Peteskibreen's Blog

Love is strong as death

I was in Casino on Monday night, a 3 hour drive south of Brisbane. It is a large beef cattle producing area of New South Wales and along with Rockhampton in North Queensland, is one of the largest in the country.

I drove Harley [ my son ] down as his car was needed for the family and the stand-in car would not make it. We have done this kind of thing a fair bit over the past 23 years of his comedy career for a host of reasons and it was great to be on the road together again.

BEEF WEEK is an annual event in Casino and is a highlight of this small country town’s annual calendar. This specific dinner event during the week is a new initiative around Mental Fitness and Suicide in the farming industry. Farming in Australia has one of the highest rates of suicide in Australia* and it was encouraging to see how well this organisation is attempting to to address it. There were about 100 farmers seated to eat the best steaks in the country while two speakers – Harley and Ben from Sydney mental fitness organisation Gotcha4life – told stories around mental fitness [ health ] and how to better access help from family, friends and local organisations while having a laugh to help the steaks go down. The gender imbalance was about 90% white male while the predicatable Beef Queens contestants was indicative of normal farming make up in Australia.

This venture is indicative of love with unashamedly social responsibility in its sites. One of the highlights of the night – apart from my son’s comedy performance which I had heard scores of times before and still laugh at – was the call by Ben to take our phones and send a text message to someone we hadn’t sent a text to for a long time with the following line : “Love you. Miss you. xoxo” It was a moment in time that will remain fixed in my mind as I witnessed beef cattle farmers awkwardly sitting in that space and sending or maybe not sending the message. I sent the message to two people. A liberating moment for me. WIth immediate responses!

It was not a sentimental moment. The hard hitting talk and then Harley’s own self revealing mental health transparency was about a pratical mental fitness regime . It was about solidarity, companionship and mateship with bite. It was about the community’s responsibility to all its moving parts. People! Humanity!

C.S.Lewis of Narnia fame wrote about the 4 loves in his book of the same name. I have often reflected on this work in the challenges of living in relationships, in a world full of injustice and in my own struggles around feeling loved and making sure I am other centred. And wondering how to know what love is. My friend Dave Andrews wrote “Not Religion But Love” a reflection and suggested way of thinking and living as he navigated his own and his wife Ange’s lives in their work in India and in the Waiter’s Union in in Brisbane with a life of being with those left behind. We are exposed to public declarations of religious interest by political leaders who espouse far less focus on the collapse of social justice than they do in their attempt to win crowd support for their policies and decisions: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and now Anthony Albanese. One of those who has a different presence on the public stage is the Irish President Michael D. Higgins who has repeatedly made very clear what his view is on the genocide in Gaza. It is not like any of other three. Compassion, action, declaration, end the war immediately,

Lewis writes about the four Greek words for love: Eros, Storge, Philia and Agape suggesting that at any one time there will be a need to take on board agape love if we are to find our best humanity. This is the love that is totally self-giving while not focussed on the self’s reward for loving the other. Eros [ Romantic/Sexual love] Storge [family love] and Philia [friendship/common interest love] all come to an end of themselves amidst the demands of a world where agape seems to have been sidelined but not and never lost.

To be a lover of the other for the other’s sake needs a book of suggestions and stories for us to find our way. But such initiatives at Gotcha 4 Life is one group that is a love light on the hill for those who may be slipping into despair.

http://www.gotcha4life.org

NOTES:

*In November 2021, the National Rural Health Alliance (NRHA) presented findings from their Australian-first farmer suicide desktop study at the Australian Rural a

nd Remote Mental Health Symposium. 

The study found that between 2009 and 2018, there were 370 farmer suicides reported, which equates to one farmer taking their own life every 10 days in Australia. 

This study explored farmer suicides using data from the National Coronial Information System, Census data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics and data from Australian institute of Health and Welfare’s National Mortality Database. 

Between 2009 and 2018, the average suicide rate for farmers (18.3 per 100,000) was almost 60 per cent higher than non-farmers (11.5 per 100,000). The suicide rate for farmers has trended upwards in this time, increasing to 22.2 per 100,000 in 2018, which is 94 per cent higher than non-farmers.

Farmers with certain demographic characteristics had higher suicide rates, including males, those who have separated from their spouse, and young and middle-aged farmers.

REF: Life in Mind, Australia. 2022.