Brendan's Story

Note: this transcript has been edited for clarity, grammar, and flow.

Beverley: This podcast series will share personal moments of connection and deeply felt experiences. If anything you hear has a triggering effect, please reach out to someone who can help keep you safe. Or remember, you can phone Lifeline at any time on 13 11 14.

Brendan: That took all my strength. I always talk about taking the first step. That's probably the hardest thing you can do - accept that you actually got something wrong with you or acknowledge the fact that you need an out, you need a spell.

Beverley: Father of three, Brendan Cullen, manages a 50,000-acre sheep station, 120 kilometres out of Broken Hill. Raised on his family property, it was always his dream to return and take over from his dad. He did go back for seven years, but then the loss of his dreams, together with the stresses of rural isolation and farming in the drought, took its toll.

We all know about the depression caused by rural isolation. Here, Brendan, his wife Jacinta, and farming buddy Lance drill down to explain the factors that cause it.

Brendan: Jacinta, my wife, and myself, we went and managed a few properties before we went home, so I didn't just leave school and then go home. There was a window of opportunity to move back home, and I thought, well, this is the best thing ever. So we jumped at it straight away, and we moved into the Shearers’ Quarters, which was only about 50 or 60 metres from my parent's place.

And the problem is, one of the biggest issues is that when you're working in an environment like that, whether it be in a family environment or a managerial environment, you don't have the opportunity to walk out the door and leave your work environment. That's quite tough. So your work environment not only is outside, but it's actually inside the house that you live in.

You don't have the chance to go home and sit down and just spend some time with your wife and your kids. It can be a dangerous environment living like that because you've always got someone looking over your shoulder. Not intentionally; it’s just you're living in each other's pockets.

And unless you can find happy ground all the time, it can be quite difficult. And it did become difficult. But through that process, I suppose I was home for the best part of, let's say, seven years.

Voice over: Succession.

Brendan: Yeah, succession is quite difficult. There's so many things attached to succession. When you've got families on properties, or, say, for example, parents, grandparents, even great-grandparents still involved in the farming enterprise, it can be quite difficult because the younger generation, or the last generation that is on that property, there's an expectation on those people. There's an expectation to succeed, and I don't believe it's self-imposed. It is spelled out to you sometimes.

So you're in a position where you think, gee, you know, this is a solid outcome, but at the same time, you don't have an opportunity to make any decisions because you don't hold the chequebook. So you can be working for nothing for a very long period of time, hoping at the end of the day that you get the opportunity, and you may be 60 before you get it. And that is tough.

I mean, that is really tough. I admire anyone that goes through that situation. I couldn't. I think I could envisage what was happening, as opposed to my parents envisaging what was happening. So from that, from about three years on, I basically had to find the courage to say, well, you know, we've got to move on because I don't envisage we have a future here anymore. And that was bloody tough.

That was really tough. So we went through a process there, and to cut a long story short, we parted company. It was probably the best thing that could have ever happened. It gave us the freedom to move on, but it probably also gave my parents the opportunity to move on as well.

Voice over: Drought.

Brendan: Droughts are evil, bloody things. And so when you fall into a drought, and I say fall into a drought, well, not so much fall into a drought, but you ease into a drought, I always refer to it as a disease. It starts from a long way out.

So you don't wake up in the morning and see it dusty outside and whatnot, and your sheep are poor or your stock are poor. It starts from a long way. Sometimes, you can have the best plans in place, and if droughts last long enough, they'll take you down paths you've never been before.

They find themselves working harder than they've ever worked before, and you start in a strong position, you end up in a very ordinary position. Now, if you're in this position you are today, two years ago, and I ask you to say, now, would you like to feed for the next two years? Would you like to run your waters for the next two years?

Would you like to pull your sheep out of the bog for the next two years? Will you sign up for that? The first thing they're going to do is think I'm crazy.

There's no way in hell we're going to do that. The problem is, at the end of the two-year period, after being in a full-blown drought, you find yourself in that situation.

And the unfortunate thing is most people end up having to deal with a lot of death.

Voice over: Death.

Brendan: Death is part of farming, unfortunately. And it always will be. Whether that be your own stock or whether it be, you know, your native animals, whatever it may be.

And in a lot of cases, a lot of people have to, you know, euthanise stock. A lot of stock. And some people have the ability to be able to cope with that, and some don't.

If you have a pet in the house, and that pet's been part of your life for ten years, and you see that it's passing away for whatever reason, it has an enormous effect on not only you, but the house. You know, whoever's living in that house. Well, you know, our domain - these farms, these stations out here - we take great care in looking after our stock and after our pets. And when that's compromised, that is quite difficult.

So if you increase that single unit, say one dog as your house pet, into 10,000 head, you've got a whole lot of worry on your hands.

You just need to take the emotion out of the game the best way you possibly can. But it will come back and bite you every now and again. I mean, you're just inhuman if it doesn't affect you in some way or form.

Some people have the ability to be able to deal with it, and some don't. And the ones that don't are the worry. And the ones that do, it does affect them.

But they just have the ability to be able to work with it. But, you know, people get affected by it.

Voice over: Self-doubt.

Brendan: There's also a two-fold effect that that has on people. They start drinking, they start, you know, self-medicating. Instead of having one beer a week, all of a sudden, they're having six a night.

All that type of stuff. So they lose their clarity of thought. And in doing that, their ability to be able to make good, sound decisions starts to waver, even though they think they are making good decisions.

So you start doubting yourself. You're thinking, I've just, you know, I'm going to lose the property. My family are going to think I'm a failure.

Where do I send my stock? It might be too late to send my stock because they're too poor. I can't afford to feed anymore.

Then all the, you know, internal stuff, you know, self-doubting starts to happen. And unfortunately, people's coping mechanisms change. Their ability to be able to think clearly changes.

Voice over: Isolation.

Brendan: You can have a lot of time on your hands. We get to spend a lot of time by ourselves, and we do a lot of miles in the car, and we get a lot of time to think. And you could probably say that you get into a situation where you can overthink things sometimes.

And I actually got into a situation there, and I probably did it for the best part of nearly ten years, where if someone was sitting next to me, if you could look over my shoulder when I was driving around doing the waters, you would think that I was talking to someone next to me.

But I used to have conversations, conversations with no one sitting next to me, and basically have an argument sometimes, which was, you know, always come out okay. But I mean, you fill your head full of rubbish, and you exhaust a lot of energy on nothing.

But because it went on for so long, I just thought, you know, I've had this issue for a very long time. I've just had so much stuff going on in my brain for a very long time, and I'm thinking I'm walking around being normal, but truly that wasn't the case. I was, you know, internally combusting.

It was a fairly significant dry time, so I assumed it was the drought, but it turned out that it was, yeah, it was other things as well that were bothering me.

So if you put the drought, you know, family pressure, you know, succession, all that sort of stuff tied into one, all of a sudden it becomes a pretty tricky situation. Therefore, a lot of people will fall into a depressed state. They won't even know they're in it.

They won't even know they're in it. One of the issues with growing up in the bush is you're constantly trying to prove yourself. What you do out there is basically your signature.

You are completely in control of your actions, and your actions basically tell you who you are and how you are as a person. In my case, I was well aware of that. I felt like I was coming off the long yard for half my life, off the long run for half my life.

I constantly felt as if I had to prove to either my parents, which I had no pressure there, by the way, to prove, but it was self-imposed. And for the people I worked for, I constantly had to prove that I was capable.

And then if something went wrong, I used to knock myself around about it.

If you are out in one of these places, and you can't pull yourself out of bed in the morning to go to work, you probably should be looking to do something else. So you put yourself under an enormous amount of pressure (undue pressure) a lot of times, a lot of times.

What I used to do is, when I started work in the morning, or I envisaged what I needed to do for the week, I'd write down a list. And on that list, I'd try and achieve everything on that list, no matter what.

And a lot of times, I wouldn't achieve what I wanted to achieve. So I created this massive workload for myself, and I wasn't happy until it was done.

We went through a fairly significant drought in 2009, and what I was finding is I was basically walking through the front door and walking out the back door, and my kids were quite young.

And actually, Blake tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘You know, you better slow down, otherwise you're not going to see these kids grow up.’ And what he meant by that was slow down.

And I'm thinking, well, how can I slow down when if I slow down or stop, this place is going to fall down around my ears?

And it would have. Absolutely, it would have.

So, you know, there were outside pressures unbeknownst to them, but there were also my internal pressures as well.

So with what was going on with that drought, probably I foresaw it as a bit of micro-management as well. And just ... I actually started drinking more too. I probably was hitting the bottle more often than I probably should have been, and self-medicating.

I just felt tired, not actually knowing where an out was, not actually knowing what could help me. I think that was my lowest point. I couldn't find solace in anything.

I couldn't find it from my wife. I couldn't find it from my family. I couldn't find solace.

I couldn't find anything that was going to get me out of the situation I was in, which tells me now I can see that I was in a dangerous space. Because surely I can talk to someone about something, and then I'll be right the next day.

But it was a big, slow-turning cog.

I think when I started to think, in the drought particularly, when he was going out all the time, and every day, they were having to destroy animals, I started to, just little things, I started getting nervous about him going out and things like that, and I just thought, whoa, why am I even thinking stuff like that?

And once you start thinking and worrying about things like that, your gut tells you that something's not right.

Jacinta: Through his depression, I actually started to get my own a little bit, and it's probably from being worn out. Because you are trying to look out for them, and then because he's a little bit on edge, you try and keep the children happy, and just try to, I guess, overcompensate for what they may be missing out on from Dad, make sure they're getting it from someone.

And in that process, you're actually becoming exhausted yourself.

And, you know, I was emotionally exhausted, and I was physically exhausted. And I remember standing in the doorway of the kitchen, and I was looking at my wife, and I was just standing there, and my heart just went berserk. It just went... I thought I was having a heart attack.

And I thought, well, this is a worry.

I said, ‘Gee, my heart's bloody trying to jump out of my chest.’ And then I knew, well, that's never happened to me. That's quite strange.

And that was probably a trigger point to actually thinking that something wasn't quite right. And then, you know, I was bloody... I was crying a lot, and, you know, I had a lot of stuff going on that probably wasn’t relevant.

And this is what I was talking about earlier ... that it creeps up on you. You don't actually know what's happening.

Things started to change for Brendan after he went to a Royal Flying Doctor Service Life Skills course. It was aimed at young farmers struggling with rural issues, and Brendan was asked to fill out a form.

Brendan: The RFDS did a clinic with a life coach, Jill Rigney, and we went to that. And we did a few things, and I was thinking at the time, ‘Gee, this sounds like me, you know. It sounds horribly like me. You know, I'm in a bit of a pickle here.’

So I decided that it might be time to catch up with someone, you know, talk to someone about it. And that took all my strength. I always talk about taking the first step.

That's probably the hardest thing you can do; accept that you actually got something wrong with you, or acknowledge the fact that you need an out, you need a spell.

And so I walked into the Broken Hill Base Hospital, and I met up with a couple of people, and we sat down and had a conversation.

And they basically told me that I had a form of depression. And I thought, right. That was a massive relief for me.

I actually thought at the time. I just felt this enormous weight off my shoulders because I thought, right, now I know what's going on.

Now I’m going to fix this.

When Brendan told friend and fellow farmer Lance about his depression, Lance was shocked. But as he considered his own increasing isolation, he realised his mate was not alone.

Lance: Yes, it was a bit of a shock, really. We didn't really expect it. We all thought he was on top of his game, and everyone looked at him, you know, thought he had everything organised and sorted, yeah.

Well, it sort of hit home a bit and sort of made me think about what I was doing and what was going on there, really. And once you sort of heard about it, you sort of started to notice different people that you thought could have been covering it up as well, and you just made conversation about it.

Like when I first started, when I was 13 or 14, I was at the end of the packhorse and the start of this new AGA, aerial mustering and all that sort of stuff.

And I got to learn a lot more. When you were riding back then, you were riding around on horses, so you had a little bit more time to talk and take things in.

It was obviously there, but they were a lot bigger camps, so you had a lot more blokes to talk to.

I remember being in a mustering camp when I was about 15. I think there were 23 people in that mustering camp alone. So you had more of an opportunity to get things off your chest.

People look at people who have depression and say, well, it's a commonly used word. It’s overrated and whatnot. Or you may be just in a state where you're overworked, you're tired, and you may not be depressed, but it's the prerequisite to fall into that state.

So you're very close, on a borderline, and it's not actually up to you to make that call. Allow someone else to make that call.

And even if you are, if there is a massive workload and you're feeling under enormous pressure, there are so many good options out there that can take that away from you where they give you some extraordinary clarity in what you do.

Brendan: I was out of hospital. They put me on some medication, which I was quite thankful for. And during the period while I was on that medication, I harnessed some tools which I used to get myself into a situation where I was thinking clearly.

But I also kept those tools with me, and I've got them with me right now. So if I find myself slipping into a situation where I'm going down this road again, I just pull them straight out of the toolbox and put them into gear.

I needed to actually acknowledge where my faults were or what I was doing to create my own toolbox.

And I knew damn well what they were. I just didn’t want to act on any of it or if I thought I was, I wasn’t really.

So you need to accept where your faults are, what's actually making things tough for you.

And for example, alcohol. You need to accept that you're drinking too much. So don’t drink too much.

But only you can tell yourself that. And if you've got the ability to tell yourself that and listen to yourself, well, then you're on the right path.

So one of the reasons for me to actually come out and express why I've gone through this is to allow people to be able to come up to me and say, ‘Well, mate, can you help me out?’

Because it's easier to come to someone like me or this is my perception as opposed to having to walk through those doors at a hospital.

And with this Lifeline ambassadorship that I fell into, it was a role that didn’t even exist, and I was asked whether I'd take on the role, and I just put my hand up straight away and I said, ‘Well, yep, I'd love to do it.’

It gives them the opportunity to come up and have a chat, a discussion.

Lance: I just thought it was good because at that stage, I knew I had a problem. I thought it was good that he’d sort of told us all what was going on, and it had made it a bit easier to talk to him as well.

Yeah, it sort of gives you that sort of bit of relief that you can actually talk in confidence with him about the same issues, really.

It’s good to catch up and just get a few things off your chest, and you can vent a bit. And you just know you’re around the right company.

That’s the main thing - to get it off your chest, and that way, you know you’re not alone.

You're not fighting a big battle on your own, which, most times, is in your own head.

Brendan: I struggled. I didn’t like leaving the place because you just felt as though it was going to fall apart if I did leave.

For 12 months there, I think I went to town for three days, and that wasn’t three days in a row. It was one day here and one day there. I was out, sort of in and out for the year, and that got a bit hard.

And that’s when I sort of... I suppose that was probably the year everyone was telling me I did have a problem, and I didn’t believe them. And it wasn’t long after that I realised I did have a problem.

It is a lot easier to do it with a mate, so you can vent that a little bit more.

Well, it made a big difference. It was a load off my mind. As I said, you think you’re the only one going through it in the area, and you don’t want to put it out there because you just don’t want to deal with everyone else’s problems because you’ve got your own to deal with.

It’s a big thing.

If there was someone in the district that knew one of his mates or one of her mates was in strife, I’d be quite proactive in actually making an advance and just asking them if they are okay.

It’s really important.

They’re probably not going to get the answer that they think they should be getting, though.

They’ll ask if they’re okay, but they’ll generally just say, ‘Yeah, no, I’m doing all right.’ Knowing full well they’re not. That’s the tricky part.

I think when it gets to that point, especially when the alarm bells are really ringing, yeah, just ask how they’re going and make the phone call.

It was almost instant, really. Once he’d unloaded all that, he could see the light at the end of the tunnel, and he could see what he had to do.

And now I can see when he... If he starts to possibly have feelings like that again, you can see him sort of stepping back and assessing it and then making the right choices.

I learnt quite a few tools, and one of the biggest things for me is exercise. It’s a known fact that it helps with depression, and sport’s always played an enormous role in my life.

So, you know, I’d travel 140 kilometres to Broken Hill and go and play AFL.

I didn’t just do that because I enjoyed it. I did it because it helped me.

And, you know, it was not uncommon for people to drive down the road and see me with my joggers on, running up the road. And they’d look at me and go, ‘What in the hell are you doing that for?’

Well, I was doing it because it made me feel good.

And you’re punishing yourself, but the return you’re getting is quite good.

And so, I’m now swimming with a club in Broken Hill called Broken Hill Aquatic, and that’s been enormous for me.

It’s a good out for me. It gets me off the station.

I love my position here, but it’s just a good out because you’re doing something completely different.

And being different is not bad.

Being different is good because it allows you to just do whatever you want. And that’s empowering as opposed to trying to, you know, follow the next person in front of you and trying to be like the next person.

Be like who you want to be.

And that’s taken me down the road of, you know, doing ocean swimming and whatnot.

So between ocean swimming, running, and working, life’s pretty good at the moment.

I’m trying to make up for lost time the best I can, and there will be nothing that ever gets in the road of myself and my kids ever, ever again.

Very proud of them all.

Look, if I had to give someone a message, I would just say: Acknowledge the fact that you may need help, even if you perceive that you don’t.

If you’re doing something that’s not quite within your character, or if you find yourself under pressure, the best thing you can do is just acknowledge it first because that’s the hardest thing.

And then seek help. Seek help.

And once you seek help, it becomes very simplistic.

After all, you’re in charge of your own wellbeing.

People out there that know they’re in a situation that’s not nice for them to be able to get on track, they need to search and look for help.

It’s quite difficult. There’s no disguising that.

But once you take that first step, things get a hell of a lot easier.

The closest beach that I’ve swum at is in Adelaide.

Yeah, so that’s about 500-odd kilometres from here.

Yeah, that’s the only downside.

Yeah, I wish I could get up in the morning and swim in the ocean every morning. But, you know, I drive to town and do a couple of sessions there a week, and we’ve got a couple of champion little kids there that feel a little bit out of place at times.

But they’re robots. They’re absolute robots.

Beverley: Thank you for listening to Holding on to Hope.

Lifeline Australia is grateful to all our interviewees who share their stories in the hope of inspiring others.

We also acknowledge all of you who provide support to people in crisis and those on their journey to recovery.

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