Mary O’Brien from Are You Bogged Mate? (left) catches up with the Ambrose Angels, the team behind the two days of fundraising, fun and awareness for men’s mental health. Photo: Cape York Weekly.
“Don’t burn the machine – you can always get it out.”
That was the blunt metaphor that highlighted Mary O’Brien’s Are You Bogged Mate? message to about 60 Weipa residents at Carpentaria Golf Club on Friday night.
Ms O’Brien, a spray application and drift management specialist in the agricultural sector by trade, has travelled more than 500,000 kilometres across the country spreading her message about the importance of men taking their mental health seriously, and made the trip north to western Cape York to address the audience ahead of the Weipa Men’s Mental Health Golf Day on 14 June.
Weipa resident and BUSY at Work psychologist and senior health practitioner Sindi Morley opened the event by sharing an impassioned story about her own family’s experiences with mental health before Ms O’Brien took the microphone to provide a raw and unplugged presentation unsubtle enough to pierce the armour of even the most stoic men in the audience.
She told Cape York Weekly she believed men were not the horrible communicators they were made out to be when it came to mental health.
Steve Dunstone, Pete Humphreys, Nick Preece and Michail Petridis. Photo: Cape York Weekly.
“I think they just do it differently,” she said.
“And I think that’s the big problem, that everyone says, ‘blokes don’t talk’, but they will talk if you give them the right people in the right space, and understand that blokes communicate very differently to women.”
Using a relatable mix of farming and rural metaphors, Ms O’Brien explained men did some of their most effective communication in the most unconventional of settings, like driving a car or teeing off on the golf course.
“I’ll have men that will come to me and say, ‘I’m not quite bogged, but the wheels are starting to slip’, so it’s about that different terminology,” she said.
“You’ve got to be very relaxed in that shoulder-to-shoulder stuff, which is how blokes communicate, and that mateship and doing things together; men will be in a better place to communicate shoulder-to-shoulder, rather than face-to-face.”
Now in its third year, the golf day has surpassed more than $25,000 raised for men’s mental health initiatives, with punters stumping up more than $4,300 in the pre-game buggy auction on Saturday morning alone.
