Sheep farmer Brendan Cullen lives 600 kilometres from the nearest beach, and a good hour’s drive from Broken Hill’s swimming pool, depending on hoof traffic – feral goats, roos and emus, which he calls the most “kamikaze of the lot”.
That’s why he is known as The Desert Swimmer, the title of the new book he co-wrote with author Paul Mitchell about swimming the English Channel’s 64 kilometres in 17 hours in 2022.
English channel to raise mental health awareness and has written an autobiography. Sitthixay Ditthavong
Just like the advice Dory gives in Finding Nemo, his coach from the English Channel Association, Mike Gregory, told him to just keep swimming … until he hit something.
That something was the coast of France.
After seeking help for severe depression in 2015, Cullen started swimming. Often he would practise in the snaky, icy and muddy pre-dawn waters of local dams and Copi Hollow in the Menindee Lakes system where he couldn’t see the bottom.
This experience gave him a huge tolerance for swimming in the dark, he said on Tuesday while visiting Sydney.
Cullen prefers not knowing and not seeing to swimming when sunshine is illuminating the threats, like the 21 species of sharks that live in the channel.
About 1881 people have swum the channel.
Yet the idea of a bloke from the Australian bush – who lives on an isolated property with 10,000 sheep for company – tackling the cold, busy waters captured the public’s imagination, Cullen said.
That gave him “an incredible opportunity” to discuss mental health, and the 25 years it took him to muster the courage to walk into Broken Hill Base Hospital in 2015 to seek help.
“My story can give people hope that they can turn their life around. And you don’t have to swim the English Channel.”
Cullen is now a Lifeline Regional SA & Far West NSW ambassador and peer-support mental health champion for rural communities through the We’ve Got Your Back initiative. His phone is always on for people in need.
Cullen tells a good yarn, with nearly every line starting with a warm and prolonged “maaaate”.
When he recalls times he was crook, and his joy at discovering budgie smugglers were the required swimwear for the Channel crossing, his voice is that of the Australian outback.
He said he was “shitting himself” when he sought help for years of overwork, depression, anxiety, and self-medication with a cycle of alcohol and exercise.
A tipping point for him was a severe drought that caused livestock to die, and cost many farmers their properties.
Nearly half of Australian farmers (45 per cent) have felt depressed, and almost two-thirds (64 per cent) have experienced anxiety, the National Farmer Wellbeing Report in 2023 found. About half (45 per cent) had thoughts of self-harm or suicide, and close to a third (30 per cent) had attempted self-harm or suicide.
Many thought mental health problems illustrated a lack of masculinity.
Others felt ashamed. Cullen knows that feeling: it started when he was abused by some older boys while living away from home during high school.
He said the pressure of swimming the channel was nothing compared to the feeling he had when he walked into Broken Hill Base Hospital in 2015 feeling like a fraud.
He hadn’t been bitten by a snake, and wasn’t at death’s door, but he felt like a thundercloud about to burst, he wrote in the book published this month by Allen & Unwin.
“What pressure is about is walking into a hospital when you don’t know what the hell is wrong with you. I always keep that in mind,” he writes.
“I am just not right,” he told the hospital’s nurse.
When he saw the psychologist on duty, the first question was, “Are you thinking about killing yourself?”
It was then he realised he needed help and to change his life.
Always buoyed by exercise, he started ocean swimming after watching his brother Lachlan swim in Sydney – it gave Cullen a break from the farm and some time for himself.
When he was asked whether he wanted to swim the Channel to raise awareness of mental health, Cullen said he initially thought it was a ridiculous idea, given the distance from Kars Station near Menindee to the nearest beach or pool.
“I remember walking around the table in the kitchen thinking, ‘Why not take the plunge and see what it looks like?’”
Cullen said this week he is not afraid of giving up. His fear is not giving something a go.
What’s next?
He’s now completed two of the three jewels in the Triple Crown of Open Swimming, the English and Catalina channels, and is considering whether to attempt the third: the Manhattan Island Swim.
Lifeline 13 11 14. Beyond Blue 1300 22 4636.
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