Sydney town is a huge, sprawling, iconic super city, growing 20 per cent faster than New York or London where I was born. I lived here in the inner suburb of Newtown for 14 years and both my kids were born here, before moving to New Zealand in 2003 for a quieter, more rural lifestyle. It’s 4.8 million residents enjoy a wonderful, exciting, prosperous and beautiful city which has, I think, a very bright future. Others would, of course, like to share in its bounty, among them, a good chunk of the roughly 170,000 migrants who arrive in Australia every year. Sydney, named after Viscount Sydney who sent the first fleet here from the Old Dart in 1787, reached the status of a City in 1842 and hasn’t looked back.
I arrive on a cool July evening and armed with my Opal card, soon indulge in a week-long orgy of reminiscing and catching up with family and friends. I re-visit old haunts and reflect on the busy years of hard work (laying bricks), paying off a huge (at the time) mortgage and bringing up two kids. It’s also a frustrating time as I eagerly await the arrival of my bike which hopefully is sailing across the Tasman Sea on the good ship ANL EMORA. My other frustration is the 2018 World Cup and a young England side’s steady progress, a happy phenomenon I hadn’t witnessed since Germany knocked us out on penalties in Italia 1990.
Before I leave, I’m able to watch England’s World Cup dream come to an end at the hands of tiny Croatia in the Semi-Final, deserving victors in the end. The three lion’s roar is reduced to a whimper, the young team lacking the skill to go any further. Youth, pride and passion are simply not enough. It’s only a game, I tell myself as I sob into my flat white! Unfortunately, I can remember as a boy in London when we actually won the thing, so have endured 52 years of misery ever since. I console myself with the thought that I now won’t have to get a tattoo of the three lions, a thing I’d rashly promised my kids if we’d won!
I’m staying at my wife’s uncle’s apartment in beautiful Darling Point in the affluent eastern suburbs. On another cool, sunny morning with the currawongs loudly singing, I wander down to Richie’s coffee shop below where I’m to meet David. He’s kindly agreed to talk to me and braved the rush hour traffic to ride across the bridge from the North Shore.
Black Dog Rider David Peach
I greet David, CEO of the Black Dog Ride as he parks his BMW GS 1200 by the kerb and takes off his helmet. The Black Dog Ride is an Australian charity organisation whose aim is to raise awareness of a silent killer – depression. Since the first ride in 2009 it has raised millions for mental health programmes around the Nation. Steve Andrews founded the charity in response to the sudden suicide of his best mate’s wife Anna.
After getting the coffees in I ask David, how he got involved in the organisation. “Well,” he begins, sipping his cappuccino “I had a mate I grew up with – we knew each other from Grade 5. Most of our youth resembled an arms’ race, first on bicycles, then on motorcycles – every year one of us would get something bigger and better and faster, and the other one would follow.” David and his mate were extremely close, living their lives in parallel – they were both best man at one another’s wedding. “Then at age 38 he killed himself,” says David, “and I never saw it coming.”
That happened in 1999 and David says that for the next 10 years he flip-flopped between mad and sad, “I was very cranky at him because he didn’t reach out,” he says.
Then in 2012 a journalist mate of David’s invited him along on a Black Dog run, a day’s ride on the Central Coast. It was the first charity ride he’d ever participated in. He says, “it opened a kind of release valve and allowed me to try and make some good out of my friend’s passing.”
From then on, David went on every Black Dog ride and in 2015 he took part in his first ‘big one,’ to Uluru and back. “Three days after that, I flew to New York and joined the first Black Dog ride across America. So, it was in that year that I realised that this was something I really cared about. In August and September of 2015, I rode almost 20,000 kilometres,” he says. “That must have been very cathartic,” I offer, and he nods in agreement.
Then, in 2017 Steve Andrews was forced to step down as CEO due to health issues, which sent the charity into some disarray. “Steve, like many riders in the charity was profoundly affected by the suicide or in his case, suicides of people close to him,” David says. “Speaking with my fellow riders, I discovered that 95% of them had been affected by the suicide of a close friend or been affected by depression themselves.”
We talk for a while about one of my best mates, Richard “Wilf” Willis who took his own life in 1999 aged 40. At the time, he lived in London and I lived in Sydney. “Did you see it coming?” asks David and I tell him I didn’t.
“In my friend’s case it was a slow spiral,” he continues, “he had a pretty tough life, but we kept any eye on him and he never gave any indication that he might take his own life. And I suppose that’s the sinister thing about depression. Ultimately, it’s a one on one battle – you against your demons or whatever triggers it. All the rest of us can do is hope, stand by, be there and try to get them some help.”
It’s evident that David is a very passionate and dedicated man and the cause is very close to his heart. “The biggest challenge of course is to reach out and ask for help,” he goes on. “And most people don’t do that.”
“So, is that the main aim of the organisation, to get people to reach out?”
“Absolutely,” he replies. “To make it OK to talk about depression. To give people the ability to make it all part of a person’s general health. If you break a leg, there’s no question, you go to the hospital. If you get sick, you go to see your doctor. But so many people who struggle with depression battle it alone. So yes, the whole idea behind the organisation is to bring depression out into the open. Starting conversations and making people aware that it’s OK to ask for help.” He pauses as he eats his croissant and I order more coffee. “‘If you’re not OK, that’s OK’ is a line borrowed from another charity but we’re all working on the same problem just from a slightly different angle,” he says.
I ask David if he thinks that the stereotypical image of the macho Aussie male might hinder men from admitting they have a problem. “I’ve never been asked that before George, but thinking about it, it probably doesn’t help!” he replies.
The organisation tries to be as inclusive as possible as far as riders go. “Statistically,” he says, “our average rider is a business owner, is 57 years old and rides a Harley Davidson, which is basically me, apart from the Harley. We are trying to encourage youth as they are disproportionately represented in the suicide figures. We also have many women ride with us, so there’s no gender bias.”
The Black Dog Ride is registered with the Australian Charities Non-profits Commission and holds Deductible Gift Recipient status, which means they can issue a tax-deductible receipt which can by claimed against a person’s tax. “By doing that we accumulate funds and historically have helped the Black Dog Institute (people often confuse our two organisations), Lifeline, Beyond Blue, Head Space and number of other charities.” But that’s now changing under David’s stewardship as the Government has started to inject funds into the sector, allocating grants to the likes of Beyond Blue and Head Space in the last year or so. “There’s more money in those grants,” David says, “than we’d make in a few years, so we can now turn our attention to helping smaller grass roots mental health projects that can’t get on the Government’s radar.”
One such charity the Black Dog