HE'S 65, grizzly with failures brought on by the long dry, and mad about policies that rob his area of irrigation water, but Kerang farmer Colin Fenton is off to a workshop next month on health and happiness. And I dips me lid to him.
How unusual it is to hear of farmers, especially older male ones, attending such workshops.
Run a field day or a crop conference and they'll be there, but a health and happiness workshop? That's women's work, isn't it?
Well, no, not exclusively and a workshop of this sort has never been better timed in north and north-western Victoria, where farmers are suffering crop failures and where it's time for an emergency response similar to that for the February fires.
According to Colin, many farmers, beaten by too many dry years and savaged water allocations, have already left.
Mary Fenton, 62 who arrived on the Kerang farm from Melbourne as a 21-year-old now wants to start a new chapter in their lives. But she's struggling to convince Colin to go.
To give you some idea of how ingrained farming is in their family, their oldest grandson at the age of eight was a registered stud owner.
"That's how strong the genes are," says Mary. "It's pretty hard (to move on) when you have that sort of love of farming in the family."
Mary tells the story of the farmer up the road whose wife went to live in Melbourne.
The farmer told her that his wife had given him 40 years of her life and now she wanted to do what she wanted. "There should be no domineering of a family by a piece of land," says Mary.
She's had enough, but how can Colin be convinced?
He vents his fury at dimwits in high places who direct water and drought policies, and governments "who will wake up one day and discover Australia has no food."
He says farmers have already left the region in waves.
Even the stalwarts who kept the faith and stayed are exhausted, their reserves of resilience spent, and he warns that if EC (Extraordinary Circumstances) payments are not extended after March, the exodus will be en masse.
Next month Petrea King of the Quest for Life Foundation and author of Your Life Matters will walk into this context and offer workshops rights across north and north-western Victoria in which she'll demonstrate that no matter what's happening, health and happiness is possible.
Petrea has faced significant challenges herself, not least a suicide in her family, myeloid leukaemia and much more.
She's done similar workshops on health and happiness in western NSW, where she's seen men in farming especially struggle because they see the inability to earn an income as a personal failing. "They're taking climate change personally," she says.
"It's not really until people get to that place of saying 'this has happened and what are we going to do about it' that they can move on."
She says often this happens when we face the big Ds in life - disaster, despair, drought, debt, disability, divorce, disappointment, diagnosis and domestic violence.
She says destructive self-doubt can be countered by the Four Cs or the "keys to peace". What are they? You'll have to go to Petrea's workshop to find out.
- Health and Happiness workshops, organised by Loddon Mallee Integrated Cancer Services, will be held in Kyneton on Oct 5, Echuca on Oct 8, Bendigo on Oct 9-10, Kerang on Oct 14, Swan Hill on Oct 16 and Mildura on Oct 18-19.
- To book or find out more phone 0413 057 879.
