Martyn Leisc put in plenty of behind the scenes work to help organise Dubbo’s Living Well Expo, held on November 9, in his role as the Australian Mens’ Shed Association events coordinator. He believes these collaborative events are the way of the future, gathering diverse service providers and support organisations together because there’s strength in numbers, and resources, in so many ways.

“Basically it’s on the premise of the six elements that make up your good mental health and wellbeing,” he said, “which is body, mind, spirit, people, place, planet.

“You can look at yourself and say ‘do I tick all those boxes’ and we know that simply by attending a Men’s Shed, you are ticking all those boxes. But for others, they may think, ‘Yes, I do ‘body’ by exercising, but I don’t do much with my mind, maybe I’ll join the local library and their brain training group and do some crossword puzzles.’

“So all the services are here and people can just talk one-on-one to all the people (at the various stands) and find out how to maybe do something to improve their mental health, where they might be lacking.”

When Men’s Sheds started out, Marty said many people didn’t understand the holistic role they played in the community when it came to men’s mental health – now, he says, most people just ‘get it’, that it’s not just about going to work on a community carpentry project with a few other blokes, it’s about social interaction and awareness-raising.

He says once people see what’s happening with these collaborative style of gatherings, he believes events such as this will become not only the norm, but actually expected by the community.

“We think so, and we hope so. We try to come to regional centres and put things on like this and encourage the community to support it and make it a regular thing.

“Ten years ago, no-one knew what a Men’s Shed was, now, they’re often becoming the epicentre of communities and they’re creating all these feelings of goodwill and filling a lot of gaps that existed in communities.”

We had to speak loudly to conduct this interview, there was such a buzz of animated conversations coming at us from all sides, and Marty said that – exactly that – is what the Expo and the Men’s Sheds themselves are all about.

“Sometimes you have to just initiate the conversation and it can open the floodgates and that’s a good thing about Men’s Sheds. They provide the comfortable environment where the men feel like they can open up about things.

“We can then slip them the message – we call it ‘health by stealth’ – we slip them the message of good health and the blokes will pick it up and talk about it. They’ll be happy to talk about it with each other, and then they’re happy to talk to other members of the community. So that’s why the Dubbo blokes were so eager to put this event on, because they know first-hand the benefits.

“Dubbo’s been a fantastic regional centre for this sort of thing, I absolutely love the community engagement in this town, it’s been amazing.

“I’ve found a lot of organisations where single individuals have identified a need and they’ve just said, if not me, who, if not now, when, and they’ve set up organisations like Bruno (Efoti) with Tradies In Sight.

“It’s just amazing and I love that – you probably don’t get that as much in the city as you do out here.”