By Tyler Wright
A former peacekeeper who served in the Solomon Islands, and current member of the Mount Evelyn RSL Chris McAleer said he “fell into a heap” before deciding to leave the force around four years ago.
“Anxiety and stress was high…my father passed away and I was there looking after my father with my brother and sister until his last breath,” Chris said.
“That affected me, and then everything started to snowball, and I hit a wall.”
After seeking help through Open Arms, a free counselling service for veterans and their families, Chris began to learn about the impacts of mental health and the effect on the body.
Always a “mad fisherman,” it wasn’t until Chris’s wife Megan suggested creating a fishing club that Chris began the conversation with his friends and ex-serviceman.
“I had a couple of mates… and we went and did a fishing comp together just for a bit of fun, and we had an absolute ball,” Chris said.
“We barely caught any fish, but it didn’t matter because of what we did and the fun that we had.”
After the success of the fishing haunt, Chris found the non-for-profit group Reeling Veterans and asked for help to create his own group for serving and ex-serving defense force members and their families to gather and form a support base for each other, called Fishing for Veterans.
“When you get outside, you get around your mates, you get around fellow people who know what you’ve been through and you can accept their experiences,” Chris said.
“You’ve got a bit of camaraderie [and] you create that wellness group.”
Chris said Bendigo Bank, the Ministry of Chocolate in Croydon and Aussie Veterans Coffee Co. have all got on board to support the initiative which sprung to life a couple of months ago, with the Veterans for Fishing group voted a sub-committee at Mount Evelyn RSL’s last committee meeting.
With this support, Chris hopes to start facilitating events and meet ups in January 2023, not only for veterans based in the Yarra Valley, but throughout Victoria.
“We’d love to love to get it to the point where if we had someone message us and they were in Gippsland and they said ‘hey I’m struggling, I’d like to come in for a fish one day,’ we can then put out on our social media, ‘hey, who’s out in Gippsland and is happy to take John out fishing for the day?’” Chris said.
“There might be four, five or 10 blokes or ladies contact us and go ‘hey, I’m going fishing for the weekend,’ and then you can then introduce those two people they can message each other and you can then create other little bonds.”
Chris plans to hold some some fishing events on land in areas like Ferntree Gully and Lillydale Lake to make activities accessible for those local to the area, and also hopes to bridge the gap between older veterans and younger veterans who he said often share similar stories.
“The bigger a community is, then we can get those younger veterans talking to the older veterans and realise ‘hey, you don’t have that much that’s not uncommon to each other…you’re going to have the same stories but they’re just going to be 30 or 40 years apart,” he said.
“Mental health doesn’t discriminate.”
To find the Veterans for Fishing Facebook group, visit https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100085498778274
