True Grit: a critical response to Shane Fitzsimmons’s Australia Day address
The 17th of January 2021. A week before Australia day. Shane Fitzsimmons, former Chief of the NSW RSF, stands in front of a lectern. he’s on stage at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, charged with delivering the NSW Australia Day address. His thin-framed glasses, perched on the end of his nose, scream dorky dad.
Is it Shane’s unassuming demeanour that fools me into thinking he has more to say than men should talk?
That morning, I’d read a stream of online articles declaring his Australia day address a call-to-grace among men. For over a year, news outlets had referred to Shane as the nation’s father. Finally, I’d thought, it’s time for a nuanced, public conversation about men’s mental health. Finally, someone’s going to break the fourth wall, and say, how the hell did we forget about male suicide rates in Australia?
People will actually listen to this man.
Shane began his speech by outlining the shit-show that was 2020. Drought. Fire. Flood. Plague. But midway through, he sidesteps, telling a story about a work colleague who’s afraid people will find out he’s seeing a psychologist. Shane is adamant, “there is no shame in having emotions…”
Sure. An important message. Especially coming from the top brass of Resilience NSW, the lead disaster management agency in the state. But, sadly, one undermined by his own rhetoric:
“so how do we cope in such difficult and complex times? to me, it’s resilience, resilience that is at the heart of Australian culture… you get knocked down, you get back up again. you get bucked off the horse, you dust yourself off, and you sit right back in the saddle and continue on….”
Maybe it’s just me, but the cowboy trope feels dangerous. In Australia, 75% of people who die by suicide are male; of those, more than half are rural.
I grew up around farmers and farming families, many of whom survived decades of drought before they lost their homes to fires. Resilience isn’t new—it’s stoicism 2.0. It’s the same shit different smell, a neurosis at the core of hypermasculinity.
Look, resilience says, it’s fine to fall face first, but it better be into a pushup.
Jess Hill’s See what you made me do looks at a culture of shame and silence among men. While women are shamed for almost everything, men’s shame is entirely centred on being seen as weak. the narrative goes that emotion is the antithesis of strength. Essentially, we can’t let others know that we’re fallible. As Jess illustrates, men will go to extraordinary lengths to maintain the façade of being a man, of being in control. of being resilient.
We will hurt others, hurt ourselves.
What Shane’s speech reminds me is that while we try to reinvent the wheel, we’re working with the same shitbox car. he wants us out there talking to each other but he hasn’t even bothered to unpack how stories, like pervasive one’s about stoic cowboys, are the poster-boys for this culture of silence. The normalisation of emotional dialogue and emotional intelligence between men is important, but when it’s grounded in a language of hypermasculinity, it’s self-defeating.
Shane had the chance to talk, with real scope, about men’s mental health. He had the chance to name and shame governments who have disinvested in mental health services, particularly in rural communities. He had the chance to talk about the inaccessibility of men’s mental health services. He had the chance to talk about the devaluation of rural identity in the Australian socio–political landscape, as well as the challenges of rural living. He had the chance to say to men: let’s talk and here’s how.
Instead, he asked cowboys to be cowboys.
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