SAVING LIVES... ONE HAIRCUT AT A TIME
With his family by his side, Walkabout Barber Brian is on a mission to help men open up
It’s not easy listening to someone tell you they’ve been in the darkest place a person can be, ready to end it all, and it’s even harder when you’re a nine-year-old girl and the person speaking is your dad.
When Brian Dowd recently shared his story with a crowd of people that included his young daughter Narlii, he did so with the knowledge that opening up about his experiences was helping save other people’s lives.
What blew him away, however, was Narlii’s reaction.
“She went up to her mother and she started crying and said, ‘You know what, Mum? Dad’s pretty special. He’s my hero’,” recalls Brian, a 47-year-old father-of-two from Newcastle.
Brian is the Walkabout Barber, a trauma specialist and professional barber who travels to regional, rural and remote regions with a mobile barbershop trailer, giving men the chance to open up about their mental health in a comfortable setting.
Partnering with local healthcare and social services
providers, Brian and his team last year provided free haircuts, healing and hope to 2100 men in 35 communities throughout NSW, Queensland and Victoria.
“When men sit in my barbershop chair it becomes a magical space because they start to let their guard down and talk,” says Brian.
“It just so happens that behind the chair is a qualified professional that can give them responses around their social and emotional wellbeing, identify what is going on and refer them to somebody else that might be able to assist.”
As well as operating the mobile trailer, Brian has a permanent Walkabout Barber shop in the NSW town of Warners Bay, while a second mobile trailer is also being fitted out to offer a range of beauty therapy services.
Brian’s journey began in the NSW town of Coonabarabran, where he grew up as the youngest of four kids. With a childhood marred by experiences of racism, Brian thought he’d found a way out at the age of 22 when the Newcastle Knights rugby club came knocking.
He made the move to Newcastle with hopes of scoring a professional contract, but says he let his personal demons cruel his chances, after he fell into a downward spiral fuelled by alcohol, drugs and depression and he found himself at rock bottom, ready to end it all.
A phone call from his mother at a crucial moment provided a lifesaving turning point for Brian, who returned home, reconnected with his Aboriginal culture and began the long road to recovery.
“It took me three years to save my life and when I turned 30, I said, ‘Now I’ve saved my life, I want to save other people’, and that’s been my journey for the last 17 years,” says Brian.
“I’ve started men’s programs, young people’s programs and we’ve won national awards for employment programs of the year.
“I’ve worked with over 22,000 people and I can probably count on two hands how many I’ve lost... I use my personal experience to shine the light on other people’s journeys, for them to be able to look deep inside themselves for answers.”
Brian says he couldn’t have achieved what he has, including Walkabout Barber being named Business of the Year at the 2019 National Dreamtime Awards, without the support of his wife Shellie, 35.
“I struck gold when I met my wife,” says Brian.
“She’s seen my highs, my lows and my setbacks, she’s been there through it all – without her I couldn’t be doing anything I’m doing now.”
‘They leave fresh on the inside, with weight lifted off their spirit’
It was Brian’s five-year-old son Takari, who was diagnosed with autism at the age of two, who inspired him to pick up a pair of clippers in the first place.
He decided to open his own barbershop to give Takari, who found everyday activities traumatic, a safe space for a haircut, before eventually stepping up behind the chair as a barber himself.
“I fell in love with it, not only as a space for my son, it became a space for me because I started to talk and I started to share and people started to talk to me in the chair,” Brian recalls.
“We’ve created a space where people feel comfortable. They get a nice haircut and feel fresh on the outside, but they also leave feeling fresh on the inside with weight getting lifted off their spirit.”