Braidwood may look totally idyllic as Canberrans make their cameo appearances there (using the bucolic village's boutique coffee shops and public lavatories) on their way to and from the coast.
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But of course, Ed Gardner explains, like any place on earth Braidwood does have some ''problems''. Now he and others are about to address some of those problems with the opening in Braidwood of Australia's latest Men's Shed. There are already, nationwide, more than 950 of these blokey institutions. There are 15 here in Canberra.
Of course there are several million informal, tool-festooned men's sheds in several million Australian backyards (sanctuaries where the man of the house goes to do blokey things with his tools and his brains) but institutional Men's Sheds are a relatively recent invention. The Australian Men's Shed Association's national members' manager, Melissa White (''I look after all the shedders,'' she told us proudly on Thursday), says that the movement as we know it began to get formally under way, with funding, from 2007. Now there are 50,000 ''shedders'' for her to look after. There will be dozens more when, from Saturday, Braidwood's shed gets under way.
The Men's Sheds are a response, she says, to the growing understanding that ''social isolation'' has an especially malevolent impact on men. Men tend not to have the social networks and communications talents of their more sociable sisters. Isolation from others gives depression in men scope to grow and blossom.
''We've found that on average two men from every shed say they contemplated suicide prior to joining a shed,'' White reports. ''But we go to lots of sheds and every single man we ever talk to says that being a member of his shed has changed his life for the better. I spoke to one man, at a shed, just this morning, at about 11 o'clock, and when I asked him 'where would you be at this moment if you weren't at the shed?' he said 'I'd probably still be lying in bed.'''
But once the men are coaxed along to a shed, she testifies, they have a wealth of worthwhile things to do including everything from just the simple pleasure, effortlessly easy for women to arrange, but not so easy for men, of ''telling tall stories over a cup of tea''.
About 80 per cent of Men's Sheds are in the bush. A study by the National Rural Health Alliance found that men in some regional and remote areas are more than twice as likely as those in the city to commit suicide.
Ed Gardner says that rural downturns can have mood-blackening impacts on rural folk, on farmers and farm workers.
Gardner says that, alas, ''men don't talk to one another'' but that when he goes to pick up his wife at the local CWA the ''clatter'' of conversation (and of knitting needles) is beautifully, healthily deafening. He's hoping for comparable convivial clattering (the clatter of tools more likely than the clatter of knitting needles) at Braidwood's shed, which he and others have been trying for five years (''It's had a longer gestation period than the average elephant!'') to get off the ground.
The guest speaker at this Saturday's opening is depression-fighting crusader John Harper. His work takes him not only to farming communities but increasingly, he told us from a copper mine at Parkes, to mining communities where there's often the same dangerous mixture of stubborn, monosyllabic manliness and isolation.
A farmer (at Stockinbingal) he'd prided himself on being indestructible but his life unravelled as depression took hold. He'd wait for his wife and kids to leave for the day and would then sit on the verandah all day, doing ''what a dying man would do''. Just before everyone came home he'd peel himself up off the verandah and pretend to have been hard at work all day. But at last he got help, blessed, he tells us, with a supportive wife.
Harper, founder of Mate Helping Mate, is quite a character and it sounds as if his 10-minute presentation at Braidwood will be even a little theatrical. He uses props, for example a broom with which to sweep away the ''mess'' of depression.
He tells us he sometimes uses a clever toy bought at Questacon that gives the optical illusion of an object being much bigger than it is. He does this because he says that when people get depressed ''they feel that their problems have got bigger and bigger while they [the sufferers] have got smaller and smaller'' and have become dwarfed by them. In fact you are as big as ever and there's lots you can do. Then he tells them what those things are.
Braidwood's Men's Shed is at Cowper Street. This Saturday's official opening (with a free BBQ) is at 12.30. Ed Gardner's number is 0408 202 274. If you are experiencing signs of depression you can get help from organisations including Lifeline on 13 11 14.