Depression, cancer motivation for Dan Watson's Perth to Sydney walk
HEAT, humidity, isolation - nothing stops Dan Watson from his Perth to Sydney trek.
“My rule is anything under 45 degrees I’ll walk,” he said.
“I had a 48 degree day once, but it only read 45 on my phone so I still went for it anyway.”
In order to raise money for SANE and Cancer Council NSW, on October 20 last year Mr Watson left Perth and aimed to finish on March 7 in Bondi, Sydney.
Brown as a nut, he arrived in Bega on Friday and collapsed in Littleton Gardens for a moment, having walked the long way in from Merimbula and suffering from “phantom pains” down his side.
Some of the toughest parts of the journey were the isolation across the Nullarbor Plain, trying to deal with going back to the reality of work and the terrain - especially around the Adelaide Hills and the Bega Valley.
The motivations for his walk have now changed since he first began.
“When I first started, it was basically about me and my mum,” Mr Watson said.
“I was very depressed, really unhappy with my work, and a lot of things going wrong in my life were all my fault.
“My mum was diagnosed with cancer three years ago, and it wasn’t really shoved in my face until March 2014 when she said that she missed me and she needed me, and she’s not the sort of person who says that.
“When I saw her, it put all my problems in perspective.
“So, originally my motive was to help myself by helping someone else, but as my mental health got better and better and my mum’s condition went into remission with chemotherapy, it became more about the people I could help who I met on the trip,” Mr Watson said.
One of the most humbling experiences for him was not far out of Western Australia when a young girl in a wheelchair came up to him and donated a handful of silver coins.
Another was near the Coorong, South Australia when a man approached him who had lost his wife only days earlier, and Mr Watson helped to share his pain a little.
“The word ‘cancer’ is such a leveller for people because it’s about as extreme as it gets, so that is where the commonality, the solidarity comes from,” he said.
The walk helped Mr Watson deal with his own mental health issues, by giving him enough time to confront those issues and by doing it to help someone else.
“It took me a while on the road and getting to rock bottom to realise that I can be selfish,” Mr Watson said.
“If I kept worrying about myself, I wouldn’t have finished the walk.
“But to make the walk for someone else, for Mum, that was taking those issues off myself.”
The money raised by Mr Watson will be split, with 70 per cent going to Cancer Council NSW and 30 per cent going to SANE.