Every March the team puts the tools down and walks 25 kilometres through Brisbane. Nick explains why it works better than sitting someone down for a chat.
Twenty-five kilometres, side by side
We do this charity walk every year for Spoke to a Bloke, and it’s called Walk for a Bloke. You walk 25 kilometres through Brisbane City — you end up going through Suncorp and you end up at the Normanby at the end. Surprisingly you think, oh, I walk all the time, it’ll be fine. But it does hurt a fair bit.
Nick O’Shea
Why walking, and not talking
The format is doing something specific, and Nick puts his finger on it better than we could:
As men, sitting in front of each other, making eye contact and telling each other what our problems are — we struggle with that. But sometimes sitting next to a guy, whether it’s at the footy, in a golf cart, walking along the street — when we’re not making eye contact, we seem to be able to be okay to open up.
Nick O’Shea
It is not only Nick. Spoke to a Bloke counts 3,088 men walking and talking in more than 30 locations around the world — all of them doing the same thing, shoulder to shoulder rather than face to face.
What the walk is for
Walk for a Bloke is run by Spoke to a Bloke, a registered charity working in men’s mental health. It began after Nick Dunn was lost to suicide in 2021. On 21 March 2026, 3,088 men walked in more than thirty locations around the world on the same day. Brisbane is one of them.
What it looks like on any given day
A walk once a year is not a mental health policy. What matters is what happens on site the rest of the time, and there is a system behind it:
Each senior member in the team, or the leading hands, they’ll have one or two guys that they look out for — touching base with those guys to say how you’re going. The signs become really obvious on site. Your really young guys, you start to see it because they start to lose their cool really quickly. And so you go: hey mate, how are you going?
Nick O’Shea
And if that conversation needs to happen, the advice is the same as the walk:
It doesn’t take anything to ask — hey, how are you going? Take him for a walk. It’s not hard to take them for that walk and get them side by side. You’d be surprised how much better chat you actually get out of the other person when you’re walking with them side by side.
Nick O’Shea
Hear the whole conversation
These quotes come from Nick’s conversation with George Samios on Unlock Your Potential — Never Cutting Corners. It runs about forty minutes and covers a good deal more than the walk — building a team, his father’s accident, and why men’s mental health sits at the centre of it. Watch it on YouTube.
Walking in 2027
The next Walk for a Bloke is 20 March 2027. Details and registration at spoketoabloke.org. If you would like to walk with our team, get in touch.
If you are struggling, Lifeline is 13 11 14 and Beyond Blue is 1300 22 4636, both available 24 hours.