FIFO and Mining Life: Counselling for the Roster in Perth

Perth Counselling

The toll the pay does not mention

The money is good and the work is real, and none of that cancels out the cost. Weeks away from home, twelve-hour days, broken sleep in a donga, and the same view of red dirt and a wet mess every night.

It is a particular kind of wearing. You are surrounded by people and still alone, busy all day and still flat, and the longer the swings stack up the harder it is to put a finger on what exactly is wrong.

Why it is hard to name

Mining culture does not exactly invite you to talk about how you are travelling. You get on with it, you do not want to be the one who cannot hack it, and so a lot gets pushed down and carried quietly.

That pushing-down works, right up until it does not. It tends to leak out as a short fuse, a heaviness on the drive to the airport, a drink too many to switch off, or a numbness that follows you from site to home and back.

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The strangeness of coming home

People expect the hard part to be the swing away. Often the harder part is the return. The household has found a rhythm without you, the kids have moved on three weeks of growing up, and you are expected to slot straight back in and be present.

For a few days you can feel like a guest in your own home, out of step with everyone, before you finally settle, just in time to leave again. That re-entry friction is one of the most common things FIFO workers bring, and it is completely normal.

What counselling actually offers here

Counselling is not someone telling you to toughen up, you already do plenty of that. It is a steady, private space to put down what the roster has been quietly loading onto you, and to look at it honestly without anyone on site knowing.

The healing comes from being understood by someone who is not in the camp politics and not at the dinner table, just there for you. The anxiety counselling page shows how that work runs, and it moves at your pace, not the shift roster’s.

It fits around your swing, not the other way around

The reason ordinary counselling does not work for FIFO is obvious once you say it. You cannot keep a standing 3pm Wednesday appointment when you are on a plane to the Pilbara every second Wednesday.

Sessions are held online or by phone, so they go where you go. A session from your room on site after a shift, or from home during your week off, whatever the roster allows. The work bends around the swing instead of asking the swing to bend around it.

You do not have to be in crisis

There is a tendency in this industry to wait until something breaks, the relationship, the drinking, the day you cannot get out of the bunk, before anyone reaches out.

You do not have to wait for that. Coming in while you are still functioning, still doing the swings, just worn thinner than you would like, is the easier place to start from. Catching it early is not soft, it is smart.

When it is more than the roster

Sometimes what is going on is heavier than the wearing-down of FIFO life, and I will be honest with you if I think that is the case. If you are at any risk of harming yourself, a booked session is not the right tool.

Please contact your GP, call Lifeline on 13 11 14, or 000, and there are dedicated supports for mining and FIFO workers worth knowing about too. Counselling sits alongside those, it does not replace them.

What it can shift over time

With some space to look at it, a lot can ease. The re-entry can get smoother. The fuse can get longer. The thing you were numbing can be felt and worked with instead of drunk away.

None of that happens in one session, and none of it requires you to stop the work or change your life. It is about carrying the same life with less of it quietly grinding you down.

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Private, and nobody on site needs to know

Discretion matters in a small camp where word travels. Because sessions are online or by phone from wherever you are, there is no clinic, no sign-in, and nobody on site any the wiser.

What you bring is confidential, and the only person who knows you are doing the work is the person you choose to tell. For a lot of FIFO workers, that privacy is what makes it possible to start at all.

From Perth and out to the sites

Because it is online, this reaches you in Perth on your week off, from Fremantle to Joondalup to Mandurah, and out at the sites in the Pilbara and the Goldfields when you are on swing.

You can see how it runs on the counselling in Perth page. If the roster is taking more than it should, that is reason enough to have a look at it.

A few quick questions