Peter’s November 2025 Blog

A Voice from Behind

The Mission to Seafarers centre in Melbourne is the sort of building that shouldn’t really exist anymore. Not in the middle of a city where glass towers climb higher each year and heritage can seem like an inconvenience. Built in the early 1900s, its design and solidity belongs to another era – one of wool stores, dockyards and sailors spilling into the streets on long-awaited shore leave. That it still stands, still serves, still welcomes a daily drift of seafarers from across the world, feels quietly astonishing. Most buildings of its age and character have long since been repurposed into restaurants, galleries, private apartments … or simply demolished. This one, somehow, has survived and patiently carried on doing what it has always done.

At one end of the centre sits a domed chamber – a curious, almost whimsical space whose original purpose I either never asked about or have quite forgotten. What I do remember is its sound. Domes have strange acoustic lives: consider the Whispering Gallery at St Paul’s Cathedral in London, where a murmured secret can swoop to the other side of the building like a bird across stone. Melbourne’s dome has its own trick. Stand beneath it, speak a few words, and the room appears to lift your voice, reshape it, and return it to you from a place just behind your shoulder. When this happened to me on a recent visit, I instinctively turned around, startled, hunting for the person who had echoed my thoughts aloud. Except that the voice, of course, was mine.

That eerie moment – hearing yourself as though a stranger were standing inches behind you – stayed with me. Indeed, it set me thinking about the Mission to Seafarers SafeTALK programme.

SafeTALK, for those yet to encounter it, is our suicide awareness and prevention training programme for seafarers. It exists because suicide is not a distant or abstract problem in the maritime world; it is a raw and urgent one. Data submitted under the Maritime Labour Convention shows that in 2023, 6.5% of all deaths at sea were confirmed suicides. A further 22% were classified as “Missing at Sea”. Anyone who has spent time in this world understands what those numbers likely conceal. Not every loss leaves evidence. Not every tragedy is witnessed. And not every family receives the clarity they deserve. 6.5% hardly grasps the appalling truth of suicide at sea.

Working in chaplaincy and frontline welfare, we are painfully familiar with the pressures that shape life at sea: the long stretches away from home; the isolation; the sense that there is no easy exit when things begin to unravel. For some, these challenges accumulate quietly until they become unbearable. Declining mental health is not always dramatic. Often it is a thinning of hope, a narrowing of options, a slow unravelling that remains unseen and unspoken.

SafeTALK’s strength lies in its specificity. It is about seafarers and their lives . Its language and the scenarios are those of life at sea. It speaks into mess rooms and engine rooms, into lives measured in contracts and voyages. Its voice is the voice of seafarers and, crucially, it equips seafarers themselves – not outside experts – to recognise the signs of strain in their own crewmates. It gives them the courage and the clarity to ask the question most of us fear to ask: “Are you thinking about suicide?”

It is a blunt question. It can jolt. It can feel intrusive. But it is also a doorway. For many, it is the first time they have heard their own fear spoken aloud right there beside them – not as an accusation, but as an act of care.

In that sense, the gift that SafeTALK offers is rather like an acoustic dome: to be a voice in a moment of spiralling need, a voice that seems to come from just behind, close enough to startle but close enough to help. It speaks in a seafarer’s own accent, in the familiar cadence of a friend or colleague. It speaks from beside them, not at them. And sometimes, that is what saves a life – the shock of realising that someone has noticed, someone has drawn close, someone has dared to say what you could not.

Like my experience beneath the dome in Melbourne, SafeTALK allows seafarers to hear a voice they thought was theirs alone, returning to them from just over their shoulder – a voice asking the hardest question because it carries the hope of an answer, the hope of life.