About Even Keel

Even Keel opened in 2016 in a single rented room above a bookshop on Sandy Bay Road, with a view of a car park and, on a clear day, a slice of the river past the roofline. Alison Marsh had spent the six years before that in a large CBD clinic, seeing five clients a day back to back with ten minutes between them to write notes, answer the phone and reset the room, and had come to think the ten minutes was where most of the actual thinking about a client's week was supposed to happen and mostly didn't. What she wanted to build was plainer than that: a practice where the fifty minutes booked was the fifty minutes used, and where the next session picked up where the last one left off instead of starting again from a file nobody had reread.

The practice moved into its current premises on Regatta Point Lane in 2019, a converted weatherboard cottage with sash windows and a hallway wide enough for a waiting area that isn't a shared open room. Alison chose it over two newer, cheaper offices because it doesn't look like a hospital corridor and doesn't look like a hotel lobby either, and she's found that matters more than she expected. More than one new client has said that being shown to a specific chair in a quiet room made the first ten minutes easier than any form could have.

The name comes from the water below Sandy Bay, not stillness, which nobody's mind actually manages on demand, but a hull that has found its own waterline and rides through the chop instead of fighting it. It's meant plainly, not as a promise, since nobody here can promise a particular outcome, only a proper hour and a clinician who has read the file before the client sits down.

The practice grew slowly and on purpose. Daniel Ostrowski joined as a second psychologist in 2019 once the wait list stretched past six weeks. Ben Whitlam joined in 2021 to run reception, bookings and Medicare claims so the clinicians weren't doing their own scheduling between sessions. Tessa Lofgren joined in 2023 as a provisional psychologist completing her supervised practice hours, which also meant a lower fee for clients without a referral. Ten years on, Even Keel still books fifty minutes as fifty minutes, still keeps one spare chair in the corner of the waiting room that nobody's quite sure what to do with, and has decided that's a fitting enough detail to leave alone.