ANNIE WAS WORKING as a secretary when she turned sixty, a milestone she’d always regarded as her retirement age. Although she could have coped financially, she found she wasn’t ready to retire: ‘I felt there were still things that I needed to do out there, that I still had quite a bit to offer in the workforce.’ She took on several part-time and casual jobs: after-school supervision, administration for a short-term project, setting up her house for international homestay students.

Annie is one of an increasing number of Australians who have decided to work into older age. In a recent Australian Bureau of Statistics survey of working adults aged forty-five or more who had a retirement age in mind, almost half said it would be between sixty-five and sixty-nine years, and close to one-fifth wanted to go on working until they were seventy or older. Furthermore, over six hundred thousand reckoned they’d never retire.