Edition 68
Getting On
- Published 5th May, 2020
- ISBN: 9781922268761
- Extent: 264pp
- Paperback (234 x 153mm), eBook
In a world where seventy is the new fifty, old age isn’t what it used to be.
As the proportion of older Australians continues to rise, the lived experience of everyone, be they in care or looking after an aged relative, will be intertwined intimately with the phenomenon of longer lives. But longevity brings with it urgent issues: postponement of retirement, the question of financing extended life, how to forge a society that can accommodate the needs of a majority older population with the dynamism of the young.
Edited by Ashley Hay, Griffith Review 68: Getting On takes a timely look at the question of how we age successfully – as individuals, as a society, as a population.
AUDIO
Listen to Editor Ashley Hay read her introduction ‘The time of our lives’.
Listen to Laura Elvery read ‘The town turns over’.
Listen to Editor Ashley Hay in conversation with Ian Lowe and Ingrid Burkett.
In this Edition
The invisible arrow
WHY DID THEY ask me for an essay about stopping writing? And why did I say yes? Did I tell someone I’d stopped? Have I stopped? I could, ifI wanted to, couldn’t I? I’m seventy-seven and I’m pretty tired. And lately I think I’ve copped...
Magical thinking and the aged-care crisis
HOW DID AUSTRALIAN aged care reach its current nadir? Countless inquiries and reviews have probed this question; postmortem after postmortem has dissected the policy and regulatory failures that have wrought the present abysmal state of affairs; a surfeit of recommendations have been handed down; revised...
Things of stone and wood and wool
FOLLOWING THE DEATH of her elderly father, a close friend of mine recently asked if I would read a poem by Goethe at his funeral. I didn’t know the man well. In fact, I had met him only once, seated in my friend’s car on a...
Live long and prosper
THE BIOLOGICAL BASIS of ageing can be traced to its beginning four billion years ago in a gene circuit in the first life forms that provided a survival advantage by turning off cellular reproduction while DNA was being repaired. One gene turns off reproduction;...
Joining forces
THESE ARE ANGRY times. The Earth itself is angry. Flames roar through the land, human tempers flare and the political world is angrier than it has been since the 1960s. A furious sixteen-year-old rails at the United Nations in an incandescent speech built around...
Killing time
The days of our lives are seventy years;And if by reason of strength they are eighty years,Yet their boast is only labor and sorrow;For it is soon cut off, and we fly away. Psalms 90:10 ‘HOW TIME FLIES!’ my elderly relatives used to say when I...
Contemporary loss
ONE OF THE most popular Irish broadcasters and writers of modern times was Nuala O’Faolain. Abruptly, in the middle of an engaged and full life, she was diagnosed with lung cancer. Later, when dying, Nuala was interviewed on Raidió Teilifís Éireann, the equivalent of...
One hundred years of sumbiotude
I AM A child of the Anthropocene, born in 1953. I have lived in a period of history also known as the ‘Great Acceleration’. The speed and scale of material change since 1953 is breathtaking, so much so that I sometimes feel I am a...
In an unguarded moment
IT’S EARLY ON a Friday and the usual morning hustle of a school day is playing out in my kitchen. Olivia, ten, is dressed and breakfasted. She’s adding to lunchboxes: chopping up fruit, tossing in chips, searching for lids. Sophie, seven, provides commentary: cut...
System failure
WHEN I TURNED sixty last year, I entered a year’s worth of birthday celebrations with friends to mark the milestone. I was the first cab off the rank in March, with other birthday celebrations punctuating the subsequent months. There were seven of us in total, born...
Experiments in the art of living
A FEW YEARS ago, a pretty young woman approached me in the lunchroom of the building where I began work on my novel, The Weekend (Allen & Unwin, 2019). ‘You’re writing about ageing, aren’t you?’ she asked. I was, I said, smiling. She considered my fifty-year-old face for...
Bold rage
Do not go gentle into that good night,Old age should burn and rave at close of day;Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Dylan Thomas LOOKING BACK OVER my family tree, the last century has been kind to my ancestors. Many of them have made...
The ball still swings
Click here to listen to Editor Ashley Hay in conversation with Ian Lowe and Ingrid Burkett. ‘IT’S JUST LIKE the game we used to play,’ a teammate observed, ‘only in slow motion.’ He was talking about over-sixties cricket. The slow bowlers bowl with as much guile as ever, but those of...
Solving my medical mystery
IN OCTOBER 2018 I found myself in St Vincent’s Private Hospital. Located in Darlinghurst in inner-city Sydney, it was undergoing renovations and the grinding of jackhammers and loud banging punctuated my stay. Nevertheless, it was a fascinating fortnight: I shared my ward with some...
On looking into mirrors
YOU LOOK INTO the mirror. There are a number around the house and every now and then one of them becomes an attraction. Your skin is clear. Your hair is thick. The face looking back at you is as it should be when you...
A life in books
NOVEMBER 1952: BERNARD Marks has just arrived in northern Egypt from Salford, in the north of England, to begin two years of National Service in the Suez Canal Zone. Faced with a rising tide of Egyptian nationalism, Britain – its empire still largely intact – is...
The human factor
I would like to believe in the myth that we grow wiser with age. In a sense my disbelief is wisdom. Those of a middle generation, if charitable or sentimental, subscribe to the wisdom myth, while the callous see us as dispensable objects, like...
Old growth
IN 1975, JUST before my sixteenth birthday, I read in the summer issue of Dolly magazine that everyone needed some ‘me’ time. This sounded grown-up, enticing. The editor suggested checking into a hotel to unwind. I’m not sure I knew the difference between a hotel, a...
A vapour trail across the sun
I AM AN amazingly fortunate woman. I am an author, well into my seventies, published for the first time. My memoir, The Erratics (4th Estate, 2019), sits on shelves in bookshops, its starry night-sky cover facing hopefully outwards: a book successful against the odds, received with...
Longevity, quality and turning back the clock
MY NAN WAS an active, outgoing, engaged senior citizen. She gardened, kneeling on a foam pad to protect the skin of her knees and her fragile bones, honeycombed with osteoporosis. She read books, the newspaper, did the crosswords. She looked after her neighbours’ children...
Dying wish
I believe in my mother’s inherent dignity and personhood, although we became strangers to one another years ago. I try to remind myself that, while her illness may have overtaken her, it does not define her, no matter how long it keeps her imprisoned.
Hearing stories of the past
WHEN WE FIRST see Daphne, she is sitting in a pool of sunshine at the edge of her veranda. Bougainvilleas punctuate small patches of open ground between each cluster of rooms, and an unused swimming pool contains slowly disintegrating giant palm fronds, making the...
The hungry years
LIKE FALLING OVER, choking in public is always a little embarrassing. When it happens, people feel the need to apologise once the episode is over, as if it were a sign of weakness or social gaucheness instead of an involuntary malfunction. It is a sad...
The almost homeless
MARG’S NORTH BRISBANE townhouse looks innocuous from the outside. But when she ushers me inside, the chaos of her interior world becomes evident. Boxes and baskets overflow with clothes, paper, fabric and books. They line the corridor, mass on kitchen benches, cover the dining...
Death by the book
THE NASTY CHEMICAL smell had gone. His eyelids were shut and she wanted to have one more peep to see if he was still there. Gently, she prised the right one open. The skin was tinged yellowish-brown, soft, wrinkled and cooling now. The eye –...
The elsewheres of Charlie Bolt
NO ONE KNEW what happened to Charlie Bolt. He had a wife, somewhere. She left to find ‘happiness’, believing it was elsewhere. Instead of looking for her, fifty-two-year-old Charlie Bolt went the other way. He’d never experienced an epiphany on his lonely road. Charlie...
The town turns over
Listen to Laura Elvery read ‘The town turns over’. IF YOU WANT to know how we got here, we will tell you. Once, not so long ago, we were everybody’s ageing parents. We lived in nursing homes, aged-care facilities, places called Freedom Villas. These were not always good places....
How the sky stays above us
I am changing now the congregation of years not age so much as a ripening view and I have started speaking to trees one big gum surely hundreds of decades I stop and look hard where peeling bark reveals cambium whorls like human fingerprints and multiples of tiny crawling things are not concerned I say thank you, Grandfather for holding...
Bionic enhancements queue
Bionic enhancements queue Every time I go through airport security now the queue is longer. I stow everything I can decently remove – belt, boots, earrings, finger rings, neck chains, phone – in the plastic tray with my jacket and scarf. Through the scanner and setting off every alarm,...
Andrew
Their house has the taste of salt Pictures framed for satire Balsamic vinegar ripening Offset with olive oil They know themselves What they love What they take seriously What they scoff at Or dismiss They laugh well, between themselves and their close circle It’s almost its own world An earthy prism Rich with time Sunshine intercepted By curling...
Winston
I heard they grew Winston Churchill in a Petri dish, from stem cells and DNA. Identical, or so they said. He lives in Wapping, dabbles in fine art and fishponds – a bricklayer by trade. It’s all very hush-hush, a big disappointment. He’s just not the same, you see, without the war.
Afterwards
The body of Raleigh May, sixty-seven, lies in an open casket in the chapel of the Craig-Hurtt Funeral Home on North Main Street in Mountain Grove, Missouri, United States in September 2018. Raleigh was a Vietnam veteran who received multiple service accolades, including an...
The creative life of Eileen Kramer
‘I feel like I could fly!’ Eileen Kramer was born in Sydney in 1914 and studied singing at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music during the 1930s. In 1940, she saw a performance by the Bodenwieser Ballet and fell in love with dance. She joined the...
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