Interests and activities

Yeah, I think as you get older, as you’ve been working all your life, there are a lot of things that you would have loved to do, like after I retired, well now I’ve got time to paint and I’ve got time to do art and craft and I’ve got time to embroider, I’ve got time to do that gardening that I love, and I’m learning all these things and going to that class and that class. When Robin retired, because he worked so hard all his life, now he wants to do the things he loves, so like he’s having time to go cycling, going cycling with other people and doing the camper trailer sort of travelling type. All those little things take time because he had to learn how to drive the camper and pull a trailer with you. He had classes to go to. I had to go with, not that I would, but anyway.

I’m in about probably nine clubs in Darwin; that keeps me active, and then Probus, I’m very active with Probus, you know Probus, very active with Probus. Yesterday I went ten pin bowling, yesterday with Probus, and then last night we went down to the wharf, down to the Greek restaurant where the entertainment’s set, all those shops there, went down there and had tea last night and there’s about 35 turned up. They’re a good crowd so I mean ten pin bowling you’ve got to be – we have some fun. We have a bus tour every month. Hire a bus and go here, there, everywhere; that’s very active.

Get on a committee. I’m on a couple of committees and that really helps, gives you something to do, meet new people you know, instead of sitting home and looking at the four walls. There’s nothing on TV. You read the newspaper in 10 minutes. So what’s left if you’re always sitting at home?

I do Life Long Learning at the Life Long Learning organisation and I do voluntary work at a not-for-profit organisation. I am involved in a social organisation on a membership basis, that puts on a variety of things like plays or functions et cetera. I belong to that.

And how important is that to your overall wellbeing?

It’s very important. I have to be engaged. I’m that sort of person. I need this mental stimulation and engagement, and I need the things I learn at Life Long Learning to keep my mind active.

It means that you never stop learning, that you can learn until the day you die. I know people who are still learning in their mid to late 80s, and even over 90. There’s no need to stop if you can get to wherever you need to go to do your learning. You can do it. And particularly if you choose a learning institution or find one that offers a lot of different subjects and it gives you a variety of choice. I personally enjoy writing, and of course, that involves research and it gives me a lot of scope, and I interact with other people who write, and we learn a lot of things from each other and we learn about things from each other.

That’s the first time I knew him, I met him [a friend] at the community centre before that, we used to have our coffee together. When they were forming the walk with wheels group he said “well you could join if you want to, you’ve got a scooter” he said, so I joined it. I was one of the originals.

Well we usually – this year we’d have a meeting every Monday, we do craftwork, we have a stall at the – when they have their markets up here. We have a bit of a yak and do some puzzles and play some games occasionally. Next week we’ve got bingo of course, which I hate, I don’t mind the poky playing. I hate bingo. But it’s just more a social outing, we don’t have speakers or anything, we had a talk about that, we just didn’t want them. Because I belong to one that [my friend] runs, the men’s lunch I belong to that, I’m in that one, been in that since it started, and I’m also in the other one Huff and Puff.

What do Huff and Puff do?

Huff and Puff’s a breathing group

Yeah. I also play golf, and I chose deliberately to play golf at a public golf course, not a private one. And that – I mean, I don’t like the snobbery associated with women’s golf at posh courses, but the group of women there are many of them very, very different from my background. I would say 90 per cent are not tertiary educated. They are from different backgrounds, they have got a wealth of life experience, great sense of humour, better golfers than I am, all of that, and that’s opened my view of the world as well.

How long have you been playing the golf?

Regularly? Since I retired. Probably regularly five or six years. It’s a very important part of my life now, it is, in ways that I couldn’t have imagined.

What kinds of ways?

Well, because of my background, and my father introduced me to golf as a young person, I have always been interested in it but didn’t play for 20, 30 years because of work and family and all that. And so I wanted to take it up again and I was really focused on the golf. And then when I got – and I know that you don’t improve unless you join a club and all that sort of stuff, and so I joined a club and I was there for the golf. And then I discovered that it’s far more than that. It’s actually a very, very strong and robust support network.

What kinds of support?

Well, I’ll give you an example. There is one woman who probably joined two or three years ago. She is tertiary educated actually … and her husband is dying. The way in which I suppose myself and others have – and I have never been in her house, I have never, she is not a friend of longstanding – but have rallied around to support her and take her places, and listen to her, and all of that has, I think, been quite remarkable. And the other thing is quite a lot of the women are older, older than I am. They’re in their 70s and 80s. Some of them are inspirational. Like they’re playing 18 holes of golf and they’re 82 and stuff. So you think golly, if she can do it, I can keep doing this too.

Yes. And they make it with varying degrees of success. But the ones at the golf club, and the mere fact that they are there, and they’re playing golf, and they are engaging and all of that, are probably the ones that provide the positive role models. There are others who I suspect withdraw, and their life closes in, and all of that sort of stuff.

Friendship is the most important thing in the world. If I didn’t have my friends – there’s women that I have met, husbands have left them and they spend their life watching TV and drinking booze. I’m just like – why? I have my club, I have my friends. Yeah. I just think that’s really, really important. I couldn’t sit at home alone. I mean, if I’m having a bad day, then you don’t want to be around me. I’m very good at sitting at home, drinking my cups of tea, reading my book, escaping into my book and stuff like this. But other than that, it’s kind of like – well, I don’t have anything to do so I’ll phone somebody. You know? My neighbour up the street – up the top house with the two little girls. They’re often outside on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. So you go out and you play with them, and you teach the kids how to sweep up the leaves, and teach them how to rub their hands over the lavender bush so they can smell it. So even in the middle of winter, when you can’t smell it, they still go up and rub and smell and everything like this. So, you know, it’s just – you know, and the whole – the seasons. There’s a tree out there that loses its leaves, so for the last couple of years it’s sort of like – look, it’s getting the little things coming and everything. It’s going to soon have the flowers and stuff. And we do that every year. It’s just – the kids pick it up and it’s just – it feels like you’re passing something on. They might not remember, but maybe they’ll grow up with the love of Mother Nature and the things that happen. They know when the full moon is out. They can watch the moon. They’re also very aware of when the airplanes go across and they leave the trail behind them. So yeah, it’s good fun.

One of the difficulties is for instance transport, an awful lot of people of my age certainly don’t drive, how do you get them all together even if they’re willing? Suppose you had a grandmother or a mother or something yourself that would drive you or would do this or that for you but other people may not. They may want to go and see so and so or may want to enjoy this or that and they’re perfectly capable of doing so but because there’s no transport available it makes it that much harder. There are all kinds of societies as in bridge and mah-jong and all the rest of it as long as you can, but again all that depends on being able to get there.

Now as I say I may have to get into it again and try and find something that interests me. There’s the University of the Third Age things like that and I’ve written about that and I’m waiting to hear whether they’ll have me or not, it’s not expensive which is also another story is the expense.

And sometimes I go. There was a dinner the other day that is actually before Christmas and then they have a breakfast at the Casino, have a breakfast and they pick you up. If they can’t pick you up I can’t go there but they always pick me up and it was through them I think I got to know about – or somebody told me about [the home care service] and I stuck with [them] because they were actually far better because they could, whenever I rang them up to go to the doctor they would arrange for somebody to pick me up, bring me there and bring me back and they have done that and they came every fortnight and they have been there for more than one year. I got the same person, the same to take me to shopping.

I should go back and say I’m transgendered, I suppose. I’ve been transgendered all my life, but didn’t do anything about it. Tried to resist it, married, had three children, and it still was there and it still came back to me. And eventually I gave way to force majeure when I was 52 and transitioned from male to female. Now having transitioned from male to female, I decided to make my life useful by trying to do something for others who found themselves in the same position. So as part of that, I sat down and wrote my life story, and I think that was the point at which I stopped playing so much sport, particularly tennis. I was still playing tennis at that point. But I gave that up in order to be able to be disciplined about my writing and I wrote the book, and I was successful, from point of view of being an award winning book. And since then, I have been an activist for transgendered people, and I currently work at the [State] gender centre, as their information worker.

You were telling me before, too, about your creative writing classes. Can you tell me about them?

A lady moved into the village three years ago. She’s a retired English teacher, and one day she said to our occupational therapist … No, she’s not an occupational therapist, she’s something, a step lower. I’ve forgotten what it is. “Do you think anybody would be interested in creative writing?” So [she] said “Well we can try”, and I had just stopped, after many years of china painting, and I was desperate for a hobby. I thought ‘But writing – I don’t know anything about writing’, then I discovered that I could write, and I drove the family mad because I’d say “Guess what I’ve just written – I’ll read it to you”. Now nobody asks me what I’ve written [laughs] except [my granddaughter], and it has just been so satisfying, and [my daughter] one day said “That’s wonderful mum, for an elderly person to have a new hobby – that’ll do your brain no end of good” [laughs]. But it is, it’s just fantastic, and three of us say to [the teacher] that it’s changed our lives, because it gives you something to think about, and in the middle of the night you’ll wake up and you think ‘I know what that word was’, so you get up, make a cup of tea, have a piece of bread and honey, and you write. Well why lie there tossing and turning when you can do something [laughs] creative? Oh it’s just fantastic.

Austin: Yes, I’m a bit of a sucker. People who ring me up and tell me and let’s face it, I have some sympathy with them, they’re all worthy charities but you can’t contribute to 25 different charities so I really keep three going but sometimes Val [my wife] gets on to them and she shoves them off a bit.

Val: Don’t be silly, when I do the tax we would have 20.

Austin: But they’re different – they’re not the permanent, these sort of persistent charities we’re talking about that ring up, they’re more old school, old university, old associations, that sort of thing, they deserve it. I have to say, we’re not millionaires, we don’t lavish out thousands of dollars but $50 here, $50 there.

Val: I think the problem of belonging to a lot of organisations is that some organisations sell their membership list with addresses and I guess being home all day, we would have quite often two or three requests for money per day. Certainly we get three or four in the mail per week and that’s I suppose because we do belong or have belonged to a lot of things and I remember one I belong to when I was on the committee, we made a resolution not to sell our mailing list to anyone. Now if you’re old, because you belong to more things, I suppose our name and address is everywhere. I thought they used to come just from the phone book but they don’t, they clearly come from membership lists and it’s a mistake to give money because they never drop you and one organisation I belong to, I suggested that people who regularly give should not be asked so often but people who never give ought to be targeted but I must say that it’s becoming – I mean for one, I put on the request letter, the envelope “Deceased” and they didn’t ever ring again or write again. But I can hardly say that over the phone. I know that any age group are getting these requests but I suspect that more older people are just because you belong to more things.

Can you tell me a bit more about the parcels that you send back to the Ukraine, Tamara? I’m particularly interested in what it means for you, to do that.

Tamara (translation): I send parcels. What does it give to me? First of all, many children will become believers. I do all this labour with joy, and this positively influences my health, but if a person is stingy, and he feels uneasy to donate, this eats him out, therefore he gets many illnesses. I read that greediness may affect your heart and contribute to heart disease, saying in Russian non-medical terms, it eats you out. Greediness negatively affects your health. But if I do this with joy and pleasure, this positively affects my health. I turn around boxes of 20-30 kilograms, you need to pack it and sew the covering, ten times you need to move it around and wrap around. All this positively affects my health.

Yes, I can send parcels from savings from my pension, because I purchase things very cheap. As I said, the shoes were about 40 dollars, and I purchased them for only two dollars. I go to different areas and buy a lot of them, for only two dollars per pair. I cannot afford them when they are 40 dollars. Once I came to [the store] and there were sweaters, of 40 dollars each, fluffy, of nice colours, for girls. The sales person came and marked a dollar each. There was a trolley near; I initially came with empty hands. I said to her: “Put them all in the trolley”. She asked me: “Why do you need all of them?” So I bought 40 sweaters for only 40 dollars. You can always allocate some money for the needy if you wish and send parcels. I do garage sales, sometimes 50 dollars. Once there was a football match, and I’ve got only 17 dollars from that sale. However, your pension pay is very good here. If you cook at home, then it will be sufficient for you to eat and to buy clothes and shoes for yourself and to send parcels. We did not have so much clothes and shoes as we have here, and we can buy this from the pension, so I can send some to the needy and to orphans. I did not even dream about this pension.

When I started, I said, how about taking the preschool up to the nursing home, and the children put on a concert, and the oldies thought it was better than all the presents in the world because many of them don’t see kids and there was a gentleman up there one day, it was a wonderful sight. He’d had a stroke and they were trying to get him to work his hands again, and they gave him some A4 paper and he showed the kids, he made all the little boys, there were three and four-year-olds, paper planes which used to be a great cheap entertainment in the past and they loved it and he loved it, and now any time they go up to the home, they let him know and give him some paper and he makes these kids the paper.