Fridays with my Folks

by Amal Awad

  Their children and grandchildren are also involved in their lives, though distance can affect how regularly they see each other.

  Charles hopes that Cath will create attachments at the village, people she can talk to. ‘But not run their doors down. That’s what I’m hoping for. Maybe it’s asking a lot, but at least she gets to do things at the community centre.’

  He has a chuckle at how his situation varies from the norm –wives looking after their husbands. Indeed, he’s one of the few men I speak to who is older, able-bodied and a carer. He’s healthy at seventy-five, active, able to take walks in the bush.

  We’re ready to wrap up when he apologises for not being more effusive and open. But talking about the past isn’t easy for him. In fact, he refused to discuss Vietnam until 1991, nearly thirty years after he completed his tour of duty. An ex-army mate contacted him about a gathering in Townsville. After that, Charles got involved. ‘It’s released me, put it that way.’

  Every month Vietnam veterans get together, thirty to forty people. ‘It’s really a stronger bond than your brothers and sisters. They watched your back for twelve months and you watched their back for twelve months. It’s hard to describe, and nobody can say, “I know how you feel.” It’s just not possible. You haven’t got a clue,’ he says, more passionately than I’ve seen in our conversation. ‘That is a real outlet for us.’ His wife loves to go, too, he adds. The women look after Cath. ‘Let’s put it this way, I don’t have to look after her for four or five hours. She gets looked after. She’s always loved that.’

  Charles gets up and disappears into another room, returning a minute later with several black and white photos from his childhood (he’s one of nine children); one of Cath when she was young, pretty and blonde; and a few snaps from Vietnam. In one, a handsome young man stands, bare-chested, in army pants and boots, dog tags around his neck, a cigarette in his hand, as he poses with an expression that suggests neither happiness nor displeasure. He looks as though he’s about to say something. In another, he sits on grass beside a mate in front of an army truck, both smiling into the camera, their breakfast kit in front of them.

  ‘You were a handsome fella,’ I remark.

  Charles shrugs, modest. ‘Some people say I was,’ he replies.

  ‘Do you still have the dog tags?’

  ‘I have. I still have my pay book,’ he says, breaking out into full, throaty laughter. ‘You find a lot of these things when you’re moving.’ His brother has scanned the photos and saved them onto a USB, he tells me, and he looks at them on the television.

  Charles shows me a more recent photo of Cath. She’s aged gracefully – you can see the same woman in both the old and newer photos, the same smile.

  ‘How did you meet your wife?’

  ‘Well, there were two girls walking down the road one day, and I had a little car and I turned and did a U-ey!’ He laughs again.

  He tells me he commissioned a painting of the black-and-white photo of Cath in her youth and retrieves a large frame in which the full-colour picture sits. Married six months before he went to Vietnam, Charles paid an artist in Vietnam to paint Cath’s image. ‘Because that photo went with me … [The painting] cost me $15.’

  Once again, I’m taken aback by the energy of the photos. Proof of experiences that slip into mythology as we age. I thank Charles for sharing them with me. He’s quiet for a moment, looking a bit sad. ‘I get emotional, but that’s the way it is.’

  ‘There’s a lot of co-dependency’

  Geoff has no qualms admitting that he came to Elements ‘kicking and screaming’.

  ‘I used every excuse known to man not to come here.’

  He’s seventy-four, retired, and has been living at Elements for three years, with his wife, Julie, who is ten years his junior. They are unique for the forward planning that shaped their decision to move in to a retirement village. I would venture to argue that, in some ways, they are taking the ‘ideal’ approach to graceful retirement.

  We’re in the staff room at Elements, eating a lunch cooked by Chiou See. Julie and Geoff sit opposite each other at the large table, ready to share their experiences. They are funny, not always intentionally, exhibiting a kind of lovable tension –Geoff brims with sardonic observations, while Julie displays a stoic thoughtfulness. They frequently finish each other’s sentences, one half-sentence flowing into the next. Julie is quieter; she gives the sense of someone who has experienced her share of challenges, and for whom a pleasant retirement is her gift to herself. And, as both Julie and Geoff like to point out, they expect her to outlive him.

  Between us sits Chiou See, and the teasing runs merciless and thick. When I ask Geoff what attracted him to Julie, he responds, ‘I haven’t the slightest idea. I’m still working on that.’

  Married for thirty-four years, for both it’s their second marriage. They have no children together (a conscious decision), but Julie has two from her first marriage.

  I commend them on their number of years as a couple. ‘That’s not bad,’ I say.

  ‘Not now,’ says Julie.

  ‘Not recently,’ affirms Geoff.

  They have no secret recipe to happiness, both being on their second marriages. They admit to not having a conventional relationship. When asked if they consider their marriage a good one, Julie says it’s ‘different’.

  ‘We’re not like an ordinary run-of-a-mill couple that live in a retirement village. I know that. That’s good,’ says Julie.

  ‘What are you seeing in others that you’re not seeing in yourselves?’

  ‘We’re not normal,’ replies Julie.

  ‘What’s normal?’ I ask.

  ‘Well, to me it’s like a couple who, I don’t know … the bloke does stuff and the woman does stuff.’

  ‘Let’s put it another way,’ says Geoff. ‘These people that we’ve met here and we know, you can guarantee are a certain type. It’s five pm, “Oh, I can’t ring them now. They’ll be having tea,” or such and such, so and so. Then they’re walking at a certain time. We don’t do any of that.’

  They are also friends, adds Geoff.

  ‘I think probably a good way to describe it is they are not co-dependent,’ says Chiou See. ‘I think that comes up a lot in relationships. There’s a lot of co-dependency.’

  Julie says she’s not the type for Valentine’s Day affectations, despite being moved by it in those around her. ‘I don’t want to be like that, but I know people who are. If something happens to Geoff first, I’ll be shattered. I’ll be absolutely shattered, but I will know that the things we did together were enough. That was great. A lifetime of stuff.’

  ‘You can look back on the bad, or you can look back on the good,’ says Geoff. ‘It’s up to you which one you want to choose.’

  Julie reflects on how, upon meeting Geoff, she could imagine them growing old together. ‘When I got married the first time, I was seventeen and the person I married was fifteen years older than me. Then I got pregnant, and on and on and on. My life was on a roller-coaster, didn’t stop … And when I met Geoff, I could imagine … looking into the future; I could imagine getting older with Geoff. My only fear was he wouldn’t live long enough because of the way he was abusing himself. There were many times when I thought I would have to get out of it because I couldn’t stand to see it anymore. The only time that I was really serious, and Geoff knew, we ended up at a psychologist.’

  ‘Got in with a couple of them.’

  ‘Thankfully it was somebody that Geoff could actually listen to. That’s when he decided he’d do something about it.’

  ‘I made a choice. I went to AA. I’ve done the whole bit. Now I don’t. I could easily slip back, but here it’s good.’

  ‘It just made me sad. I know the person underneath all that. That’s not him,’ says Julie.

  It was a story in Brisbane’s Sunday Mail, written by Chiou See, in which she spoke of her vision for her retirement village, that first caught Julie’s attention. The idea of it
sat in her. When she paid a visit the village was incomplete, but she loved the setting. However, at the time the village didn’t allow pets. ‘We had two dogs, so I sort of discounted it. Then Chiou See came in here … and she was in a big hurry to get down the coast to …’

  ‘Pick up the kids,’ chimes in Geoff.

  ‘Pick up her children, but she still made enough time to actually speak to us.’

  Julie’s dog now lives with them at Elements. Chiou See realised her residents tended to be pet-lovers. She commissioned a new report to work on the pet problem – previously there were restrictions due to the local fauna. ‘It was a long-winded process … There was this big war about “Oh my God, we’ve got to protect all the koalas.” It was a blanket protection policy, not an informed protection policy.’

  It took three years to convice Geoff to move to Elements. He puts it down to male ego, rather than fear of losing himself. He had built the home he lived in for thirty-odd years. But, he admits, their social life wasn’t as functional as their house. They had friends, but not a huge cross-section of them.

  ‘Did you have an idea in your mind of what you wanted your life to look like or did it just sneak up on you?’ I ask.

  ‘No. Logic dictates that I would probably, because I’m older … go first,’ says Geoff. ‘Me being who I am, I thought if we moved in now, I’d get the benefit of being here while I’m still young and handsome and … Half of that’s right.’

  As a couple, Julie and Geoff would visit Elements, but they weren’t residents. Eventually Chiou See delivered an ultimatum of sorts to Geoff – no more attending functions in the village until he got his cheque book out. In Geoff’s defence, he says, the place was still being built. ‘There was nowhere for me to live, and I wasn’t going to camp out. I didn’t like it that much.’

  ‘He kept changing his mind whether he wanted to live here, and he would’ve lived as far away into the forest as possible because it was the last building built,’ explains Julie. ‘He did not want to come at all.’

  But one well-constructed home and an appealing community later, they are settled in.

  Is it generally the woman who’s driving the move to the village, I wonder. ‘Generally,’ says Chiou See. ‘Occasionally we have a few males who want to come and then the women don’t come, but probably 80/20. Eighty per cent of the time it will be the husbands resisting, which is normal.’

  There’s quite a bit involved in moving in, says Geoff. He wasn’t going to compromise on his garden shed, but he’s pleased to report he has twice as much as room in the garage.

  It was easy to physically make the change, Julie says. Although, she doesn’t think she’s a good people person – she doesn’t do well in groups. ‘It seems funny, strange moving into a community, but I moved because of lifestyle as well. I wanted a change. I didn’t want to spend my life in the one place looking at the one street and the same people.’

  So she had no fears coming to Elements, and the major drawcard was lifestyle. ‘I didn’t want to come here and wait to die or wait to go on to the next step in aged care. I wanted to come here and actually live and enjoy what we had to enjoy.’

  And Geoff has discovered that what he could do in the outside world he can do in his new home. ‘There’s been no difference for me because I’ve always repaired things. People break things. I fix them. That’s always been the same. Even here, hasn’t it? When something goes wrong here, quite often Chiou See will call me.’

  ‘Because I have to,’ says Chiou See. ‘I’m trying to give you a purpose in life.’

  9.

  ON COUNTRY

  Who is your kin? We aren’t always connected by blood.

  My explorations have led me to the heart of Australia, where issues of illness and ageing take on a new significance.

  In Alice Springs, the heat soaks into your skin. A sleepy town by day, Alice is blanketed in punishing desert heat, seemingly stuck somewhere in the past. On the drive in, I pass a section of an Old Ghan train, rusted and disregarded by the side of the road. There’s an Old Timers museum. Billboards for fast-food joints and an Indian restaurant jar against the town’s earthy, humbling landscapes. The sky is a bright blue and even the withered tree trunks are hauntingly picturesque.

  I wonder what Mum would think about it. She has expressed a desire to visit Alice in the past. And for a moment I contemplated a trip here with my parents, so my mum could live out her earlier desire to visit the town. But I’m here to work. The reality is, while my parents have experienced many of Australia’s various landscapes, I suspect it would be harder now for them to deal with the heat here.

  Alice is a place full of people who are far from home. And some are here because they have been diagnosed with renal failure and must undergo dialysis treatment. In central Australia kidney failure rates are fifteen to thirty times the national average. Out of the coastal centres the survival rates of people on dialysis are improving, but the age they start dialysis is much younger. In the general Australian community most sufferers of kidney failure begin dialysis anywhere between their sixties and eighties. In central Australia, the age range is thirties to fifties.

  Alice Springs is a town that tells a story of displacement. The nightmare of being tied to a dialysis machine for life is different, heavier, here. It comes loaded with social and economic factors that aren’t shared by all Australians. Remote Indigenous communities have some of the highest rates of chronic disease and preventable illnesses in the world.

  It’s a focal point for the Honourable Ken Wyatt, the Commonwealth’s first Indigenous minister, sworn in as Minister for Indigenous Health and Aged Care under Malcolm Turnbull’s government in January 2017. Wyatt wants to reduce the prevalence of otitis media (middle ear infection) in Aboriginal children – according to the World Health Organization, they have the highest rates of otitis media in the world – as well as look at eye health and renal disease. ‘We’re losing too many people,’ he tells me in a phone interview.

  The Indigenous health portfolio holds special significance for the minister, a Noongar and Yamatji man from Bunbury in Western Australia, who has worked in Aboriginal health in two states and has always focused on education and health. In October 2017, then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull acknowledged problems with the government’s near-decade-long Closing the Gap initiative, a strategy to improve outcomes in health, education and employment for Indigenous people in Australia, all of which consistently fail to meet targets and progress.

  President of the Australian Indigenous Doctors Association Dr Kali Hayward has told media, ‘It is very important for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander doctors to know that there is someone [such as Ken Wyatt] in a position that can effect change and affect decisions being made about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health.’

  In May 2018 the Federal Government announced its intention to spend $57.8 million to support Indigenous dialysis patients, which would see a greater number of mobile dialysis units in Indigenous communities. The Purple House, where I’m headed, was allocated $25 million, an amount the CEO, Sarah Brown, told media was ‘staggering’. The funding, she said, was a ‘game-changer’.

  As the minister takes time out of a busy day to speak to me by phone, Wyatt focuses on several key areas: training more Indigenous doctors and nurses; maternal child health, which he says will always remain a priority; and men’s health (Wyatt recently lost his cousin, Jason Bartlett, a singer–songwriter who succumbed to end-stage kidney disease aged thirty-six). The minister doesn’t discount treatment for renal failure, but he encourages prevention, visits to the GP. ‘Because what you want to know is what’s happening inside of you, if your kidney’s starting to fail … You may not be able to turn it around, but how can you slow it down?’

  Wyatt recognises the challenges in this, bound by the reality that ‘all of us grow up thinking we’re immortal’.

  ‘In the past, if I think back say forty thousand years ago, it would’ve been based around the f
amily – building an understanding of how to care for your body, how to look after yourself, and how to live much longer, and be well and fit. We’ve gone away from that. Culture is still extremely strong, it’ll never diminish. Our country is our country, our community, and the families we’re a part of, will always remain that, but our challenge is: how do we take what we have as a strength and use that to build our health to be better?’

  A challenge that expands, given there are so many other confronting issues for Indigenous people to deal with. ‘We’ve got gaps in so many parts of our lives [but] if we could just all stop and think: do I want to end up on dialysis? Or is there something I can do at my age that will prevent me becoming attached to a dialysis machine, which I can take responsibility for, and I can change [even if] I will need my GP at times when I’m sick? If we do that, I think we can turn around some of our health challenges.’

  Wyatt is refreshingly candid about the lack of money allocated to Aboriginal health. In the months to come, the Federal Government will announce the funding for Indigenous health, but it becomes clear how deep the issues and imbalances run when we speak.

  Take a large circle, he says. Draw a very thin line from the edge of the circle to the middle, and you have the total amount of money for Aboriginal health in the big bucket for health. ‘But I will continue to fight to increase the amount of funding going into the health of our people in all fronts. And I just want to see our culture, and our knowledge, and our history living much longer because every time we lose an elder, or a senior person, or any individual, we lose incredible knowledge out of our communities.’