It was the perfect plan. Writers Peta Murray and David Carlin would introduce their elderly parents, who lived at the same aged care centre, so that they, too, could become firm friends. Murray’s father, Frank, and Carlin’s mother, Joan, both loved reading. Maybe Frank would want to share Joan’s copy of the Guardian Weekly? They could enjoy a game of bridge, Scrabble or bocce. Was it too late for romance?
This was a fantasy, but fantasies are what aged care marketing materials are made of, aimed squarely at easing the guilt of families. However, upon introductions, Frank and Joan ignored each other. Frank retired to his room.
If that was a fantasy, perhaps Murray and Carlin could at least work on shaping the reality of their own advancing age. Losing a beloved colleague, Adrian, to a heart attack while cycling at the age of 58, only sharpened their resolve.
In their new book, How to Dress for Old Age, Murray and Carlin navigate the emotional labour of caring for elderly parents while asking big questions of themselves: Can we ever escape the long shadows of our parents? Do we have to do ageing the same way they did? How do we avoid a “desiccation of spirit”?
When Guardian Australia meets the pair they’re sitting in the office they once shared at RMIT, back when Carlin was Murray’s PhD supervisor. They were peers of the 80s theatre scene – he a director, she a playwright – before reconnecting as friends in academia. Today they’re so in sync that they’ve accidentally coordinated outfits, looking vaguely post-punk in black-rimmed glasses, both with silver hair. Carlin has his shaved at the sides with a whipped top.
“We are endeavouring to rewrite the scripts for ageing,” says Carlin. “Since leaving my full-time job I’ve experienced a lot of times people coming up and saying, ‘Oh, so you’re retired now. I guess you’re playing a lot of golf, or just travelling around the country.’ There’s a lot of unconscious ageism.”
“For many of us, when we stop work, our identity and our sense of meaning is taken away from us or we surrender it,” Murray agrees.
When Murray finished her PhD on ‘elder-flowering’ – a personal exploration of activating the elder self in artistic ways, including dress – Carlin, who has always enjoyed collaborating dating back to his theatre days, suggested they write a book.
Their starting point was the title, taken from a passage of Murray’s PhD, in which she made an inventory of her wardrobe. For her 60th birthday she staged My Own Private Mardi Gras, dressing as her alter egos, Buster Loose and Wanda Lusst. Now 67, she’s realised that the older she gets, the bigger the wardrobe she will need, in order to dress her inner multitudes.
Both she and Carlin consider themselves to be late bloomers. They entered academia later in life, and Murray is battling to climb the institutional ladder “before I’m cut off at the knees”.
“I think people have their primes at different times of life,” she says. “Maybe for majority it might be in youth, but there are other people who don’t hit their prime until much later. I certainly don’t have much to say about my adolescence or my 20s. But there have been other times that I feel have felt far more like I’ve arrived at something.”
Carlin doesn’t like to refer to himself as retired, a word he associates with withdrawal and diminishment. “I thought, I could become a full-time writer now, and so why don’t I? What am I afraid of? I like to think that I’ve gone back to being a freelance writer and artist, and I just had a very long gig.”
His attitude matches that of his mother, Joan, who refuses to call the facility she still lives in a nursing home, preferring to vaguely tell people she has moved to Melbourne to be closer to the family. Joan has always been a doer, something that didn’t diminish after the death of her partner, so she was able to find a sense of community within aged care. She, too, had been a late bloomer. In her midlife, she enrolled in university courses in south-east Asian studies and social and political theory, finding meaning working for NGOs. She founded an urban ecology eco village in Adelaide, her schedule packed with book clubs, bushwalking groups and volunteer work.
“It only occurred to me originally that she didn’t start that [eco village] till she was 60,” says Carlin. “People are living longer, if we’re lucky, so you might get to what was retirement age, and you might have 30 years of productive life ahead. So what do we want to do, rather than just hang out and wait for the end?”
Murray’s father, Frank, who died in 2019, is more of a cautionary tale. His partner was seemingly the instigator of his interests and activities, and when she died, Murray and her sister could see the threat to their own prospects. As Murray writes: “I see Frank catapulting towards us in sickening, unstoppable slow motion. He is tumbling from his world onto ours, flailing uselessly in mid-air, as Sarah and I look on. We have mere moments to prepare for what we should have known was inevitable: that he would lob on us with a crushing thud, flattening everything.”
When Frank entered aged care and his interests narrowed further, Murray had to reckon with “an implosion of hope” as it became obvious that their conversations wouldn’t become any more profound than the usual pleasantries and Frank’s repetitive monologues. Her rage and sorrow mutated into depression.
Carlin, meanwhile, battled with feelings of guilt every time he cycled past ‘The Place’, as the pair dubbed the aged care facility. He was relieved that his mother had moved closer, but as he writes, he felt “guilty too, that her day-to-day care was safely outsourced. It felt like a good place. Didn’t it? She wasn’t going to be abused or neglected. I latched on to all the available fantasies about how nice it could end up being.”
So what of their own aged care plans? Murray is a co-founder of the GroundSwell Project, a not-for-profit intent on improving death literacy, bringing in the arts as a vehicle for sparking conversations, but admits she’s neglected her death admin. Since she “forgot” to have children, she been looking at collective models of later living arrangements: women’s households with shared tool sheds and other resources. “We talk about it all the time. I don’t know how good we’ll be at actually doing it, but the idea of being close to a small community that looks out for each other, that’s my fantasy.”
Carlin is repelled by the capitalist promise of an atomised life in luxury gated retirement villages, hoping instead to embrace the Japanese idea of wabi-sabi, of beauty in imperfection and ageing.
“I have developed an interest in secular Buddhism and the idea that we love beautifully, gnarled, twisted old trees, but we don’t have the same admiration for people who might be gnarled and twisted,” he says. “I have to fight in myself those Anglo Protestant things from my cultural upbringing around work ethic and everything being rigid and regimented. That’s why I’m rejoicing in being more playful and thinking of this time of life as being time to go full on with creativity.”
Lately they’ve fed each other’s newfound obsession with fine suits. Carlin has discovered the joy of ordering bespoke suits from tailors in Ho Chi Minh City, while Murray has a favourite suit in the colours of the trans flag.
“I feel like I’ve never really known what I’m supposed to look like, and now I’ve discovered the suit and colour and fabulous eyewear,” she says. “I can definitely see myself becoming more flamboyant and more eccentric in my clothing choices. Much to my partner’s horror.”
How to Dress for Old Age by Peta Murray and David Carlin is out now through Upswell Publishing
