My portrait has been entered into the 2026 Archibald Prize. For international readers, this is a prestigious annual award any Australian artist can enter. I have no expectations, except that I’d like the portrait to do well for the artist. Let me tell you how it all started.

Melbourne artist Lorraine Meinke first approached me in 2019, when I worked in television, presenting an interview show called One Plus One. Later that year, I resigned and as I was planning to be in Melbourne to moderate an awards night, I met Lorraine for the first time and we had the first of two sittings.

For several reasons, COVID being the most memorable, Lorraine didn’t finish the portrait to her satisfaction. Maybe it was just as well because, at the time, I didn’t feel I had been as helpful as I should have.

To be honest, I wasn’t sure what Lorraine saw in me. I don’t think I’m visually interesting. I often feel self-conscious. I’ve always hated my nose. One eye is slightly bigger than the other. I wish my teeth were whiter. I’ve been told (by my daughter) that I look angry or upset when I think I have a neutral expression. When I become excited, which is frequently, my face contorts and - I’ve been told - I shout, although I call this ‘being animated’. I can be impatient. At times I am petty.

Is all of this apparent from the outside?

If my face has become my biography, I am curious about what the artist sees.

I asked Lorraine if I could meet her on the day she was due to lodge the portrait at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. On a humid, autumn day and she appeared at the foot of the gallery’s sandstone stairs, lugging a giant canvas in a wooden case. She’d brought it from Melbourne. I hadn’t seen the portrait yet, thinking that it might be nice to be surprised.

But what if I didn’t like it? I thought. Well, it’s a bit too late for that, isn’t it?

The Archibalds are a ‘thing’ in Sydney. Actually there are three awards. Apart from The Archibald Prize, there’s also the Wynne Prize for the best landscape painting of Australian scenery or figure sculpture and the Sulman Prize for best subject, genre, or mural painting.1 The winner is sometimes a famous artist, like the wonderful Wendy Sharpe or Del Kathryn Barton, but I would say it’s more about whether the portrait captures something unusual or surprising about the sitter. The highlight of the annual. event is that a select number of entries (plus finalists and winners) appear in an exhibition which is always extremely well-attended.

Lorraine said she’d be very happy if my portrait (which she calls her portrait), gets hung in the art gallery as part of that exhibition.

“The odds of succeeding are exceedingly small. It attracts hundreds of entries. I don’t know why it’s so popular. Perhaps because, if you win, you’re an instant celebrity,” said Lorraine. “Personally, this would terrify me.”

But if your portrait gets hung, she said, “you get instant street credibility… It is like finally being acknowledged as a ‘real’ artist by both the industry and your creative peers. Plus, it’s great exposure. You get to meet the other finalists at a special lunch event. I could actually meet some of my idols, like Tsering Hannaford for example, which would be amazing since her dad is the reason why I started painting portraits in the first place.”

I am curious about what Lorraine ‘saw’ when she chose me. What was she trying to paint, trying to capture?

“After the very first sitting I was intrigued by the subtleties of your face. Within what seemed like milliseconds, your face could transform and go through a full range of emotions. I don’t think that you have to say anything in order to convey how you feel; it’s written all over your face. I liked that quality about you. It’s very honest and appealing; there’s no mask present.”

So she saw that I felt like a fraud? That I was (during the second sitting) emotionally fragile? That I wanted her to hurry up?

She paused.

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“What ultimately won me over, was your eyes when you smiled; they sparkled and made your whole face come to life. They seemed to speak volumes. It is that twinkle that I sought to capture. The mischievous quality that lurks behind the professional persona.”

Lorraine said that she doesn’t normally paint people smiling, but, she thought that when I didn’t smile, I looked bored.

“I wanted to capture the very start of the expression. Definitely not a wide smile. Just the slightest smirk. In my opinion, there is something going on behind the expression. It tells you something more than a photograph alone could. Exactly what it’s saying is open for interpretation. For that reason, I feel like I have successfully managed to capture a moment in time.”

At the art gallery, I waited nervously as Lorraine produced an Allen key and opened up the crate in the packing room.

My initial thought was that it was not in colour, which surprised me. I thought it looked like a lithograph or an engraving.

“I like it,” I told Lorraine. And I really did.

Lorraine said she knew it was going to be good very early on in the 2026 attempt (she had abandoned the first attempt from 2019 as it ‘just wasn’t working’). She kindly shared one of her progress images:

Eventually, after around fifty hours of work, she had this:

I particularly like the placement of my hands. I don’t know why. I like the crows feet near my left eye and I like that Lorraine has captured the different shape and size of my eyes. I like the soft folds in the silk shirt and the pattern of the cardigan. She (Jane) is not perfect. The portrait tells a story. There’s definitely something below the surface. It is a biography, of sorts.

After salad at the cafe, before we parted company, I was interested in something Lorraine had mentioned on our walk to the packing room.

It was about knowing when to stop painting.

“I believe that old saying that ‘artwork is never finished, only abandoned’. You can always do more. It’s a question of whether doing so is going to improve the piece. It is extremely easy to keep going and essentially spoil an otherwise good piece of work by mucking around with it too much, instead of simply walking away…More recently, I have been actively trying to let go of my perfectionism and learn to embrace a looser, less rigid, style to my work. I believe adopting this approach will ultimately set me free.”

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Friends, wishing you a Happy Easter on Sunday and Happy Orthodox Easter next Sunday.

My ABC Long Read item on dementia has been published which I’m sharing with you. However I wanted to write a supporting piece with acknowledgements and further reading. This was a major undertaking (almost a year of research) and so much of what I read and learned did not make it into the finished work.

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What was the article about?

It was about dementia obviously. I used my mother’s case as an example to bookend the article, but hopefully it didn’t dominate it. For anyone who currently has or has had loved-ones with cognitive decline, I’m sure you’ve gone through your own thought process about whether some behaviour you’ve seen or heard is normal or whether it demarcates a new stage in the progression of dementia.

I also wanted to include a historical perspective on dementia so I researched the story of Dr Alois Alzheimer and the discovery - in the 1990’s - of his case notes from 1906. This was beautifully explained at length in the Lancet (Vol 349, May 24 1997).

I spent hours in the archives searching for the many ways that dementia and senile dementia - as it used to be called - were described in historic newspapers. In fact, back then, they didn’t really discuss the phenomenon, although the prevalence of dementia more than a century ago was obvious. In Trove, I found a remarkable feature in the Illustrated Sydney News from 1 May 1890 about the occupants of the Melbourne Benevolent Asylum including Susan Brandon, a woman claiming to be 102.

What are some good resources I found?

I took a photo of a portion of my reading list 👇.

Now I want to talk about someone who didn’t make it into the article, but who had a big impact on me. Wendy Mitchell, a British woman who lived with early onset Alzheimer’s disease and who died in 2024, wrote three books which I bought after following her blog - Which Me Am I Today - for several years.

Wendy’s books brilliantly described how she dealt with the changes affecting her brain (like when she discovered she could no longer turn right while riding her bicycle). She wrote her books in collaboration with journalist Anna Wharton who helped her turn thoughts into incisive prose that really moved the story along. Anna also wrote a wonderful obituary about Wendy. And if you want something else powerful (and confronting), do read Wendy’s final blog post here.

Jonathan Franzen’s New Yorker piece from 2001 - My Father’s Brain - was hugely inspiring. In the closing paragraphs he reproduces a letter his father wrote just weeks before his final breakdown. The letter - addressed to Franzen’s nephew -was surprisingly coherent, at a time when Franzen’s father, Earl, was not. I’ve often thought about this letter as I wonder how much of someone’s cognitive decline we actually see and what is actually going on for them.

Through Franzen, I found David Shenk’s excellent book, The Forgetting and of course that lead to his even more excellent podcast of the same name with Greg O’Brien.

I have also subscribed to Deborah Kan’s newsletter Being Patient for many years.

Where to get help

Once I started looking for expertise on dementia, the question soon became, why isn’t it all in one place and how do other people find help when they need it? In Australia, the best general information is on the Dementia Australia website but it took me a while to find their Dementia Guide which, if you live in Australia, they will post to you for free.

As I said in my article, there is still much ignorance about what constitutes dementia and there are many people out there who have not been diagnosed, which means they may not have support.

There’s an excellent resource called Forward with Dementia which is an initiative by six countries (including Australia, Canada and Britain) and provides some great printable checklists, webinars and many other resources which I highly recommend.

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Finally, I interviewed two amazing people for my piece who were voluntary advocates for Dementia Australia, but I was never aware that they were advocating for anything. They shared their good days and bad, what works, what doesn’t work, what they fear and what they love. What they don’t want to lose.

Jessica Harris is caregiver to her husband Richard of fifty years!

And Peter Duclos makes a mean Flat White! Peter has younger onset Alzheimer’s but is making the most of life. He made me realise that while he has a diagnosis, he is not his diagnosis and every day is there to be seized.

So if you’d like to read Will I Get Dementia do click on the link. As always I’m happy to hear your stories and comments below.

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Hello friends,

We are nearly at the end of the year if you can believe it.

I’ve spoken before about the annual stock-take that I do in December and January to work out whether my present course needs adjusting. It’s the main journalling event of my year. Most years, I don’t even journal. I just put it into dot-points in my Notes app. I love looking back at my annual stock-takes. With the personal stock-take I’ve been doing for a decade now, I look at my life broadly or holistically (work, family life, health) but for sharing, I produced two versions for you to print at home and if you like, give away as a card.

You could put the cards into colourful envelopes at a family gathering or a work/community function.

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Feel free to download them. Keep reading for printing instructions. And perhaps you’d consider subscribing while you are at it?

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Here’s the work-life version:

And Forget-Me-Not is for family and friends:

Print-at-home Instructions:

A4 paper

Page orientation: portrait

Double-sided: (on SHORT EDGE)

Scale to fit: (print entire image) 97%

Layout: 2 pages per sheet

B&W is fine

Print and fold into half and half again

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Note about question language:

When I asked my dad to look over some of the questions given he has 96 years of perspective (was a journalist, author and newspaper editor and still writes every week), he took out words like ‘happy’, when, for example, I had asked “What made you happy?” He preferred “What were your ‘highs and lows?”

I have opted to use ‘happy’ based on Brené Brown’s definition from Atlas of the Heart:

But I’ve also used ‘content’ as in ‘contentment’ because some people feel happy is either over-used or incorrectly-used. Brené defines contentment as:

Thanks:

Thanks to for the card design inspiration.

Thanks Dad, for help with the wording.

Thanks for the original idea from our interview and his book Happiness By Design

Speaking of Pete Billingham, I enjoyed our chat on the art of the eulogy this week in Forget Me Not, my monthly series on memorialising hosted by . If you missed the conversation, you can listen again right here:

If you missed the conversation, you can catch it again here:

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Thanks so much and see you next week!

I recently heard a talk on ageing where the researcher said we “age heterogeneously”, meaning each of us has a different experience of ageing. This got me thinking about an impressive and lovely woman I worked with this year during the Australian tour of Lost in Shanghai. Her name is Jen Jackson and she’s a stage manager for theatre.

Stage management is about juggling lots of different balls. It’s a fabulous world involving all varieties of humans and the methodical transformation of a performance venue. The job of stage manager is often physically taxing and the hours are long. Some of the older theatres have a lot of stairs and mysterious corridors! I discovered during rehearsals that our stage manager, Jen, sometimes used a cane when she walked. It turned out that she was often in a lot of pain. As we travelled across the country I learned that Jen had a unique perspective on ageing as a result of a rare disorder. She is twenty-nine.

Jen: When I first started walking, I had a strange gait. I was very pigeon-toed and my legs are different lengths. I had a lot of pain at night. Mum tried to take me to different family doctors and specialists to see if they could find out what was going on. But for years the medical profession told her there was nothing wrong with me. The doctors wouldn't listen to her, telling her she was a neurotic mother who just wanted her kid to win a race. She was dismissed for such a long time.

It wasn't until I was about ten years old that there was a lucky coincidence; our family doctor retired. I went for a checkup with a new doctor and as soon as I walked into the room, he said “Why is she walking like that?” And that's where it all started.

What were you diagnosed with?

Jen: The underlying condition is a connective tissue disorder called Multiple Epiphyseal Dysplasia. It affects your growth and your bones. I also have osteoporosis and arthritis. I share a lot of symptoms with something called Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome where I have hyper-mobility in my joints [As a demonstration, Jen bends her fingers back further than mine would go, making me squeal]

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Jen, what was it like doing sport at school?

Jen: I was never a sporty child. I always lost races. And I was very afraid of balls coming towards me. I grew up in the Blue Mountains outside Sydney and spent a lot of my childhood going to the children’s hospital. I got treatment for bone density every three months. I’d be in hospital and get an intravenous drip for a couple of hours. And there were lots of scans and blood tests and things like that.

So what did you tell your friends about your condition?

Jen: I was in Year Five or Year Six at the time (ages nine to eleven). The doctors would say, “You have to limit your movement. You shouldn't do any high-impact sports and you have to be careful when you're playing because your bones are weaker”. And I remember saying to my friends at the time, that I couldn’t play some things anymore. It was hard for them to understand because it wasn’t like something suddenly happened to me. It was just the way my body was.

And what about the pain at that stage?

Jen: Sometimes it would be hard for me to sleep at night. I would tell Mum that my legs really hurt which was how she knew something was wrong. It was a bit unusual for a kid to be in that much pain. As I got older, the pain got worse because there was more wear and tear on my joints, especially in my hips.

So how did it progress through high school?

Jen: I used a mobility scooter when I was in high school because it was quite a big campus. And then I also started using a cane when I was in my final years at high school. At that point, I had very limited mobility and I couldn't walk by myself.

So my gap year after high school before I went to university was spent getting both my hips replaced. They were done separately. I got one done around March and then the other one was around October that year.

What difference did the hip replacements make?

Jen: Oh a huge, huge difference. It was a massive improvement in my quality of life. My condition affects my whole body. So all of my joints are affected and I still have quite a lot of pain. Right now, my knees are pretty bad. My ankles, my back and my neck have a lot of issues as well, but the hips were by far the worst. Getting those replacements at the age of eighteen gave me back a pretty extraordinary amount of mobility.

When you started university [note: after university Jen went to the prestigious drama school NIDA) to major in theatre studies, did you worry your condition was going to limit your dream of working in theatre?

Jen: I held back from some things things. I realised that I would need to manage everything carefully. So, I’d say, if I do this thing, that means I'm going to need a few days where I don't do anything because I'll need time to recover. But I still did most of the things I wanted to do and I still had a busy social life. I was very active and did the Student Theatre Society at the University of New South Wales. I actually did a lot of shows with them. Sometimes this just involved pushing through a lot of pain. It was very physical. Chronic fatigue comes with it and there’s a lot of brain fog as well. But I really wanted to do it.

Now that I’m working in the theatre world, I'm a freelancer so I still have to manage how I work. Sometimes I'll turn a job down because I can't do some things. I can't do heavy lifting and things like that.

So you’re twenty-nine. Do you think about the future, Jen?

Jen: I try not to think too hard about the future but in reality, since a pretty young age, I have always had this thing at the back of my mind. What's life going to be like, in like ten years or twenty years? When you are dealing with all of these medical issues, that’s how the doctors talk too. I have to manage things now, so that I'm in a better position in the future. So, I actually knew years before that I would get those hip surgeries in my gap year. It had been discussed. I’ve had a long time to adjust to all these thoughts.

What scares you the most?

Jen: I think the scariest thing is thinking about how bad it might get when I'm older. I always say, I have the joints and the body of an older person. And it's scary to think about that. If I'm in this much pain now, how bad is it going to be in twenty years time, and how am I gonna cope with that? And am I going to have even less mobility later? How restricted is my life going to be when I'm older? Because, in a way all my joints are already pretty old.

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Have you met a lot of older people, Jen?

Jen: When I got my surgeries, I was put in a ward with older people who were having the same thing done to them! So we're all in a similar situation. It was strange being the youngest person there by a significant amount. As part of my treatment, I used to do hydrotherapy when I was in high school. And especially because I grew up in the mountains which already had an older population too. There were no young people doing hydrotherapy 99% of the time! I got a lot of comments from people, often assuming that I'd injured myself because I walked with a cane.

Jane: What sort of comments did you get from people?

Sometimes randomly, somebody will come up to me and say, “I'll pray for you” or “Do you want me to pray for you?” And I'm like, “No, thank you.” I'm not a religious person myself. I think these people probably mean well, and they're obviously just trying to express something, but I don't like the implication that there's something wrong with me or I deserve pity or something like that.

Then there's the classic situation of getting into an Uber and the Uber driver says “What happened to your leg?” and I would just say “I was born this way”. But yeah, you get a lot of comments of just people being surprised and people saying I’m very young to have had hip replacements. I just laugh it off, because I know people mean well. It’s surprising for most people that this can happen to a younger person but for me, that's just always been my life. It's a huge adjustment to realise that your body is no longer functioning in the way that it used to or the way you expect it to.

Hello dear readers,

I’ve been looking through the archives to find out how our ancestors handled grief, wondering if it was more openly expressed than it is today. And then one thing led to another so this is a post about grief as the second anniversary of my Mum’s death approaches. I met a friend recently who told me that though forty-six years has passed since her mother’s death, the grief she feels is still raw. This came up in a conversation as I reflected on my own experience of grief since losing my mother two years ago and thinking about what has changed. A beautiful funeral I attended this week has also added to this pot pourri of thoughts on the subject.

In 2023 (when my grief was one) I described it as something you grow around. Now I can see that the shape of grief keeps changing. Threads are being spun like a yarn.

Here’s what I notice:

• I still feel anger, specifically when I recall Mum’s attending physician (not someone we had chosen) and the lack of empathy she showed to my family.

• When reminded that my mother is gone it no longer shocks me.

• I’m grateful I’ve had the opportunity to spend ‘time’ with my mother in the years since her death by writing and performing in a theatre production about her.

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A month after Mum’s death, my family and I went to Scotland and stood on a dam overlooking a river where the salmon come home to spawn by cleverly hopping up a ‘ladder.’ As we stood there taking in the scene, my daughter exclaimed, “It’s hard to believe Grandma’s gone, and we are standing right here, enjoying this.”

At first I couldn’t speak. Every mention of Mum’s death felt like being reminded of an injustice. But I knew exactly what my daughter meant. “It’s ok,” I told her. “We can miss Grandma wherever we are. We carry her with us in our hearts wherever we go.” I find I often think of my Mum in mindful moments of noticing beauty; looking up to see clouds in a new pattern, parting gently like a mouth; lips open before a gentle kiss.

I discovered this passage recently:

“Our parents cast long shadows over our lives. When we grow up we imagine that we can walk into the sun, free of them. We don’t realise until it’s too late that we have no choice in the matter, they’re always ahead of us. We carry them within us all our lives, in the shape of our faces, the way we walk, the sound of our voice, our skin, our hair, our hands, our heart. We try all our lives to separate ourselves from them and only when they are dead do we find we are indivisible.

We grow to expect that our parents, like the weather, will always be with us. Then they go, leaving a mark like a handprint on glass or a soft kiss on a rainy day, and with their deaths we are no longer children”. - British Theatre director Richard Eyre

I think it’s important to notice those handprints and soft kisses wherever possible and not to push them into the recesses, particularly if we are busy. Working with family stories - much more a part of my life than they used to be while Mum was alive - makes me feel close to her. Though there was so much I didn’t ask her (during the years when she was lucid) I often find myself in silent conversation with her, asking “Is that what happened Mum? Is that the reason you did that?” At other times I marvel at her resolve and thank the kindness of long-gone relatives or schoolfriends on discovering obstacles that made her life difficult such as trying to obtain a passport without identity documents.

My two year old grief makes me want to reach out to other people who’ve lost loved ones. I’ve found that there are people who are open to this and people who are not. I recently shared a conversation with a friend who lost her mother many years ago. I knew her story because she wrote a wonderful food memoir and I interviewed her about her book for a book festival. Our conversation took place against the backdrop of an artist (chef) creating delectable artworks (a sushi banquet). It was impossible to find the laughter, tears and morsels remotely sad or ‘depressing’ as many people describe conversations about bereavement, grief or loss. It was a deeply satisfying conversation in a time when so many conversations are mere intersecting monologues as philosopher John O’Donohue suggests.

When had you last a great conversation, in which you overheard yourself saying things that you never knew you knew, that you heard yourself receiving from somebody words that absolutely found places within you that you’d thought you had lost, and a sense of an event of a conversation that brought the two of you onto a different plane, and then a conversation that continued to sing in your mind for weeks afterwards? - John O’Donohue, On Being

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Last week I attended the funeral of an actor. I didn’t know him well, but I’d interviewed him some years ago and I felt a warm connection. After a rare illness, he spent the last eighteen years in a wheelchair. Eventually, and not without struggle, his eulogists told his friends, he came to accept his ‘new’ body. During the service, there was Shakespeare, prayer, a bit of ritual and wonderful stories. There was such an atmosphere of warmth, sadness and love that by the time I left the church I felt so, ‘held’.

Grief, it seems, grows more intricate with each passing year.

This time last year, I wrote a couple of articles for The Guardian after an existential alarm. It was triggered by the death of my mother and it made me realise I probably had only thirteen million minutes left to live. I grappled with how to describe someone at sixty: a new member of the ‘senior citizen’ cohort. It seemed crazy that seniors of all ages were stuck together in the same basket, so I invented a category for younger olders; I called them Juvenile Geriatrics. I liked the title so much I christened my newsletter with it and fashioned a logo from a drawing I did when I was five years old.

Since The Guardian series, I’ve been keen to explore the world of ageing as I experience it around me. But I’ve hit a stumbling block. It’s hard to be an age enthusiast. How can one be enthusiastic about ageing when ageism is so, acceptable? I am not going to present a well-researched rave right at this moment as I have a newsletter to finish but my researched rave is not far off.

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If I gave the impression that the problem is younger people being ageist you’d be mistaken. I’m talking about geriatrics of all categories, juvenile, mature and senior saying things like:

• We have to accept the inevitable (and do nothing)

• Let nature take its course

• Don’t judge me, remember my age

• I have to take things a bit slower

• I wish I could do that (learn new things)

Technology is one example of how we geriatrics can put ourselves down because there’s a tendency to neglect, rather than persist things that we suck at. As you know, I am passionate about family history. After signing up to Projectkin and meeting , I felt inspired to make an effort to solve some of my own tech problems. I have to ask lots of questions and I swear at Wordpress a lot. While I’m not ready to accept an honorary doctorate in software engineering I’m confident the offer is not far off.👩‍🎓

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Technology is just one example of limiting beliefs and put-downs we older humans excel at.

When I left a long career to pursue cherished projects, I said I wanted to live a more ‘deliberate’ life. It was the best word I could come up with at the time but I’ve come to realise that ‘deliberate’ doesn’t cut it.

Some of the downsides of ageing are just heart-breaking as we learned this week after the sentencing of Canberra’s oldest murderer. And yet while ageing is rarely a trending discussion, we do need to talk about the challenges of longer lives lived in poorer health.

A researcher told me last year it was problematic to assign particular adjectives like ‘healthy’ or ‘productive’ to the word ageing because to age well is a privilege in societies like ours.

“There's nothing wrong with trying to be healthy and getting all the information in order to age in the best way, but one of the issues around that is it's not equitable. (To age well) you have to be able to afford good food, the capacity to get out there, live somewhere where you walk in lovely green places. So many people just don't have access to these things.”

The researcher is right. Healthy/productive/positive ageing is a privilege.

But I am talking about mindset not money; the thought process that goes on behind our decisions. We can stick with limiting beliefs about what geriatrics - juvenile or otherwise - are incapable of, or make vigorous curiosity a lifelong friend.

Friends, what’s your ageing mindset?

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Speaking of curiosity, if you’re in an AU-friendly time zone, I’d love you to sign up for my three family stories workshops taking place in May and June. Thanks so much for reading and hope to see you soon.

Family Story Workshops

Like a tailor crafting a new coat, I’ve been putting the pieces together in my new direction as a juvenile geriatric.

What does ‘putting the pieces together’ mean, practically? Well, over the past two months I’ve focused on my physical fitness roadmap for the future. I decided to start teacher training in Pilates after a year of attending regular reformer Pilates classes.

I love this form of exercise. It involves strength (weight-bearing), cardio fitness, core strength and pelvic and spinal stability which is at the heart of how we move. Some of you may also be familiar with mat Pilates, which I will be studying in the second half of the year. 

When I embarked on this route I thought - if nothing else - the teaching course would make me a better Pilates practitioner. I also wanted to learn to listen to my body and honestly face my weaknesses and strengths. If you’ve ever had a lower back injury, or your back just ‘went’ after you made a strange move, you may also be interested in learning more about core strength (I’ll explain in a future post).

I have found a joyful parallel with my current work. Pilates training is the exercise equivalent of my recent book Rebel Talk, in which I encourage readers to develop self-awareness of their own conversation styles and to challenge themselves in order to have richer conversations. (Plug alert: if you’d like to buy signed copies from me with Australian postage included, they are available here)

In my fitness universe (which sits happily beside writing and performing) I find myself beginning again.

I had a thirty-five year career in journalism. I mastered many skills from writing, interviewing, living in warzones, even applying make-up! It feels strange to begin again. I am in this curious space called uncertainty. Will I be terrible at this? Can I handle being judged and corrected? Will I ever learn anatomy? Will I pass the exams? Will I ever teach? Who will employ me?

A line in Maggie Kirkman’s thoughtful book Time of Our Lives - Celebrating Older Women, suddenly caught my attention : 

“We need to continue to develop skills, connections and means of communicating with people and with the world at large, and we need to do so before we become resistant to learning new things.”

Resistant to learning new things? How and when does this happen?

I reached out to Maggie.

“(In older people) I think there is often a fear of failure after a lifetime of feeling accomplished with familiar tasks and ideas. Feeling like a duffer for making mistakes, especially if there is an audience of younger people rolling their eyes… it can take an effort of will to launch into the unknown. There’s this expectation that age = decline and incapacity. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.” - Maggie Kirkman

Together, let’s stop giving such expectations fuel.

Do you need a nudge to launch into the unknown?

I know I do. It can be daunting out there on the launchpad, against the shuddering scaffolding, the fear we might embarrass ourselves or the notion we might fail. But the launchpad is also exhilarating. 

I want to age with a flexible mindset, a strong body and great posture. What are your goals? Shall we compare launchpads?

What do you think happens when we die is a great question. I was asked this recently during an interview with Angela Catterns and Ian Rogerson in the Suddenly Senior podcast (you can listen here or wherever you get your favourite podcasts).

I felt like I blew it. I felt unprepared.

Ian asked: ‘what is your attitude towards where we’re going next?’

I wanted to be certain he didn’t mean where was I heading next in my career, or something like that. So to clarify he said ‘after we’re gathered.’

After we’re gathered? I sounded surprised. I thought we were going to talk about becoming old, not becoming earth-dust. I said that while I was not a believer although I have always been a seeker.

We chatted about how it was good to see life as a finite resource.

And then I thought about all the hours I’d spent wrestling with faith (I will definitely do another post on this soon). Of course, the truth is that whatever we think happens to us after we die, nobody’s sent back a peer-reviewed report. Or video. It is a mystery.

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When actor Keanu Reeves was asked this question by Stephen Colbert in 2019, Reeves replied,

"I know that the ones who love us will miss us."

I wish I had channelled my inner Keanu and come up with a better answer. While I’m at it, what’s the life question you’d like to answer? Share it with us!

By the way, if you live within reach of the NSW Central Coast, I’ll be moderating a discussion on ageing at Words on the Waves Writers Festival on Sunday 4th June 2023

“It’s never too late to try again” Alizé Cornet (tennis player on reaching her first grand slam quarter final)

“I haven’t resigned myself yet.” Lew Hollander (93 year old ironman)

Your favourite quote/saying/aphorism here: _____________

Hello Friends,

Thirteen million minutes is roughly twenty-five years. Does it sound like a lot? It doesn’t to me. I came up with the idea of The Juvenile Geriatric, after an ‘alarm’ sounded one night after the death of my beloved Mum.

Having watched my parents age over the last decade (Hi Dad xxx), and realising that, I too, am getting older, I wanted to start a conversation about how we navigate this transition to older life. I worry about a lack of compassion towards older people. I worry that we silo them once they are deemed ‘post-productive’ and sometimes we abandon them. And I worry that older peopler are increasingly devalued in the workplace. Which is crazy when they contribute bucketloads.

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In the past few years I’ve had dealings with MyAgedCare, aged-care homes, doctors, geriatricians, ageing researchers, physiotherapists and lots of older Australians. I have tons of questions and I’ve found a handful of answers so far. I want to share what I’ve learned in The Juvenile Geriatric which I’m launching today.

As a proud ‘Slashie’ (someone with multiple descriptors in their job-description, otherwise known as a portfolio career) I’ll post about ageing, conversations, family stories, food and travel as well as updates about my theatre show Lost in Shanghai.

I look forward to hearing from you, whether it’s your own experiences, recommendations or subjects you want me to explore. In the meantime, you may be interested in my latest piece for Guardian Australia which has just been published.

And if you didn’t catch the first part of The Guardian series, here you go.

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Thank-you so much for reading.

Yours truly, Jane.

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