Australian
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Clip description

Three elderly women residents of the Kurmala Nursing Home, in Sydney, read poetry which they have written about their experiences of old age.

Curator’s notes

In this clip, Alma, Gladys and Addie, who were at the time residents of the Kurmala Nursing Home, a residential care facility in Sydney’s inner west, read poems they’ve written about ageing. The poems would have been the result of a workshop carried out with the residents by a therapist or health worker. At the time of the film, these types of workshops – using music, art, writing and other forms of cultural expression – were still quite new and considered experimental. In the following decades they proved to be very successful approaches to the management of pain, grief, dementia, etc, and today are quite commonplace in aged care facilities.

The content of the women’s poetry displays a range of responses to being old, but what the segment illustrates poignantly is that the loss of choice and control in one’s living situation is felt almost universally by the aged in our culture. In the quarter of a century that’s passed since the film was made, we’ve seen a great deal of discussion, strategy planning and policy implementation around housing and care for the aged. With the percentages of aged in the community growing exponentially, the residential services sector has expanded to become big business. There’s been an improvement in facility standards since Alma, Gladys and Addie wrote their poems, and living options for the elderly have increased. Nevertheless aged care and residential services still remain a vexed issue.