THE OLDER THE FIDDLE, THE SWEETER THE TUNE
- Charlie Gill
- 1 day ago
- 8 min read
Hidden in a pocket of North Fitzroy is a picturesque town-within-a-town. The residents of Rushall Park retirement village are worldly, wise and wonderful
Words by Charlie Gill
Illustrations by Marnie Florence
This feature was originally published in The Rotunda's October 2023 edition. The pdf is accessible via our home page.
The year is 1964. Pat Collins, a fresh-faced 19 year old straight out of school, is in a Catalina-seaplane, flying over the lush green mountains of southern Papua New Guinea. He is making his way to a Catholic mission on Rossel Island, the country’s easternmost point, for a working holiday.
The year is 1970. London-born Simone Putnam is somewhere amongst the raucous sea of people watching the Who play 'My Generation' at the Isle of Wight Festival. Around 700,000 other members of her generation are there to watch the likes of the Doors, Joni Mitchell, Jimi Hendrix, Miles Davis and Leonard Cohen.
The year is 1974, and Teresa Pitt has just moved into her home on Brunswick Street North, as a single mum with three kids halfway through an Arts degree. The year is 1976 and Margaret Roadknight’s version of 'Girls in Our Town' has cracked the Top 40. The year is 1979 and Lois Collinder is watching Prisoner—the first Australian series with a primarily female cast—and then the year is 1986, and Lois has a starring role in the show.
The year is 19-something (because he wasn’t date specific), and Robbie Perkins is somewhere along his colourful journey from original production designer on Neighbours, to coconut planation manager on the Seychelles Islands, to inhabitant of an Italian castle owned by a devious count. The count was once an acquaintance of Adolf Hitler’s.
“I was there for a while… then I realised he wanted me to falsify a few paintings.”
The year is 2024, and Pat, Simone, Teresa, Lois, Margaret and Robbie’s individual paths—dotted lines loop-de-looping across the globe, or even just Melbourne—are crossing at the Rushall Park retirement village in North Fitzroy: a pretty little neighbourhood nestled behind walls of pristine green hedges next to Rushall Station. It is populated with colossal peppercorn trees, vivid rosebushes and hundreds of fascinating lives.
The year was once 1869, and a titan of the fledgling Australian theatre industry, named George Coppin, wanted to provide housing for Victoria’s poor and retired thespians. The government granted the land and the Old Colonists Association was built at Rushall Park. (The association has come to encompass three other retirement villages, and it recently changed its name to the very plastic-sounding Abound Communities—to the chagrin of many residents.)
Fast-forward 150 or so years and it feels like I’m strolling a little gem of a city set inside a snow-globe: red brick Victorian cottages, dazzling flower bushes and narrow, winding roads. But I soon discover that although Rushall Park might have a doll’s house kind of charm, its characters are larger than life.
At the kiosk, I’m introduced to the Monday morning crowd as a reporter from the local paper who wants to learn more about their lives. Robbie, a fashionably-dressed new arrival with spiky grey hair and thick-framed glasses, goes straight for the narrative jugular. He launches into his story about living in a glorious castle belonging to a scheming Italian aristocrat; nearby, a man in a Carlton guernsey asks gruffly, “Who’s this new bloke?”, and his friend replies, “I don’t know, but he’s talking himself up."
Who wouldn’t, with a story like that? But soon Robbie is whisked away and the kiosk is empty besides me and Pat, a pleasant-faced man with a snow-white beard. We talk about his time in Papua New Guinea, as a “wide-eyed 19-year-old” landed in a new world with “bare-breasted ladies in grass skirts”. While there, he met Father Norbert ‘Nobby’ Earl, a World War Two hero who retrieved bodies from behind enemy lines and buried 350 men during his time in PNG.
We track Pat’s personal history, from passing through Checkpoint Charlie to throwing flags out the back of a truck for Emperor Hirohito’s trip to London, and arrive at the present day. He says he loves living at Rushall Park and that it’s easy to make friends, thanks in part to a monthly men’s only barbecue lunch.
“I found it interesting it was the married blokes who set that up.”
One such married couple (who, by the way, seem delightfully happy in each other’s company) is Geoff and Simone Putnam, two English-born music lovers. The two still often attend concerts at the Forum, and Geoff hosts a community radio show on 96.5 Inner FM. Having left London as a child, he describes coming of age in Melbourne.
“I grew up with the club scene here in the sixties, which a lot of people say was not like London. It wasn’t, but it was very good. There were a lot of terrific bands. The Beatles came out in ’64. And as soon as they went home, everybody wanted to be like the Beatles. It lit a candle.”
But as we sit in their apartment, flooded with morning light coming through big windows overlooking Rushall Station’s platform, it’s clear Geoff and Simone have a healthy relationship with nostalgia. They are thrilled to be here, at Rushall Park, right now.
“We just absolutely love it. We’ve lived in some beautiful places,” says Simone. “This is this is the place where my heart lies."
But what makes it so special?
“For some people, money is everything,” Simone explains. “They say: ‘Look at me, I’ve retired and I’ve got six houses.’ This place is not for people like that. Here, it’s what people have done. Oh my god, what they’ve done with their lives!”
It’s true. Actresses, singers, archdeacons, horticulturists, teachers, journalists, surgeons, lawyers, vicars on merchant sea ships, circus troupe members and, apparently, coconut plantation managers. Most retirement villages seem like bleak little municipalities for almost-centenarians. This place feels more like the launch party for a retrospective Time 100 list.
I knock on the door of an old cottage and meet Pam, a former teacher who once ran a business moving elderly people into retirement homes. She explains that Abound Communities have a kind of formula. They haven’t jettisoned Coppin’s legacy. Rushall Park still functions, in part, as social housing for residents with less money subsidised by residents with more.
“If people come here with money, it’s a very bad financial decision. If you’re reasonably well-heeled you pay quite a bit, and you don’t own it. You come here because you believe in its values. It’s housing for people who have nothing, and people with money contribute to how it can exist.”
Despite its socialist model, Pam doesn’t think there’s any overt political slant to Rushall Park’s residents—these days, at least. But then she starts laughing.
“There used to be a group of women who were communists and they’d meet at a spot, and people would call it ‘Red Corner’. I’m not a communist, but that just made me smile.”
Pam takes part in Rushall Park’s range of activities, and attends table tennis club each week. (It was started by one enterprising woman who was too old to drive her beloved Vespa, so sold it and bought a table.) But a new opportunity has arisen: writing for Our Platform, a magazine for Rushall Park that started last year. Pam wrote a moving piece for its inaugural issue that explored the function of love in dysfunctional families, and the false profundity of death notices.
“If my brother had had a funeral, I would have been the only one who turned up because he managed to piss off just about everybody who knew him.”
Pam’s piece provoked a reaction that surprised her.
“People who I know really well never said anything. I wondered if I’d made them feel uncomfortable. And people who I don’t know were touched. A beautiful woman came to the door, put her arms around me and said ‘Pam, I’m so sorry. I wish I’d known."
While The Rotunda may be slightly irked that the media landscape in North Fitzroy is getting crowded—and jealous of its clever name referencing Rushall Station—Our Platform is, undeniably, a truly remarkable compendium of emotional, adventurous and even outlandish experiences. I came to Rushall Park to hear its residents’ greatest stories, but they were already there in the pages of its magazine.
In Memories of Mongolia, Denise recalls travelling with herders in the Gobi Desert. In Wombat Mother, Liz writes about looking after baby wombats at home because her husband was a biologist. In On the Job, Judi describes working as a ‘simulated patient’ for a medical company training students. In A Fateful Day, Vicky explains how her father’s abandonment of her family warped her experience of love for life: “I have loved every kind of unavailable man—married, Asperger’s and therefore emotionally unavailable, gay, and someone about to go to prison.”
I visit Lois, writer of Yes, I was in the Circus!, to discuss her path from performing in the circus as a child—“there were elephants and monkeys and lions and tigers”—to becoming a main character in Prisoner: “People were following me around the supermarket.”
Elsewhere, Alan writes about visiting Rwanda during its genocide as a representative of World Vision Australia. Having witnessed horror and destruction, he wrote press releases that helped to bring the Australian public’s attention to the Rwandan situation.
“It was risky. We made sure there would always be enough money to get out,” he told The Rotunda.
Our Platform was conceived by resident Hannah Gauci. Rushall Park’s old newsletter was mostly comprised of predictable jokes and prosaic announcements, so when it fell to the stewardship of the village’s residents’ committee, Hannah felt compelled to volunteer her time.
“She had a very clear vision that she wanted it to be something more interesting than that,” says Teresa, who originally invited me to do the story on Rushall Park and helps with each issue of Our Platform.
Hannah explains: “I put my hand up, with no background to doing anything like this. But I did think in the back of my mind that there are people here who have had the most amazing lives. It would be good for everyone to hear about them.”
And now, everyone has.
“People came up to me. I walked in the morning kiosk and someone sort of stood up and said how wonderful it is that it’s been done, and everyone’s got one.”
"I’m blown away by the things that people are willing to share…I find that amazing that they trust us as a community to hold their story.”
“I just love this patchwork, and I don’t mean patchwork in a negative way, I just love this variety of different experiences that make up our little society here.”
Patchwork, I think, is exactly the right word, partly because it applies not just to Rushall Park but to community on any scale. Take a step back from the map: zoom out from North Fitzroy to all of Melbourne, and from the city to the country and from the country to the big blue earth, and it’s all just one gigantic colourful hodgepodge of unique and amazing lives, stitched together through circumstance.
If I learnt anything from talking to Rushall Park’s residents—from glancing at their figurative passports, stamped with a thousand adventures—it’s surely that. I didn’t expect my visit to a pretty little retirement village for tea and biscuits to be such a life-affirming experience. Now, after a day spent listening to and picturing the lives of others, I find myself back in mine, and the year is 2024, and I am exiting Rushall Park with a spring in my step so potent I feel I could vault its gates and erupt into the world.
