Stories
Darryl, 51, sports a pair of flamboyant specs uncannily similar to those of Dame Edna Everage, whose voice and famous line ‘hello possums’ he can mimic to a tee.
Despite having multiple sclerosis for many years, Marice is a strong-willed woman who lives an independent life. ‘People always say, “what do you have?”, and I say, “I have MS but it doesn’t have me!”’
Every morning, when the doors open at 8.30 am, 63-year-old Duc Thai arrives at the Brotherhood’s Coolibah Centre with a Chinese newspaper in his hand. His day includes breakfast and lunch in the dining hall, discussing the paper with fellow Coolibah members, and recreational activities ranging from painting to ping pong.
Hello, I’m Pat. I was married at seventeen. I had three children. I had a very violent relationship, a very violent marriage. It was very frightening and that, and you had nobody there you could turn to. Finally my husband left.
‘It’s nice living here’, says Olive, 72, of life at the Brotherhood’s Sambell Lodge aged care residence. Olive has a lively sense of humour and enjoys singing, dancing and gardening, but most of all, she says, she values the friends she’s made at Sambell Lodge.
Sandra, a 48-year-old Indigenous Australian woman, was born on Thursday Island in the Torres Strait. She can’t remember how old she was when she began living in a residential institution in north Melbourne; nor when she moved to a residential service in Carrum Downs on the Mornington Peninsula.