Homelessness affecting Aussie Women in our Sixties

Having to ask for somewhere to live, it's difficult indeed': Single, female, homeless. Australia's shameful crisis

Older women are the fastest-growing cohort of homeless people in Australia today. And for many, it's an unexpected life shock that tipped them into destitution.

She used to be on first-name terms with TV hosts Michael Parkinson and Mike Walsh, and with the superstars – Dusty, Elton, Billy, Twiggy and Ringo – who thought nothing of jetting halfway round the globe to be interviewed by them in front of record-breaking Aussie audiences.

It was the 1970s and ’80s, the heyday of the chat show and there was money to burn. Later, she worked with Mike Munro (This Is Your Life), Barry Humphries (Flashbacks), Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Paul West (River Cottage Australia), an off-camera genie coolly engineering the impossible to conjure, unmissable prime-time TV.

Growing up in Clifton, an affluent suburb of Bristol in south-west England, she’d dreamed of following her big sister into professional repertory theatre. In 1969, at the age of 18, she applied to Bristol Old Vic and was offered one of only 20 places. Jeremy Irons was in the year above her; she was mates with Pete Postlethwaite.

But in 1973, after just two years in rep, she decided to follow her older brother to Sydney, travelling alone for six weeks on board a ship that docked in Tenerife, Casablanca, Cape Town, Durban, Fremantle and Melbourne before finally dropping anchor one night just outside Sydney Heads.

“I remember the dawn coming up the next morning,” she says, “and it was the most beautiful May day, cool but sunny. We came round the Heads and there was the bridge in the sunlight! I’ll never forget it.”

Within a month, she was working for Channel 10 in North Ryde as a vision mixer, earning $70 a week. And when colour television came to Australia, as it did in 1975, she moved into production and trained as a director’s assistant. Her first big job was on Number 96, the incredibly popular nightly soap that chronicled the goings-on inside a four-storey apartment block in Sydney’s Paddington.

The next decades of her career, which she spent as an associate producer, were a kaleidoscopic whirl of hit game shows, Logie Awards, Australia Day concerts, talk shows and talent quests across most of the nation’s TV networks. She earned good money and had a comfortable lifestyle on Sydney’s northern beaches.

In 1974, just one year after coming to Australia, she gave birth to her first son, James. She lived with her baby’s father for four years before they separated and, much later in 1991, she gave James a little brother, Oliver. Never married, she is, she says, “terribly independent and always have been”. She remains great friends with both boys’ dads.

What she couldn’t yet know was that when she left work that day, and a career she loved, she’d never be able to return to it.

Over the years, she maintained strong ties to her parents and siblings in Oxfordshire. “I came from an incredibly warm, loving family, whom I missed greatly,” she says. “As a result, I spent all my money going backwards and forwards to the UK. My sons spent every long summer holiday there.”

In 2000, at 49, she was diagnosed with glaucoma. Both her parents had been late-life sufferers, but it had come for her early and with apparent spite. She managed to keep it stable for a decade and a half through a combination of medication and surgery – a trabeculectomy, which relieves pressure inside the eye by introducing a small hole in the sclera.

But one day in 2015, as she was midway through casting for I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here!, she became aware of a rapidly intensifying pain in her eye sockets. By the time she saw her specialist that day, head of the  glaucoma unit at Sydney’s Royal North Shore Hospital, her pressure reading was 60 (a normal reading is in the low teens). What she couldn’t yet know was that when she left work that day, and a career she loved, she’d never be able to return to it.

Today, at 68, Rhiannon* is elfin in denim dungarees and black ankle boots, a silk scarf a flourish of unstudied glamour in her pixie cut. Her voice is as rich as a Redgrave’s, her vowels as clear as a vicarage bell on a rain-crested morning in the Home Counties. Behind heavy tortoiseshell frames her eyes are an unusual colour, the dark blue of a newborn’s, the result, she tells me, of repeated surgeries. She’s now blind in her left eye, with 40 per cent vision remaining in her right, but that, too, is failing. The diagnosis is end-stage advanced glaucoma.

“I always have a glimmer of hope that maybe the sight that I have left will last me the rest of my life, but I don’t know … I have the severest case,” she says.

The past few years have been a pride-swallowing siege of repeated personal setbacks and humiliating bureaucratic defeats. Unable to work, Rhiannon applied for the means-tested sickness allowance (the highest fortnightly allocation for a single person with dependent children is currently $604), but could no longer afford her rented apartment in northern Sydney’s Manly Vale.

“I nearly bought a house back in the ’80s, but didn’t,” she says ruefully. “If I were sighted today, I’d still be working – and for as long as possible. I loved my job. And then, all of a sudden, it was stripped away from me. I had nothing. I’d spent whatever money I’d saved going backwards and forwards to the UK.”

Three years ago, when she turned 65, Rhiannon transitioned with heartbreaking inevitability from sickness allowance to the age pension, but couldn’t find anywhere affordable to live. The Department of Family and Community Services (FACS) told her she didn’t qualify for priority social housing, but offered no explanation. Devastated, she didn’t have the strength to question it; she was told the waiting list could be 10 years.

For a while, she, James, Oliver and their partners rented a large house together in Manly. It was a happy time for all of them and Oliver’s son was born there. When the owner decided to sell the house, though, the family was forced to disband. She travelled north to Mullumbimby with Oliver and his partner, but it was hot there, and she was too far away from her specialist in Crows Nest.

Feeling ever more despondent, she returned to Sydney, where friends offered her their spare room. “I hate asking for help,” she says. “It’s terribly hard for me. It’s that independent spirit that I’ve always had. I’ve never, ever asked for anything and having to ask for somewhere to live – begging, really – well, I’m a very proud person and it’s very difficult indeed.”

She remembers sitting on a bench in Manly, looking out to sea and feeling more lost and hopeless than at any other time in her life: “I just sat there thinking, ‘What’s going to become of me? What’s going to happen to me?’ The anxiety was awful.”

Rhiannon’s nadir came the day she walked into Mission Australia in Brookvale to ask for help finding somewhere to stay. “It was hard for me to go there,” she says, starting to cry. “It was a very, very tough thing – and not because I think they aren’t wonderful there – I know that they are. It was because, at that point, I felt I’d lost everything. It felt like the end of the world.”

Older women are the fastest-growing cohort of homeless people in Australia today. According to census data, the number of women aged 65 to 74 describing themselves as homeless increased by 51 per cent in the five years to 2016. But the crisis may be even deeper than these figures show, since older female homelessness often plays out invisibly in relatives’ guest rooms, or on friends’ sofas. It’s not an easy thing to admit to.

The general public is quick to apportion blame, misguidedly citing addiction, unemployment, mental health issues and domestic violence as causes, but the reality is more nuanced – and disturbingly close to home. In fact, the reasons why a single woman is likely to approach the end of her working life more financially disadvantaged than a man often have more to do with entrenched systemic failures than her personal shortcomings.

Consider, first, the pay gap, which has hovered between 14 and 19 per cent for the past two decades. Then there’s the fact that by sheer virtue of her sex, a woman is most likely to have been her family’s primary caregiver, the one who has taken time out of the workforce, often permanently stunting her career growth, to look after children and, later, care for elderly parents. According to national advocacy group Women in Super, an older woman generally retires with 47 per cent less superannuation than a man – and yet will very likely outlive him by at least five years.

Currently, more than 330,000 single women over the age of 45 are living in a state of economic distress – that is, spending more than 30 per cent of their gross income just keeping a roof over their heads – with as many as 45 per cent of them earning the minimum wage or less. Additionally, reports the Career Development Association of Australia, in 2019, 273,000 work positions were made redundant, a 45 per cent surge on the figures for 2017.

The security of a “job for life” has long gone, replaced by the burgeoning digital freelance marketplaces of the gig economy, which gives growing numbers of Baby Boomers eager to maximise late-career earnings the opportunity to bypass the ageism of conventional bosses. But the grey-haired “gigger” has to face some inhospitable truths: this new marketplace offers no minimum-wage regulation, no super and, consequently, fewer tools with which to carve out a secure financial future.

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