The Call to Eldership in the Blue Mountains

In the Blue Mountains, many of us are entering a new season of life. A time when work and family no longer define our days, yet the call to meaning remains strong. This essay is an invitation to see ageing as a chance to embrace eldership in the truest sense: drawing on the eldership tradition of the ancient Anglo-European village culture of many of our ancestors (over 90 percent of people living in the Blue Mountains are of this cultural heritage), but also from Indigenous cultures, local experience, and the Danish thinker Tor Nørretranders, with his call for an Eldership Revolution.

What if retirement would be the beginning of an Eldership Revolution as a way to give back, guide others, and deepen our belonging to this beautiful place we call home? Our ability to leave behind life-affirming legacies for those to come.

Regen Sydney proposes that in order to make such a shift in thinking and action, we can employ the Power Shift model, which for the Eldership Revolution takes us across new narratives and values about retirement (landscape), and with a focus on the Superannuation System, leading to deep roots system change and intergenerational healing.

In the Blue Mountains we all live on the ancestral Country of the Darug and Gundungurra people, who have kept alive its spiritual potency through 65,000 + years of their cultural practices, which hold many lessons of spiritual resilience and care for Country. While First Nations peoples in Australia use the English language word ‘Elders’ to refer to the continuing role of acknowledged Cultural Custodians in their own language groups across Australia, in the Anglo-European village tradition, eldership was more broadly linked to the responsibilities of people in the Third Age of their lives.

This included providing wise guidance to the following generations, especially the grandchildren. Such guidance was based on lessons embedded in deep cultural values based on principles of community resilience and sustainable care of the natural world, the very sources of life.

Demography of the Blue Mountains—2021 Census Results

Our Blue Mountains human population of 28,769 (projected to 30,336 by 2025) is spread across three distinct phases.  As the human lifespan now sees many of us living well into our 80s and 90s, we are increasingly recognising that what was once thought of as a brief phase of retirement is now a significant phase in our lifecycle.

• Childhood & Adolescence 0—19 years—In the first 20 years of childhood and adolescence, we acquire the skills and attitudes required of successful adulthood—23 percent of our population
• Adulthood 20—64 years—which sets us up for the next 40 to 50 years of parenthood, economic productivity and community building—54 percent of our population

• Third Age/Retirement 65—85 years and over—the call to Eldership—23 percent of our population

The percentage of those aged over 65 years is likely to have further increased since 2021 due to strong retirement migration from Sydney. We of the Third Age are an important group of citizens. What then is our role?

Sadly too often, too many of us are seen as reactionary and selfish: not willing to step up to issues of intergenerational wealth inequality and the state of our planet. However, in recognition of the decisions we made and its impacts on the world, how can we help meet its challenges—instead of wishful thinking about a return to the past?

What could be the purpose and meaning of our lives in this remaining 20 to 30 years, if not the call to Eldership?

Beyond Retirement?

Currently we are urged to think of retirement as years of hard-earned leisure and pleasure, having secured sufficient retirement funds via superannuation to live a comfortable life, and to be well looked after in retirement villages and nursing homes, should we require such support in our final declining years. Or, if we are poor, and struggling to meet rising costs, we are urged to continue working in whatever way we can. Even as we are told the AI revolution will wipe out many types of jobs.

The recent Citro’s report spells out the preoccupations of the retirement scenario: retirement lifestyle, leverage home ownership equity in the city, relocation to desirable regions.

Retirement is popularly envisaged as time to play golf, enjoy card games with friends, join a book club, have time for our grandchildren, and most importantly be able to tick off against our bucket list all those things we put aside. Ocean cruises to distant and exotic locations such as Antarctica or the Arctic Circle, or places made famous by TV series—now threatened by the plague of overtourism.

For those of us of Anglo-European heritage, we look to the historic sites of our cultural heritage. For those of us from other heritages (rare in the Blue Mountains)—the Middle East, Asia, Africa and the Pacific—the chance to catch up with distant relatives and introduce our children born and raised in Australia to their own cultural heritage.

However, for we who have enjoyed the privileges of the post WWII boom years in Australia—full employment, high levels of home ownership, university education, new labour saving technologies, and stable democratic government, we need to utilise these resources to help embed a new ethos of service to community, as one that is inclusive of all life on Earth as we meet the challenges of a quantum shift, which these benefits we enjoyed have caused to life on Planet Earth, and the dark times ahead.

The Quantum Shift

As mapped out in the Government’s 2025 National Climate Risk Assessment Report, global warming of probably 2 degrees Celsius in our grandchildren’s lifetime will have dramatic impacts on patterns of human settlement, food supply, marine life, biodiversity, water resources and geo-political risks.

Other challenges also face us: growing and politically charged wealth inequality, especially in access to affordable housing; the distortions of our internet-based, media intensive information ecosystem; the new challenges of AI and the power and reach of the Tech Lords of platform capitalism; and seismic changes in the geo-politics of international relations. All these are currently undermining traditional institutions of democratic governance across the world.

What then is the nature of this Eldership mission that calls for our experience and skills in these final years, the Third Age of our lifecycle? What are the new skills and attitudes that we must learn? How do we strengthen our capacity for compassion and wisdom?

The Wisdom of the Mountains

All cultures have revered their mountains as places of pilgrimage, places where we can gain perspective, places of deep reflection, places of feeling humility. Places where we can experience how we are part of all of creation and cared for and guided by the deep ecological laws of Country and the ancestors; where we can deeply experience in our bones our sense of interbeing with all of creation as one of kinship; that our lives have intrinsic value in whatever form it has taken. That our trials and tribulations through childhood and adulthood have given us the wisdom of resilience and the insight that life is a mystery to be lived, not a problem to be solved and conquered.

The Blue Mountains is such a place—a vast plateau of several mountain peaks, dissected by plunging ravines into deep valleys traversed by the rivers that feed downstream to the world of the city of Sydney with its dense population of commerce and industry. As all communities have known throughout time, it is the mission of those of us who live upstream to care that the waters that flow downstream are pure and clear. This adage equally applies to our mission of Eldership and the many ‘waters’ of resilient community living in service to all of life on Earth.

To meet the needs of people in retirement, we have seen the establishment of the University of the Third Age, drawing on volunteer sharing of knowledge by retired professionals and academics. But unfortunately, universities and modern culture in general, have no clear educational pathway for the sort of wisdom that is required to underpin ideas of Eldership. Thus, we cannot merely look to the University of the Third Age for such guidance.

When I have asked people what are the qualities they look for in someone they regard as wise, they invariably mention this includes:

• compassion, especially for those in trouble or less fortunate than themselves
• a generosity of spirit that sees the good in others
• not rushing to judgement about things and circumstances
• being open-minded and tolerant of people who are different to you
• having insight and being able to take a wider perspective on issues and not just follow gossip
• having a strong commitment to community wellbeing and the ongoing sustainability of nature.

Unfortunately, in today’s social media ecosystem, too easily people’s anxieties and worries about the world can lead them down rabbit holes of negative gossip and exaggerated claims about ‘others’ who can be stigmatised as threatening to values and attitudes that one holds dear.

Some years ago, when I was working with Uncle Bob Randall, a Yankunytjatjara man of the Central Desert, I asked him who determines who is an Elder in his Aboriginal culture. Uncle Bob, a survivor of the Stolen Generation, went on to become an important cultural translator for non-Indigenous people working with Central Desert communities. He explained that one does not become an Elder just by becoming old. Rather one is recognised by one’s community as an Elder, through the way one has lived their lives in service to the community and in their respect for culture and its obligations in caring for Country—to be authentic cultural custodians anchored in ancestral lore.

Eldership in the Third Age

The Danish author, Tor Nørretranders’ call for an Eldership Revolution acknowledges both the skills and experience we have to offer, and our culpability in the many challenges we are leaving behind us. He is asking us to step up and use the leisure of our retirement and accumulated knowledge and experience to help weave a new story of community-based enlivened living: the story of Eldership in Service to Life on Earth, as the true mission of this Third Age.

Tor suggests that because we Seniors of the Third Age carry memories of life before globalisation, of greater household and community self-sufficiency, less consumer goods and choices, and less exposure with our current media saturated way of living, we can help our communities find a pathway back to a more environmentally sustainable, less commodified, and community-focused way of living, away from globalised screen-mediated interest groups.

A way of turning our attention back towards the place where we actually live—right here, in the network of small villages who make up the City of Blue Mountains, embedded in the intricate ecologies of the natural world across the Blue Mountains National Park, and beyond across the whole of the Blue Mountains World Heritage Area. An area including 6 national parks just a few hours away from the heart of Sydney, a city of 5 million people, crowded together, beset with traffic congestion and all the stresses of city life.

It is in this place, the Blue Mountains where we live, and not in the world of our screen-mediated news and entertainment that we can discover the life-sustaining and nurturing energy of feelings of resonance—our inner experience of vibrating with the world around us in all its diversity and glory. The blue haze of our eucalyptus forests, the blossoming trees and flowers of spring and the insects who come to feed, the crisp air of winter days and nights, the golden reds of autumn leaves, the birds who flit from tree to tree and bless us at dawn with their song, and all those wonderful secretive nocturnal animals, so unique to Australia.

Rites of Passage to Eldership

We recognise some of this idea of ‘service to community’ in the way Australia determines its annual Australian of the Year awards. In this way we can recognise that a rite of passage to Eldership would involve the way we actively help younger generations and seek to create life-affirming legacies for future generations.

That it would also involve developing hindsight, insight and foresight, so that we can become useful guides to help younger generations find their own direction, according to the demands of their stages in the lifecycle.

That we practice the intention and skills of meeting people where they are at, and that we seek guidance and advice from others who have met different life challenges. Above all, given the experience and expertise we might have acquired during our adulthood, we specifically avoid the trap of falling into ‘Expert Mind’, the assumption that we might know best.

Life has taught us the danger of hubris and the power of an open mind; one that is always open to learning more, that is at home with uncertainty and recognises that the nature of life is impermanence and change, not permanence and certainty. Eldership recognises the truth of life and death as the very cycle of the created world in which we are embedded.

The resilience of Eldership comes from the inner spiritual strength of being at home within oneself, which allows one to flow with life’s eddies and turbulence, nurtured by whatever spiritual teachings have supported you in life, and where our individuality is enhanced by its sense of deep reciprocal connection to others.

Spiritual resilience has many voices. Australia, as a multicultural society, is a land of many spiritual faith traditions, and where nearly 50 percent of the population do not subscribe to the belief systems of any of the organised religions.

And this is true of our Blue Mountains community where in the 2021 census, 46.5 percent belonged to this latter category, while 30.5 percent were of either the Catholic or Anglican Christian faith. Within the mountains community there are also small groups that follow the teachings of the Buddhist tradition, the Brahma Kumara, and small groups of other Protestant Christian denominations, many of whom are active in the inclusive Blue Mountains Interfaith Group, as shown in their logo above.

We have learned that resilience does not come from clinging to set rules and certainties whose time has passed, or the hubris of thinking such truth is a matter of doctrine, rather than lived behaviour. Human culture is an evolving expression of both continuity and change in constant interplay with the world around us, and we have learned to live in tune with this.

Above all Eldership is about accepting responsibility and accountability for the way we have lived our lives, and how, in a relational world, we only thrive with others, not in spite of them. Their suffering is our suffering. Their delight and happiness are our delight. Their sadness is our sadness. All of these feelings are part of the ebb and flow of life in all its messiness and confusion.

We need not fetishise youth and its physical beauty, nor the innocence of childhood. Instead, we embrace the gift of wisdom that ageing and a life well-lived can bring to us, along with the opportunity to give back in a spirit of generosity and wisdom. As guardians of the upstream, whether of water as the nectar of bodily life, or wisdom as the nectar of spiritual life, our final years become a spiritually nurturing journey of well-earned resilience, humility and deep engagement with life, through our rite of passage into Eldership.

An Eldership Exercise

Take a break. Go for a walk. As you walk toward your destination, imagine you are walking into the past, into the lessons learned by you and all your fellow aged ones, as you take in the vista of the Mountain view.

Expand your heart and extend your sense of interbeing to all of the natural world in which you are embedded, including humans and non-humans alike. Breathe in the nurturing nectar of this deep sense of interbeing and sit and rest with that without further thought. Just be still, silent, in compassionate communion.

Make a commitment to yourself, that you will spend the rest of your life in this Third Age of your lifecycle in service of the ideals of Eldership as Service to Life on Earth, in whatever small way you are able. Reach out and make connections with your fellow members of the Third Age and find ways to be of such service, leaving life-affirming legacies for the generations to come.
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