Taking Care of Business

At an age when most people have settled into retirement, Judith Gill talks to Carole Poustie about beginning a new career.

When Judith arrives at my house late in the afternoon, she tells me she’s getting good at finding her way around Melbourne. Her silver Toyota Echo pulls up at exactly 4:30pm, the time we have agreed to meet. Judith and I have known each other for about seven years through our involvement in the Community Church of Saint Mark (Clifton Hill Baptist). I have always been in awe of her unwavering dedication to the care of her family, often in stretching circumstances. Sometimes the sacrifices that people like Judith make are known only to close friends and family. When she agrees to tell me her story I am delighted.

It’s school holidays and it will be quieter at my dining room table than in any of the rooms at Judith’s home in Melbourne’s inner north. Her daughter, son-in-law and four children have moved in with her.

Today Judith has clocked up a few kilometres. She’s travelled to care for a 96 year-old man who has just lost his wife and is struggling with depression. She’s spent an hour in Moonee Ponds with a seventy-year-old blind woman who tells her “the day is so long when you can’t see.” She’s squeezed in an unscheduled visit to Fawkner to shower and dress an Iranian lady with dementia, because the family had particularly asked for her, before popping home for an hour to do a few loads of washing.

Then it’s out to the eastern suburbs to see me.

Judith looks weary as she walks up my driveway, and climbs the steps at the top. But then, most people look weary when they arrive at my front door: I live on a steep slope and there are 22 steps. Nevertheless, despite the hill-climb and her busy day, she is cheery as I greet her.

Judith Gill

We share a cup of tea and a piece of lemon slice as she talks about her day. “I can’t just sit at home,” she tells me, “so I do this personal care work.” It’s a career move she made at the age of 69, when she enrolled in 2008 to do the training.

It’s a career move a long time in coming.

“When I was a girl,” Judith continues, “I’d done a course and been working several years in offices, which I quite enjoyed. But I didn’t want to do that for the rest of my life. I said to my Mum and Dad that I’d like to go nursing, but they were very much against it. I think I was about 17. At that time you had to go and live in the hospital to do your four years training. In those days, you did what your parents said. But I’ve always felt that I’d like to do something where I worked with people.”

A significant hearing problem also thwarted Judith’s dreams of carving out a career in caring.

“I was about 20 when I first realised I wasn’t hearing very well. Later on, I thought about the nursing again, but I realised my hearing wasn’t good enough. The hearing aids weren’t as effective then.”

Judith, however, has always been a carer.

“My mother passed away at the end of 1960. When she became ill my father asked if we would come back home so I could look after her. I was looking after the house with five brothers, Athol – my husband, my father and my Grandfather: eight men.” At this point Judith laughs. “And me. I was doing all the cooking, doing the washing and looking after everyone because I was the only girl, I guess.”

Between 2000 and 2008 during difficult family times, Judith became a full-time carer for two of her grandchildren: Lachlan for three years from when he was two years old and David for six years from the age of eight months. She had both boys together for over eighteen months. “… you just do what’s required of you – what’s put in front of you. I wanted to look after them,” she says.

Judith Gill was born in Launceston on the second of September 1939, the day before the beginning of WW2. She is the third of six children. Her father, who she remembers as warm and affectionate, with a wonderful sense of humour, was a Baptist minister who spent much of Judith’s early life as a chaplain in New Guinea. (In later years he went on to become editor of The Australian Baptist.) Her mother, who Judith describes as “a reserved person, much quieter than my Dad”, loved cooking. She died when Judith was 19. “When my father went away to the war,” she tells me, “my mother was left with the six of us, all under ten, five of them boys. The church people would give her their ration cards. They were very good to her.”

Judith’s formative years were spent in Sydney, where her father ministered at a number of churches and where the family shared the house with her grandparents. “I loved having them there. I was my grandmother’s favourite. We would play checkers and she would often give me presents – books and a new dress for the Sunday school anniversary. And if my brothers ever got a bit much for me I would trot upstairs and sit with her.”

The youngest and one of the quieter members in her class at school, Judith left after gaining her Intermediate Certificate at age 14. She explains how this came about. “My Dad said to me ‘we’d really like you to leave school and go to Business College because it’s more important for the boys to go on to university. You’ll be getting married and the boys will need further education because they’ll have to look after their families’, which was a fairly common view in those days. Business College was for a year and my grandmother paid for me to go.”

Armed with her new secretarial skills, Judith entered the work force at 15. She gained positions at several firms in Sydney, before working for the Baptist Union, at the then ABMS (Australian Baptist Missionary Society).

Soon after, she met Athol Gill, who, at the time, was a young businessman from Wauchope, living in the Petersham Baptist Church’s hostel for boys. When the two became a couple, Judith tells me with a smile that lights her face, “The boys had bets on about how long it was going to last.” Judith laughs uproariously here. “They said ‘she won’t have you for long’. But it did last.”

“I’d said to my Dad, once,” Judith muses, “that I didn’t want to marry a minister. When you’re growing up, you see the demands that are made on your parents in the ministry. I wanted something more private than that.” She laughs again. “When I met Athol, I thought ‘good – he’s in business’.”

However, six months after their marriage, Athol was to make a decision that set their lives on a course that would be anything but private. He accepted a call into ministry, “Which,” says Judith ruefully, “was a bit unfair, but I went along with it.” Athol then began what ended up being an eleven year period of study to earn his doctorate in theology. His study would take them to London for eighteen months and to Switzerland for five years. Throughout this time Judith worked full time as well as caring for their children, Jonathan and Kirsten.

“We’d been married about four years and just before we were about to go to London, I found I was pregnant, which was unfortunate timing, as we were going by ship. The doctor said to me ‘You’re going to feel very sick on that ship’ and I did. I felt nauseous all the time. It was dreadful. The journey took five weeks and two days. We arrived in the middle of winter – the fifth of January. It was so cold. And it was a big culture shock; at about three or four months pregnant I went to work and Athol started at Spurgeons College.”

The years up until Athol’s sudden death, in 1992, were to be both fulfilling and challenging for Judith. As pastor and New Testament Scholar, Athol’s radical discipleship ministry was to forge a fiery path for his family. His stratagem for living out the Christian life, true to his scholarly understanding of the Jesus of the Bible would lead him to establish two radical Christian communities – The House of Freedom, in Brisbane, and The House of the Gentle Bunyip, in Melbourne. And he would upset some in the conservative church, who were threatened by his controversial teachings.

The “Bunyip”, as it came to be known, was established in 1975. Judith describes it as an “intentional community”. Centrally organised, prospective members would apply to live in the share houses and attend “team training” one day a week for six months. “We were working for something outside of ourselves,” says Judith, “outreaching to the local community. There was a day-care centre for the elderly, an after-school drop-in centre and a coffee house on Saturday nights, where we particularly catered for people with schizophrenia and the mentally ill. The pottery and basket-weaving craft workshops were very popular with young mothers. I often think of it being one of the earliest neighbourhood houses.”

Throughout these years Judith worked behind the scenes. For a time she took on the arduous role of administrator for the Bunyip community. “I always thought that my job, really, was in supporting Athol. I felt that he was the one out there and I should keep the home fires burning,” she tells me.

Athol often spent long hours away from home. “I think later in Athol’s life he really regretted that he hadn’t spent more time with the family,” says Judith.

I ask if it was lonely at times. “We moved around a lot,” she says. “We came back to Queensland [from Switzerland] where we didn’t know anybody and I was home with the children when Athol was out there meeting people. And then we came to Melbourne where we didn’t know anyone, either.” Judith pauses. “Really, I think I’m the sort of person who would have been happier staying in Sydney where there were people I knew, where the family was. Yes, it’s not been easy. When we started the community we made some lovely friendships, but they were all younger people in a different place to where I was with children.”

“You’ve been looking after people all your life,” I say.

“I’ve never seen myself as an up-front person. I was really quite content to be at home,” says Judith, but adds, “I also liked to have my own life. I mean, I was working … I wanted to be out there in the ordinary world. That’s why I got a job at the university of Melbourne. It was my life, and quite a different life from what I had at home. I felt I needed to establish my own identity. I loved working at the university.”

I ask how long she was there.

“Sixteen years,” says Judith. “It was a good job and very interesting people. I left just after I started looking after the grandchildren, otherwise I would have stayed on.”

Loud music suddenly bursts into the room as Judith’s phone goes off in her handbag. It’s her daughter. She wants to know if Judith will be home for tea and what they’ll be having. I look at the clock and think of her driving home through peak hour traffic.

She looks at me and smiles.

“I’m really enjoying the personal care work,” she says. “A lot of the work is just talking to people. They’re isolated, they’re on their own. They look forward to me coming and it’s lovely.”

Please note that for the purpose of confidentiality, some personal details of Judith’s clients have been changed.

Carole Poustie is an award-winning poet based in Melbourne, and her work appears regularly in literary journals and anthologies. Her first children’s novel, Dog Gone, will be launched at the Melbourne Writers Festival on Sunday 5th September.