Ageing Bodies, Rural Places, Precarious Times: A Qualitative Investigation of Successful Ageing in Country New South Wales

Abstract

Since the late 1990s successive Australian governments have drawn on the successful ageing model, first developed by John Rowe and Robert Kahn, to refigure population ageing as a dilemma hinging on the choices of responsible, proactive, risk-aware citizens. Drawing on data gathered from interviews conducted with rurally-based adults aged between 61 and 98 years old, this thesis examines how personal responsibility for the ageing body is enacted by those living in under-serviced communities in rural New South Wales.

Personalised responsibility for the ageing body emerged in relation to the spectre of the ‘fourth age’ or, more simply ‘old age’. Following successful ageing discourses, participants in this study often discussed ‘old age’ as a future event wherein one becomes ‘old’, ‘burdensome’, and corporeally ‘leaky’, which may be delayed or avoided through ‘healthy’ and ‘active’ lifestyles. However, many also encountered the fourth age during routine uses of the body in terms of frustrating, life-limiting, and alarming ‘feelings’ (aches, pains, weakness, etc.) which signalled becoming or being old.

This thesis engages the works of Michel Foucault and Maurice Merleau-Ponty to explore these ideas. Foucault’s concept of ‘apparatus’ is used to conceptualise successful ageing – and descents into the fourth age – in terms of principles and problematisations which have become commonplace in Australia. Merleau-Ponty’s account of the lived-body as an ‘inter-corporeal’ medium of experience is additionally drawn on to conceptualise successful ageing imperatives as consequential for persons who are uniquely ‘attached’ to rural places. Ultimately, this thesis argues that successful ageing rationalities, which position the fourth age/old age as a problem of prevention, unwittingly produce a ‘sacrificial ethics’ in the fourth age characterised by a logic of corporeal ‘containment’.