How to Dress for Old Age Launch: David Carlin and Peta Murray with Catherine McKinnon and Kathryn Millard

When adult children take up the labour of care for absent fathers and stoic mothers, when contemplating their own futures, things can get complicated.

Room 306. Level Three. In inner city Melbourne, David Carlin’s mother, Joan, is settling in. Five doors away, on the same floor of the same institution, Peta Murray’s father, Frank, is halfway through the statistically ordained 18 months he is likely to live after entering “care”. Each is 86. He—an ex-builder and sometime bon vivant—has shrunk inside his grey marle tracksuit but still fits proudly into his Sixth Form blazer. She— a widowed mother of three since the age of 31, turned activist, community leader and doer-of-many-things—is throwing on colourful scarves and preparing to re-invent herself again.

This book is a work of love and reckoning, as Frank and Joan’s adult children take up the labour of care for absent fathers and stoic mothers, while contemplating…