Australian not-for-profit Wintringham supports people over 50 who face homelessness and disadvantage, ensuring the winters of their lives are warm – spent in comfort and community. We stopped by for a visit.
Strolling through Gilgunya Wintringham in Melbourne’s inner north on a sunny morning, it’s hard to not be struck by how pleasant the grounds are. A driveway leads into the curve of a single-story building, units and rooms joined by meandering covered walkways. A fountain stands in the middle of a large pond filled with water plants.
“The pool needs a bit of a clean,” jokes Andrew, a friendly man who looks to be in his late sixties. His crossed arms suggest just a hint of defensiveness. He’s only been in Wintringham’s Residential Aged Care (RAC) facility for a month. A social support case worker – aptly named Krystene Care – tells me Andrew’s wife died a few years ago of diabetic complications, and he was her sole carer. No longer able to afford rent, he ultimately found a place here. Andrew explains that he has found it tricky adjusting to an environment where he isn’t the one doing the caring. “I like to help,” he tells me.
Already, Krystene is getting a sense of what Andrew might need to feel a part of his new community. Perhaps he could even get his food handling licence? As we leave the eclectic common room, with its homey ephemera hanging on the walls – is that a cuckoo clock? – Andrew’s stance seems more relaxed, his arms hanging loosely by his sides.
On one side of Wintringham is community housing for residents who can live independently, and who meet the criteria for government-funded housing support. The other side is residential aged care: hundreds of long-term housing units specifically for older people who are either at risk of homelessness or have experienced it in the past.
Krystene introduces me to Gayle, a spry 75-year-old, who proudly shows me around her home. Gayle plans to run an art workshop for other residents, and pulls out one of her own pieces. It’s a piece of fully black card – but as she holds it up, a silvery etching emerges: a tree with heart-shaped leaves.
When Gayle first arrived at Wintringham a year ago, after leaving an abusive partner, she was “all skin and bones,” Krystene remembers. “She had nothing but the clothes she stood up in.” Gayle’s ex had taken everything from her – most painfully, her personal documents, including her Proof of Aboriginality. But she found her feet at Wintringham. Recently, she has successfully applied for an intervention order, and is pursuing her ex in court to retrieve her missing property. “I want people to know you can do it,” Gayle says. “You can get an order. He’s never gonna have power over me again!”
Gayle and Kevin’s experiences are typical of many Wintringham residents. A sudden change of financial status, or housing insecurity due to domestic abuse, are all too common stories here. Priority is always given to those who have experienced chronic homelessness and are now senior citizens who need the complex care and support Wintringham can offer.
A resident sits drinking cask wine in front of his room. His partner is in a nearby room, sitting up in bed for the first time after recently recovering from a serious illness. “She’s my best friend,” he says, devastated at the thought he might have lost her.
As we walk away, Krystene explains that not many places would take on a resident who was a bit of a drinker: “But we do.”
“If I give them a safe house where they’re not going to get bashed or robbed, and they’re going to be loved and cared for, they’ll stay.” – Wintringham founder Bryan Lipmann
Wintringham’s founder Bryan Lipmann is a tall, wiry man, who seems much younger than his almost 80 years. He likes to meet people in person – whether they’re politicians he’s chasing for support, or journalists keen to talk about his nomination for Senior Australian of the Year, after winning Senior Australian of the Year for Victoria in November.
When asked about the award ceremony, Bryan brushes it off. “I wasn’t even going to go. But my wife says I have to, for Wintringham, for the organisation.”
Bryan grew up in Melbourne as the son of migrants, and took up an economics degree that very clearly wasn’t his bag. So he left the city on a motorbike with his girlfriend. What started out as an escape became over a decade working on the land – but the often regressive culture that surrounded them made self-described lefty Bryan feel out of place. “I spent far too much time on tractors and not enough time with animals,” he recalls, “and listening to stuff that was really hard to take.”
Bryan decided to retrain as a social worker, ultimately taking up a placement at a large Melbourne shelter that housed hundreds of people a night. It was loud, crowded and often violent. What stayed with Bryan were the older men who were living – and dying – there. “They were finishing their lives in terror,” Bryan describes. The idea of building something better emerged not from policy, but from this proximity, from watching people age and die in places that frightened them.
The first Wintringham building opened in Flemington in 1989, with 35 beds. Bryan ran it alone for the first two years. “I didn’t know shit from sand,” he says. “I mean, didn’t have a clue, but I was full of social justice and anger.” Funding was precarious, and aged care authorities were skeptical that a service designed for people who had experienced homelessness could survive – the assumption being that residents would drift away. “I said, ‘No, they won’t,’” Bryan recalls. “The problem wasn’t them. It was the place. If I give them a safe house where they’re not going to get bashed or robbed, and they’re going to be loved and cared for, they’ll stay.”
Bryan quickly learned how the system worked. “I found out in those early days that you got more money for looking after incontinent people,” he says, of assessing the first candidates to live at Wintringham. “So I said, ‘When you’re choosing out of the 300 people, 35 people, they’ve all got to be incontinent.’” Once residents had private rooms and bathrooms, many of these presumed health problems disappeared. Bryan explains that people who were labelled incontinent were often just afraid to use their shelters’ shared toilets, especially at night. “They could hear what was going on in there. Bashings. Rapes. People getting hurt.” In Wintringham’s first building, those issues often resolved on their own. That lesson still defines the organisation.
Wintringham now works across Victoria and Tasmania, filling the gaps most services won’t: from outreach and community housing to home care and disability services, allowing people to move between levels of support without being forced to start again. More than 3000 older people are supported each year by more than 1000 staff, with around 300 of those being in Wintringham’s eight full-care accommodation facilities. But Bryan says the point isn’t scale: it’s continuity. “If staff feel supported and valued, they stay,” he believes. “And if they stay, residents feel safer. It’s not complicated.”
In an impeccably clean community housing unit, I sit with Lina, who has lived at Wintringham for more than a decade. Everything about her place reminds me of my auntie’s house. We’ve even pulled on shoe covers to keep her pristine floors clean. “I love this house,” she says. “Everything quiet.”
Now in her sixties, Lina worked in factories sewing clothes for years. When the factory closed, she stayed home to care for her husband, who is now in his nineties and has just moved into nursing care. She tears up a little while talking about him. “He wanted someone to look after me properly,” she says. “Everything professional.”
As she insists on offering me and the Wintringham staff something to eat or drink (we finally accept some cloudy apple juice), she points out her beautifully tended garden and tells me about her life here. Some mornings, she goes to temple. Other days, she stays home, cooks, and tends the pots out the front. She misses her children and grandchildren, who are back in Fiji, where she was born and grew up. Now that she is no longer caring for her husband, she wonders if perhaps she can go to work? Do something? The Wintringham staff are quick to reassure her of her place with them, as she moves through this new stage of her life. She mentions how she once complained when the front gate wasn’t closing properly. It was fixed. “I can’t complain anything,” she says.
For Lina, as for all Wintringham residents, this place doesn’t offer neat endings. It offers a community and a dignified place to live. When you have spent years or decades reacting to loss, to violence, to instability, that can be enough.
LEARN MORE OR MAKE A DONATION AT WINTRINGHAM.ORG.AU
By Melissa Cranenburgh
Website: melissacranenburgh.com
Melissa Cranenburgh is a writer, editor, podcaster and educator based in Naarm/Melbourne.
Illustrations by Michelle Pereira
Published in ed#753
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