Australia is having a national conversation about how we age — but until now, the quarter of a million older Australians who live in retirement communities have been largely absent from the evidence that informs it.
Creative Conversations set out to correct that. Over two years, our multidisciplinary team sat down with 517 people across twelve events around the country and simply asked: how do you want to age? We recorded more than seventy hours of conversation — 1.2 million words — and subjected it to rigorous, resident-validated analysis. It is, at the time of writing, Australia’s largest qualitative, resident-focussed academic study of retirement living.
What residents told us was remarkable in its clarity. Above all, retirement living works. Residents consistently credited their communities as central to their purpose, longevity, social lives, and general wellbeing — and expressed deep happiness in the places they call home. It is because the model works that residents regard the village home as a forever home. They intend to live out their lives in place — with dignity, on their own terms. And they are asking the sector for something it was never designed to provide: an integrated, opt-in ecosystem of wellness, domestic, and clinical care services.
This report is written for the people who can act on that message: operators, investors, peak bodies, and all tiers of government. It distils the study’s findings, explains why they matter, and sets out the research agenda the Australian Retirement Living Lab was founded to pursue. The residents have done the hard part. The work of translating resident evidence into action now belongs to all of us.