Ageist thought patterns and reactions are so embedded in Australian culture that even educated people, people who otherwise insist on political correctness, will open their mouths and deliver a hurtful, hateful judgement.
Like the time a few years ago, sitting on the grass at a writers’ festival with a group of other women writers of whom I was the oldest. We were fellow graduates from a postgraduate creative writing course, some of us just beginning to be published; I knew the generational difference made parts of my life inaccessible to them, as parts of their lives would remain mysterious to me.
