Younger people have no idea I spent most of my 20s in a moshpit: Rosalie Ham

Two old women sit in a Brunswick house drinking tea. One of them is me. The other is Rosalie Ham, bestselling author of The Dressmaker trilogy, who at 71 is amply qualified to write a book about ageing.

The book – part self-help, part reflection, part memoir, laced with Ham’s trademark humour – is called Look After Your Feet. “It’s a metaphor for looking after everything,” she says. “Balance, strength and the state of your feet. My parents had terrible feet, because of the war and the Depression and getting everyone else’s shoes.”

Perhaps it’s because many Baby Boomers are avid readers, but authors are becoming interested in ageing. Their attention can be inspiring (Jacinta Parson’s A Wisdom of Age)cheerleading (Kathy Lette’s call for women in their 60s to go out and be fabulous) or enraged (Helen Garner’s reaction to a patronising young waiter).

“Mine’s just, here we are, this is what’s happening,” Ham says. What does age feel like to her? “I don’t feel it. I feel like I’ve always felt. Then I think God, I’ve got 20 years left, what won’t get done? What am I going to do?”

A caveat: this book is mostly about ageing women. Do men age differently? “It’s all about their genitals and their work.”

She’s bemused at how younger people see her. “They don’t recognise the journey I’ve had. They look at me and they have no idea I spent most of my 20s in a mosh pit. They’d be shocked if they read my diaries.”

After six novels, the Melbourne writer has turned to non-fiction partly because her publisher suggested it and also through observing her circle of friends. “Our conversations are about knees, hips, feet, big toes, sciatic and neuro pain, having a fall.” Then there’s memory loss: Ham pays for a landline so she can find her cellphone.

“You accumulate wisdom, but by the time you’ve accumulated it, you’re moved to the back seat of the vehicle of life. I don’t mind it, I quite like to ride. And it’s not literal. The family is always saying, Let grandma sit in the front of the car.”

Becoming older is not really about becoming wise. “You just collect information and have a fairly solid grasp of things from all those years of observing people and how things work. The great irony is that nobody wants to hear it.”

Ageism, Ham says, is real in the workforce, and there’s a lot of fear and prejudice against getting older. “But it’s got its advantages and I wanted to let them in.” Such as? “Being not noticed. That’s a wonderful thing. You don’t have to do small talk or work the room. You can walk in and quietly sit down and watch people. That’s great for me as a writer,” she says.

“I don’t feel guilty about pressing the button and stopping six lines of traffic while I cross the road. I don’t have to wear a bra. I can take three hours to get dressed. My budget is my own – I can spend $80 on a dog toy and it doesn’t matter.”

Ham has four grandchildren aged between 11 and 18 (the grandchildren of her late husband Ian) and she’s happy to do grandmotherly duties once a week, “but the rest of the time I do whatever the heck I want.”

It’s impossible to age gracefully. “You can try, but your body does what it wants.” So there’s discussion of flatulence and incontinence: “I had an aunt on diuretics, she’d rather stay home.” But Ham got her out and about: “The first thing we always did was check where the loo was.” There’s no advice in her book on sex. It’s fine at the time, says Ham. “But it just seems like a stupid thing when you think about it.”

Ham has been observing old or disabled or eccentric people all her life, and that’s helped to create characters in her novels. When she was a child living in the tiny NSW town of Jerilderie, there was a deaf man whose conversation could be heard streets away, a man who talked to lampposts and a man with a brain injury who ran the newsagency, where customers counted out the exact change for him. “Everybody looked out for everybody else.”

Later she worked as a nurse’s aide in aged care. “I saw people had perspicacity and accumulated knowledge. And they’d had a life. They were a scientist, or they flew a plane. And nobody asks them about it.”

There were several turning points in Ham’s life. One was when she was 10 and her mother left. She had an affair that didn’t last, but she didn’t move back. It took her years to work out what had happened.

“It was more traumatic for my older siblings. I lived on our block with people all around me and my best friend and her family and school – I had a very comfortable lovely world in that town,” she says. “She only went three blocks away, or she was at the pub, so I could always find her. She got hepatitis at 30 and the doctor said she’d be in a wheelchair by the time she was 40, so she decided to move out and have good fun. I don’t know why she didn’t think about it, she just did it. She could have been a little kinder to everyone around her. My dad was brilliant. He did his best.”

It was a scandal for the small town, and Ham’s mother was ostracised, but she survived by becoming a seamstress and the townswomen forgave her because they wanted to look good. Ham’s first novel, The Dressmaker, became her revenge: “I just took that situation and dramatised the hell out of it.”

Another turning point was born from humiliation. A boyfriend, “an odd-shaped boy with dull teeth”, dumped her and everyone but herself knew he’d been cheating on her. “At the time I was absolutely shattered. A few years down the track, when I found out who I was, I realised it was the best thing that ever happened to me. I learned to be more careful with people, not just going with a boy because he liked you.”

During a stint in a share house in Earl’s Court, London, Ham learned how to have fun. “It opened up my entire world.” In those carefree years of travel, she met a South American boyfriend, “the Gaucho”, and had many adventures on his motorbike. They are still friends. But when they broke up, he told her “you should do something with your life”.

“Oh my God, I had a kind of physical-emotional response to that,” she says. “At the same time, I went ‘I should, I will’.” That led her to drama school. And when she decided she didn’t want to be either an actor or a drama teacher, she fell into a professional writing course. “After three weeks, I knew I was home. I didn’t know if I’d ever get published, I just wrote that book to pass the course.”

The rest is Ozlit history. Publication, a surprise hit, a set book for schools, an award-winning 2015 film adaptation and international sales of more than 500,000 for The Dressmaker and her other novels. Twenty-five years later, she’s still doing Dressmaker events and recognising fans, such as those inspired by Sergeant Farrat, the cross-dresser.

Perhaps the biggest turning point was meeting her future husband. “I thought, oh there you are. He was my kind of person. I didn’t know the other people weren’t really my kind of person, but I knew who I was by that point.”

The happy years with Ian and his children were threatened when he acquired Alzheimer’s, and later, terminal cancer. “I was in full nursing mode with Ian,” she says. “That was the best thing I had, a way of coping. Those practical things probably saved me from going completely mad. It was very hard sometimes, I did drink a lot of wine,” she concedes. “But at the same time I drowned him in love and affection. I was grateful, I understood the importance of having that great big fat relationship in my life.

“His death made me appreciate life. I was more prepared than I’d ever been. I’d become more and more independent. At the end, I was off and flying again. Sad and grief-stricken. But the journey had in another way resurrected me.”

So did she do something with her life, and how would she describe it? She thinks. “I’ve enjoyed it,” she replies. “And I’ve made that enjoyment useful.”

Look After Your Feet by Rosalie Ham (Allen & Unwin, $34.99), is out March 31.

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