Speeches

ADDRESS BY STUART WAGSTAFF AM - NORTH SYDNEY COMMUNITY AWARDS 2009

11th December 2009

Following is a speech delivered by Stuart Wagstaff AM at Joe Hockey's North Sydney Community Awards, held at North Sydney Leagues Club.

Now that I have retired, I usually don’t do this sort of thing anymore, but I have such respect for our parliamentary reps, both Federal and State, that it would have been churlish to refuse.  I don’t know how you put up with parliament, so boring,. Nothing ever happens.

So, we are here to present the Community awards.  All sorts of awards for all sorts of people.  Young, old, and everything in between.

I was young once, but that was a very long time ago, but the one area that I can relate to, in which I am, in fact, an expert, is being old.  Let me tell you about being old….it sucks!

You see, the trouble is that the body wears out before you’ve finished with it, the mind doesn’t….. usually.  But if you ARE old, people assume your mind is going too.

I was in hospital early this year and the nurses came in, looked at my chart, saw my date of birth and promptly went into child talk, quite loudly in case you are deaf as well slipping into second childhood.

“Hello, how are we today? Have we been to the toilet”? I feel like saying “Yes and your name came up” but I restrain myself.

There ARE good things about getting old … people actually give you a seat on a bus, all sorts of people, sometimes even young people…. I deliberately totter and look frail and it usually works.

Also, you can be honest about things you don’t want to do… when you are young you are desperately keen for people to think well of you.  All I ever heard from my mother was, “What will people think?”.  As you age you realise that people are probably not thinking about you at all, and even if they are and you tell them you don’t want to go to their boring dinner party, they forgive you, because they think you’re old and a bit quaint.  I can live with that.

It’s also good to be able to be a grumpy old man.  I can sound off about things that annoy me, like people talking loudly into the mobile phones in public places,  young men adopting this awful fashion of “designer stubble”, Ricky Ponting does that, turning up with two days growth of facial hair, I guess young women might find it sexy… I think they look scruffy.  I can also sound off about my favourite peeve…bad manners.

It doesn’t matter if people don’t listen, I’ve got it off my chest.

But the main problem about getting old, is that you don’t know how long you’ll last.  I mean, for years I’ve been 35 inside my head, but my body isn’t aware of this, and suddenly you wake up one morning, and your 80!

You retire, you know what you have in the bank and you hope that what you’ve got stashed away will last longer than you.

But old age can last for a very long time. I mean, you don’t want to run out of funds before your time comes, by the same token you don’t want to skimp on yourself or your standard of living, nor do you want to leave too much behind to people who are waiting, (perhaps rather too eagerly), for you to pop off!

If we were all born with a “use by” date tattooed onto, say, our instep, life, and death, would be so much easier.  All that superstition and nonsense talked about death would disappear and it would become an accepted part of living, as it actually is… like “Hullo, what’s your use-by date?”.  A bit like people asking what star sign you are.  And if you had a child and sadly, the use-by date was fairly short, then you’d make sure that that child had the best possible years that you could manage.

If my date said 2018 for example, I could budget for those remaining 9 years and have a wonderful time… on the new years eve of my final year I could throw a party and tell everyone what I really thought about them.  The main drawback here is that if you lasted till, say, October or November of that year and still felt well, you’d be very careful crossing the road or talking to strangers.  And you’d be lonely too!

The main frustration though is that having lived to be old, and having a life- time of wisdom which you’ve accumulated by the simple fact of living, drawn it all up by osmosis, then you have a lot to offer the younger generations.  But do these younger generations want that wisdom from you?….generally No, and that’s really frustrating.

Mark you, there are exceptions of course, I’ve come across a few, very few, younger performers who have happily and successfully, picked my brains and gone on to better things.

There’s a lot of talk about Baby boomers, generation Y and generation everything else.  Baby boomers, now about to retire are the product of parents returning from WW2, well I am a product of the parents returning from WW1, I don’t know what that generation is called but I do know that a lot has happened in the years since 1925 when I was born, in England.  I remember when we had electricity installed in the house instead of gas-lighting, I remember when TV was invented, I remember when the radio (or wireless as we called it), was operated by big acid filled batteries that always faded out just as we were listening to Edward 8th making his abdication speech, or in 1938 Mr Chamberlain talking of “peace in our time” and then one year later announcing that England was at War.

If anyone had told me then that I could fly half way round the world in one day, in a plane the size of twenty London buses and with no propellers, I would have thought they were mad.  And all that before I even think about computers and the world wide web.

So, as you can see, a lifetime of information, lots of it useless, but some useful is stored in the minds of us oldies…. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if younger people wanted this information, this wisdom?

But what we CAN do, all of us who are adults, to help our community, is to remember the old adage, that charity begins at home.  We must also remember that damage can begin at home too.
The one thing, I’ve found, that youngsters want more than anything is to know that they are loved, to feel wanted and to feel that they are worthwhile human beings.  We can do more for our community by imparting this idea to our children and grandchildren than by any other activities, because by doing that, we can produce a generation that won’t be a burden on themselves or on the community. They’ll be self confident, useful members of society…and importantly, they’ll value you, their parents and grandparents.

It’s not enough to know that YOU love your children, they must know too that THEY are loved.  Because if, over a period of time a child is not feeling loved or approved of at home or at school,  they might well go looking for love and approval elsewhere, and we all know how dangerous that can be.  Some kids who haven’t had that seal of approval and love from their parents tend to go into the entertainment industry, looking for public approval, that in an industry with greatest rejection rate can often make things much worse for the lack of self confidence.  Bette Davis once said that she’d never met an actor who actually liked himself.

Someone once asked Bob Hope why, in his eighties he was still working, why not give it up and go fishing?  His answer, “Fish don’t applaud”.

It is so easy in an impatient moment to snap at a child and tell them they’ll never amount to anything…this can destroy a child’s self worth….Believe me, I know.

Let me tell you a bit about self confidence, it is November 1943, half way through WW2.  I was in the Royal Navy, heading home for my first leave in about a year after a spell on Atlantic convoys, which was not too pleasant.  Anyway, our ship puts into Scotland and I get the troop train from Glasgow to London, lots of stopping and starting due to air raids and so forth, the trains packed and I spent the entire journey about 14 hours, sitting on a suitcase in the corridor. We arrive in London, change stations and get the train to my home town in Surrey, I arrive there and walk with my suitcase to our house.  I imagine being welcomed like a hero home from the sea etc.  As I opened the front gate, my father was just leaving the house with a friend of his, I said a cheery “Hullo”, my father looked me up and down and said, “Your collars dirty” and walked on.  Not too good for the self esteem!

And don’t think this can’t happen in your home…. That put-down phrase that can demean a child and destroy their self confidence can happen in any home.  Many years ago I was the Covent Garden Opera House in London for a Royal command charity performance and on the way out, we all had to stand to one side of the grand staircase whilst the Queen and the Queen mother were leaving.  They’d obviously had bit of a spat and they were both looking daggers, and at one point the Queen Mother was heard to hiss in the Queens ear, quite firmly, “And just WHO do you think you are?”

Mind you it doesn’t seem to have held the Queen back….. as far as we know.

So my contribution to Community well- being is this, if just one of you today goes home from here and reassures their child or grandchild that they are worthwhile and much loved, then I will feel that my message has got across.

Thank you.