During a talk in Dunedin yesterday, given as part of the Otago Pioneer Women's Memorial Association Learning Lunch series, Miss Fawcett said more thought should be devoted to the transition to retirement.
"It's very important.
"For a lot of people it's quite traumatic to go from full-time work to nothing."
The transition also involved doing some saving and finding ways of offsetting the loss of social contact.
"I felt guilty about not going to work.
Eventually she realised: "I've worked for 42 years.
"I need some down time."
In her wide-ranging talk, she reflected on the many positive experiences in her earlier long career of full-time work, often in traditionally male-dominated industries such as mining and the oil industry.
Miss Fawcett, who is in her late 50s, was born in Victoria, Australia, and has also trained and worked as a librarian.
She has spent much of her working life in management- including in the Northern Territory - and has also worked on oil rigs, including in the Timor Sea, and in mining, as well as in construction camps and gas plants.
In her talk, titled "A Miner Problem", she told the more than 20 people attending she had started work, aged 16, in a steel foundry.
She had later planned her own transition to retirement, having shifted from Australia to Port Chalmers in 2013, but still initially "found it difficult".
There she had done some new things, including writing children's books, and running the increasingly popular Port Chalmers cruise ship markets.
Although no longer working full time, she was busy and did not consider herself retired, given her writing interests and the growing demands of the markets.
