PHOTOS: REUTERS, LINDA ROBERTSON
What a great job the octogenarians are doing.
There was a time when anyone that age was regarded as past it.
Fit only for dozing in the sun and rabbiting on about the good old days.
Not any more though.
Take Barbara Streisand.
Let’s not forget actor Harrison Ford of Indiana Jones fame who is 83 and still going strong in the television series Shrinking.
In fact, the entertainment world is littered with 80-year-olds.
Sylvester Stallone will be 80 next month and Steven Spielberg makes the big 80 in December.
Lesser stars include Hayley Mills, 80, recently seen in the television show The Wheel of Time and Dinah Lee, 83, the girl from Waimate who gave us Do the Blue Beat in 1964 and who as recently as 2023 was on the road with a rock’n’roll nostalgia show.
Let’s examine the over-80-year-olds in New Zealand.
There are about 200,000 of them with about 13,000 in Otago so I won’t list them all here.
Poet Sam Hunt is 80 on July 4 and rugby greats Ian Kirkpatrick and Laurie Mains are both 80 as is Nelson Horrell of Winton who would give them all a run for their money.
He recently deadlifted an 80kg weight 80 times in a day and said it would have been easier if he hadn’t pulled a hamstring.
Now, 80 is a long way from the biblical recommended use-by date.
You will recall the bit from Psalm 90, ‘‘The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away’’.
Put that way, 70 seems to be the recommended age to pass on, while those who hang on until 80 are a sorry lot.
Three score and ten certainly made sense when life expectancy was about 70 years as was the case in New Zealand in 1950.
By 2006 it had hit 80 and today it’s 83.
In Victorian times the biblical 70 years was regarded as a long life.
A child born in 1880 could expect to peg out at 40 but if they survived childhood probably had a good chance of reaching 70.
Novelist Antony Trollope wrote an intriguing book called The Fixed Period which is set in the year 1980 in the Republic of Britannula, a fictional island in the vicinity of New Zealand, and deals with euthanasia as a radical solution to the problem of the aged.
At the age of 67, all Britannulans were obliged by law to retire from their worldly affairs and begin a year of preparation for death.
Not surprisingly as citizens reached 67 they decided the law was a bad one.
In Charles Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit the mean-spirited Jonas Chuzzlewit, hoping for his father’s death so that he can have his business and money, is enraged when the old man reaches 80.
“Why, a man with any feeling ought to be ashamed of being 80, let alone more. Where’s his religion, I should like to know, when he goes flying in the face of the Bible like that? Threescore-and-ten’s the mark, and no man with a conscience, and a proper sense of what’s expected of him, has any business to live longer.”
Had 70 years been some kind of official cut-off point we would have been much the poorer.
We would not have the inspired leadership of that well-groomed statesman and diplomat 80-year-old Winston Peters.
Sir Graham Henry, now back with the All Blacks as a selector, turned 80 yesterday.
I know a man who will be 80 on Thursday who churns out a newspaper column each week and on the same day a local cockie will also be 80 and still runs a fine farm.
But, above all, 1946 was the “presidential” year.
It saw the birth of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, and on June 14 1946 another American was born, the self-confessed greatest American president of all time, the man who admits to being the finest human being ever to walk upon the Earth.
Next week he will be 80 and has built an arena outside his front door to host an Ultimate Fighting Championship cage match on his birthday.
The ultimate ugliness.
What style. What gravitas.
That “fixed period” idea of doing away with people at 70 suddenly seems like a good option.
• Jim Sullivan is a Patearoa writer.
