The role of older people as inadvertent exemplars of all that was good about the nation’s past is thrown into high relief when we consider representations of Britain’s ‘maritime heritage’. Yet such mythology has a longer pedigree than may at first be apparent. Victorian pioneers of photography championed the custom, dress and extended family roles of elders in fishing villages because these displayed an older moral world distinct from the sins of the city. Subsequently, the conflation of positive ageing and seaside living fuelled the promotion of health products and lifestyles, whilst the rise of the seaside holiday prompted a more humorous re-evaluation of the ageing body as typified by saucy postcards and family snaps. Alongside and related to the phenomenon of retiring to the seaside, a fresh imagery is being wrought as nostalgic images of the country’s seafaring history play heavily on the reminiscences of older people. Meanwhile, growing numbers of retirees opt for foreign travel. Focusing on a range of photographic materials, this chapter explores the continuities in perception that have connected ageing and older people with the morally and spiritually uplifting virtues of coastal communities.

The leisure of older women is subject to prejudices of both ageism and sexism. Gender roles and identities lock women into leisure which is experienced mostly within the confines of the home. The lack of material resources also limits their ability to undertake a wider range, as well as a greater number, of leisure activities within the public sphere outside the home. These conditions become emphasised in the more mature years of a woman's life, such that leisure expectations that are assumed for the Third Age seldom materialise. In the study of older women in Singapore, it was found that many engaged in home-bound activities and where these extended into public spaces, the activities conformed to gender and age expectations and according to material resources. The paper argues that leisure, especially for older women, must be contextualised; it requires an understanding of how social ideologies construct gender and age identities and roles, and therefore shape the leisure outcomes and spaces in which they are carried out.

The study involved a sample of eight moderately to severely demented elderly people who used psychogeriatric day services. Counselling skills were used by the interviewer to investigate informants' recall of emotional memories. Interviews were normally carried out individually each week over a number of months. Between thirteen and twenty-five interviews with individual informants were recorded and transcribed. The data form a series of longitudinal case-studies, analysed using quasi-judicial methods (Bromley 1986), and with a grounded theory approach (Glaser and Strauss 1967). Over time, it became apparent that each case-study revealed fragmented pieces of an informant's personal narrative. The emotions associated with their past experiences appeared to provide a strong cue to recall and formed a significant feature of their accounts as well as providing all informants with narrative identity. For some informants, this sense of narrative identity began to dissolve as their illness progressed and their stories faded from memory. For other informants, whose memories were not so devastated by their illness, it remained with them. Although outcomes varied for all informants, all experienced varying levels of increased well-being. The data may have important therapeutic implications for the care of dementia patients through the development of reminiscence work. Attention is drawn to some theoretical implications for understanding the relationship between emotion, memory and dementia.

This paper describes a preliminary investigation of differences in family caregiving in Australia. Forty-eight Italian-born family caregivers of dependent elderly persons were compared with 461 caregivers of Anglo-Celtic origin on measures reflecting psychological health and well-being, and on a range of socio-demographic variables. The latter had participated in the national Caring for Family Caregivers (CFC) group programme; the former are residents of the Melbourne metropolitan area. Statistical tests were conducted on measures which included the Affect Balance Scale (Bradburn and Noll 1969) and the Spielberger State and Trait Anxiety Inventory (Spielberger et al. 1983) and its translation (Pedrabassi and Santinello 1989). Findings indicated that Italians reported experiencing significantly less trait anxiety than Anglo-Celtic caregivers. Furthermore, significantly more Italians used community supports, were employed full-time, had lower levels of education, and reported better levels of general health than Anglo-Celtics. Implications for research and practice are drawn.

This paper provides a brief introduction to demography and population science and the newly emerged subfield of the demography of ageing. Links with gerontology are explored. Recent work on mortality at very high ages and on the black-white mortality ‘cross-over’ reported from the United States is then reviewed. These topics are important substantively and theoretically and also serve to illustrate demographic approaches to data and data analysis. Analytic approaches to the topics reviewed have had to be imaginative as there are major problems with data on very old people. Recent work indicates that the mortality of very old people, including centenarians, has fallen considerably, at least in those countries where good data exist. The mortality ‘cross-over’, however, appears to be artefactual, at least at ages under 95 years.