Older women are falling through the cracks

A recent theatrical production dealing with generational mental illness and older women’s homelessness has moved its audiences and funding agents to call for further action on the issues.

Elaine Paton’s one woman production Through the Cracks deals with her personal journey of mental problems that culminated in her being identified as endangered of becoming homeless at the same time that she was resolving her mental health problems.

 “I never thought that I would join the ranks of homeless older women, but in 2018 I did.” Elaine Paton, playwright and actor said.

In 2020 HAAG (Housing for the Aged Group) and Social Ventures Australia found that 405,000 older women across Australia were at risk of homelessness.

 “Elaine was one of the people who would not have identified as experiencing homelessness,” Kate Timmins, CEO, B.Miles Women’s Foundation said. “She was lucky that she had a support network that she could lean on, but without any resolution of a home.”

Welsh born Paton’s production uses the device of detective Myfwany Tilly, an alter ego who is trying to find Paton through her diaries and childhood film footage and stills projections, and bring her back.

 Like Paton, Detective Tilley is in her late sixties and is feeling somewhat left out as her investigation techniques and personal traits are considered old fashion.

 Tilley’s decidedly un-PC character swears and smokes as she engages the audience with file cards in her mission to find Paton.

 “Locked up in isolation, left with a pile of storage boxes containing my life, I opened them up and diaries, photos, letters and other “evidence” spilled out,” Paton said. “Looking at my younger self, I asked ‘Who was that young woman, where has she gone?’”

 In Through the Cracks, Paton’s physical journey takes her from Wales to London and then Australia, while her inner self has to deal with her father’s suicide and her mother’s alcoholism.  

 Eventually Paton comes to terms with her mental well-being through constant work with her psychologist who also helps with her homelessness by putting her in touch with the B. Miles Women’s Foundation, an inner city service for women.

This led to Paton securing public housing, giving her the security to begin writing Through the Cracks.

 By January 2022, Paton had developed the project to a workshop performance at Sydney’s Rex Cramphorn Studio, from which she was able to secure rehearsal and performance space at Leichardt Town Hall as part of the Inner West Council’s  EDGE Spaces program.

 “The program offers in-kind space to artists for the development and or presentation of new performance events and experimentation in creative practices,” an Inner West Council spokesperson said, adding “Elaine had a strong artistic track record and presented a well-articulated and innovative show.”

No theatre novice, Paton graduated from the Drama Centre London before joining the revolutionary Common Stock Community Theatre that presented shows in the East End involving local residents, before moving to Australia where she was involved in many productions.

“This gave me passion for specific, self-devised work giving voice to the marginalised for social change,” Paton said.

 The Older Women’s Network was another stepping stone in realising the production.

 “There is only so much that statistics can tell you and Elaine is looking at the world of an older woman whose world is structurally disadvantaged and it adds the flesh and bones and colour to what it is to not have a home,” Yumi Lee, Older Women’s Network said.

“It one hundred per cent deserves a wider audience.”

 With Through the Cracks, Paton has shown that she is not only a powerful performer but that she can also deal with numerous devastating issues on a humorous and inventive manner without it ever venturing into a polemic.

“My story could be any women’s story, it just happens to be mine,” Paton said.