At 73, most Australians have long since put their feet up. Keiri Easdown is onto her fifth career.
The former professional dancer never imagined she would spend her seventies working as a teacher aide, let alone that dancing would only be the first chapter of a working life stretching well past 70, according to SBS’s popular Insight program.
Keiri retired from dancing at 45, when the physical toll became too much to bear.
“It was a rude shock really – having to do something like give up dancing,” she said. “That was who I was; it was my life.”
As a single mother of two, she could not afford to simply walk away from earning an income. “Whatever I earned pretty much went out of the house; it paid the rent, it paid the bills for my children,” she said.
So began a string of reinventions. Keiri became an entertainment director at the Gold Coast theme park Dreamworld. She moved into retail and corporate work for a whitegoods company. She took on cleaning work, until that too became physically punishing in her mid-sixties.
Since her late sixties she has worked as a teacher aide, at the very school where her daughter and son-in-law teach.
It is a career path shaped less by choice than by necessity. Keiri says the wages from decades spent dancing left her with almost nothing to fall back on.
“The money is absolutely critical,” she said. “I have very little in superannuation. As a dancer, we didn’t earn much. We lived hand to mouth.”
Her story sits inside a much larger shift. Australians now plan, on average, to retire between their 65th and 66th birthdays, according to 2024 figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics. In the 2024-2025 financial year alone, 156,000 people retired.
For some of that growing cohort still clocking on well into their seventies, eighties and even nineties, the reasons are financial. For others, the picture is more tangled, bound up in identity, purpose and the simple need to keep going after a life that did not hand them an easy exit.
Keiri’s five careers tell that second story just as much as the first. A woman who lost the only life she ever wanted at 45 has spent nearly 30 years finding new ones, one reinvention at a time.
Images: SBS Insight
