Mairangi Bay resident Dr Judy Blakey’s life trajectory has taken her to several countries, before she made her home on the North Shore. In 2018, this self-described community advisor and age-friendly advocate was awarded an MNZM for services to seniors. Christine Young explores the influences that have shaped her dynamic, influential personality and career.
In May, Judy was online promoting a webinar presented by the New Zealand Association of Gerontology (NZAG), titled, ‘Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf? Artificial intelligence and older people’. The webinar spoke to Judy’s concerns that seniors should be considered in shaping all aspects of community life. It looked at potential, risks, ethics, and governance as AI is used to provide models and solutions for health and wellbeing, and considered how the views and needs of older people should be considered.
Just how Judy moved from an undergraduate degree in economics in Johannesburg to advocating in Auckland for active ageing and the engagement of older people in community and public life is quite a tale….
Judy graduated in the early days of mainframe computers and her first job was in computer programming. She attended a course to learn COBOL (an early computer programing language), where she met her future husband Peter.
Judy and Peter were English-speaking South Africans. Uncomfortable with apartheid, they shifted to Canada, and later to England, only to be drawn back to South Africa by the wish to be near grandparents, as they started their family. But Judy was never the stay-at-home-mum type. In the days when mothers were expected not to work. “I did a short stint in computer programming,” she says, and enrolled in the University of South Africa to do an Honours degree in neuro-psychological research. She also gave swimming lessons in their backyard swimming pool.
Embarking on post-graduate study, Judy was influenced by the philosophies of Reuven Feurstein, a Romanian-born Israeli psychologist and embarked on an ill-fated study trip to Israel. On her first night, taking part in Israeli folk dancing resulted in a badly torn Achilles tendon. The young orthopaedic surgeon, sensitive to her distress, agreed not to operate and Judy flew home with a plaster from her foot to the top of her thigh; when she and Peter later emigrated to New Zealand she was still not fully mobile, and had had to learn to walk again.
Judy and Peter left South Africa because of their stance against apartheid and against some of the tactics adopted by the South African police. ”We were harassed, singled out, had death threats. There were lewd, unpleasant and unpalatable aspects: they put our car for sale for a ridiculous price in the newspaper; they put Peter’s death and funeral notice in the paper.” Hordes turned up to purchase the car, and they received the bills for the ads.
Then, with Peter away on work, Judy received a postcard threatening her and their two children. “We decided we didn’t want to bring our children up in South Africa.”
After flying to Zimbabwe to be interviewed by Chris Laidlaw, New Zealand's first resident High Commissioner to Harare, who represented New Zealand's interests throughout Africa at the time, Judy and Peter’s application was approved and they arrived in Wellington.
During that first year in New Zealand, Judy finished her thesis and looked for work in research. With nothing immediately on offer and wanting to be available to support the children in the transition to their new country, she trained as a teacher.
“That was the best thing for me,” she says. “A new migrant should do teacher training, as teaching is where culture is transmitted. I was able to imbibe so much more than if I had been at home or stuck in one workplace.” She was, she says, exposed to different communities, to the principles of Te Tiriti o Waitangi and to te reo Māori, all of which have since stood her in good stead – and created some tensions. But more of that later.
When Peter won a role lecturing at Massey University, the family moved to Palmerston North. Judy taught there for ten years, and completed a post-graduate teaching diploma. But her teaching career was disrupted when she flew to Natal for the funeral after her brother was murdered in South Africa. She was traumatised by the experience, but back here, she says, “No one knew how to reach out and talk to you.”
As she recovered, she took up an opportunity within Massey University's psychology department to do research into veterans’ hearing loss and began a research doctorate. Her interest in ageing was piqued, “One of the best indicators of [future] dementia is hearing loss. And the country was slowly waking up to the fact we have an ageing population.” She joined NZAG in the early 2000s as she was completing her research and became a strong advocate for active ageing and age-friendly services.
After 17 years at Massey University, in 2008 Peter and Judy were on the move again – this time to the North Shore, when the house next door to their son and daughter-in-law came on the market. “The most healing thing in this dislocation was the grandchildren,” Judy says. Just as she and Peter had sought to live in South Africa so their children could grow up near grandparents, now they could support the next generation. Judy regularly helped out at the schools the grandchildren attended, and later volunteered as a reader writer at Rangitoto College.
Helping at a school holiday programme led to her involvement with Mairangi Arts Centre (MAC), where in 2016 she 'put her hand up' to join the board. She says this opened her eyes to 'how monocultural it was on the Shore'. She found herself facing criticism for using te reo Māori at the beginning of meetings. Undaunted, she persisted. “If we were seeking Council funding, we needed to be meeting our Te Tiriti obligations,” she says.
She is now a life member and remains actively involved, noting that MAC contributes to active ageing, fostering a supportive environment that draws in many older people.
When Judy completed her doctorate in 2008, she took on a variety of new roles, each leading to new opportunities, among them research and community engagement at North Shore City Council, tutoring at Kip McGrath, teaching English to adults, and Chinese migrant students, and as a consumer voice on the northern region Primary Healthcare Nursing Reference Network. “I had got into consumer work when doing my doctorate,” she says. “People had realised getting the consumer voice involved was important.”
She has also provided consumer perspectives to Precision Driven Health, a health data science research initiative, and participates in the governance group for the New Zealand Algorithm Hub. Judy’s early role in computing has come full circle as she combines her understanding of data and computing with her 'interest in empowering people'.
Another key role was as a member of Auckland Council’s Seniors Advisory Panel, where, as is her wont, she challenged Council officers who discovered she wasn’t the requisite 65 years old (she was four months short of that). In typical Judy style, she persuaded them that they needed seniors of different age groups to reflect the diversity of the older population. She served the maximum two three-year terms, helping Council strive for acceptance as a World Health Organization age-friendly city. As a result of this experience, she co-authored, with Janet Clews CNZM, a paper titled, ‘Knowing, being and co-constructing an age-friendly Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland’ which was published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health’s special issue on age-friendly cities.
Judy was named a life member of NZAG in 2018 for her community leadership. In 2021, she joined NZAG's executive committee to provide elder perspectives on their deliberations, and is now a member of its 2023 Conference organising committee. It is her next big (but by no means only) project and it’s apt that Judy, with her determination to combat ageism, and her research and education background, is at the forefront of its organisation.
[Sidebar if room:]
Some references from Judy on active ageing:
