Never too old for life-long learning

THE average age of a member of Bendigo’s University of the Third Age is seventy-three, but that doesn’t affect their shared passion for ongoing education.

The local U3A group was established in 1990 soon after the organisation made its way to Australia and is part of a state network of 104 branches with some 35,000 members.

Local branch president Ian Burdett said the group exists to encourage older people to pursue their passions or develop new interests with like-minded people at an age when social isolation can often take hold.

“Throughout your working life, you’ve been doing whatever your job was and for a lot of people, they haven’t had the opportunity to, particularly in our age group, study when they were younger,” he said.

“That was the whole idea of U3A, to encourage older people to continue learning or to start something they’ve always wanted to learn about.

“That was really the impetus for the start of U3A but we here in Bendigo, like many U3As, have branched out now.”

As well as their educational classes, which include languages, literature and history, the group also offers a range of social activities like board games, table tennis, and walking groups.

All up, there’s more than 80 activities for members to choose from, with 14 of them already booked out after a recent enrolment day attracted about 430 members.

“We’re well ahead of where we were at the same time last year, so we would expect probably by the middle of the year we’ll be well past 500,’ Mr Burdett said.

“We should probably get to 600 by the end of the year. If we hadn’t had COVID, we were looking at probably reaching 1000 this year.”

Making a gradual but strong return to classes since they were suspended in March 2020 due to the pandemic, Mr Burdett said members were keen to restart their studies.

“The biggest focus for us now is to get people back together; the social aspects of it, the ongoing learning aspect, recreation and having fun,” he said.

“The best thing is people come and they live, love and enjoy our activities.”