Retirement communities are, of course, for old people — really old people. They are not for only-a-bit-old, slightly beyond middle age people like me. They are also regimented and run by humourless staff who in a previous career might have enjoyed gainful employ in one of Her Majesty’s prisons.

Such are the preconceptions I carry with me as I walk through the doors of The Village to begin my temporary stay.

Set in parklands laced with walking paths, The Village could be any other suburban, low-rise apartment development.

The entrance to the main building resembles a hotel lobby that with its coffee shop, library, dining room, billiard room and theatre, is the community’s social hub.

I’m met by The Village manager Gillian Roe, the daughter of a Brisbane GP who did her general nursing training at the Princess Alexandra Hospital before specialising in aged care.

She rattles off the statistics. Opened in 2009, The Village comprises 187 units with another 98 planned and under construction. The average age of residents is 81. The youngest is 65, which is the minimum age permitted. Currently, 261 people call The Village home.

I find myself fixated by the number 65 and am thinking that it’s too young to be considering moving into a retirement village.

“We have a huge cross-section of people here," says Gillian.

"There are people here still working two or three days a week and there are people here who do a lot of travelling. They don’t have to tell us if they are going away, although we prefer it if they do," she says, smiling.

I imagine Gillian does a lot of smiling, albeit sometimes with clenched teeth, as she juggles the needs and wants of 261 residents.

She hands me a key and walks me through the foyer where she introduces me to a small group drinking coffee whose names I instantly forget. We walk on past the heated indoor pool where the water is a thermal 32C and on past the bowling green which is surrounded on three sides by five-storey apartment blocks.

The key opens the door to a two-bedroom apartment on level three overlooking a park. There’s a kitchen, ensuite, second bathroom, living-dining area, a media room-office and a large balcony.

I was expecting something more institutional but there is nothing here to suggest I’m in The Village until I see a red button in a console beside the bed.

It’s the emergency button. Press it and it summons the ambulance and gives the paramedics access to all the security entry codes in the complex.

Gillian leaves me to settle in and I begin to spread my possessions around the apartment, safe in the knowledge I can transform order into disorder in three minutes.

I’ve just discovered a packet of Tim Tams thoughtfully left in the pantry and am about to broach it when there is a knock on the door.

I recognise the face as belonging to one of the group I had met downstairs.

"I’m Bill Heymink," he says. "I just wanted to apologise for not recognising you downstairs."

My arrival, it appears, had been flagged in The Village newsletter.

I assure him there’s no need to apologise and invite him inside.

"So what," I ask, "brought you here?"

"I came here a year and a half ago because I had a few health issues like everyone else my age and realised I had no use for a big house and a big swimming pool that we never used.

"We’d lived in Yeronga so I knew the area well. I saw them build this, never dreaming that I would be living here but once you have a health scare, you realise how precarious life can be.

"The beauty of living in a place like this is you’ve always got company.

"Nobody makes a habit of knocking on your door, but you go down to the coffee shop and people will sit down at your table and you’ve got a conversation going," he says, traces of his Dutch origin lingering in his speech.

"There’s people from all walks of life and most of them have led very interesting lives."

Bill tells me that his first wife died of cancer in 1996.

"I was at a loose end so I went to Singapore and spent four years working there and that’s where I met my second wife.

"She likes it here. I had a place at Mt Tamborine but it’s as dead as a doornail during the week,’’ he says.

I ask him his age and he dares me to guess. I tell him he looks 78. "You’re my friend for life. This month I turn 84,’’ he says.

Bill’s only concern, he says, was downsizing to an apartment from a large house.

His solution was simple. "We bought two adjoining units and put in a connecting doorway."

"You know the one mistake I made?" he asks as he makes to leave.

"I’ve no idea," I say.

"I left it too late to move here. I should have come 10 years earlier," he answers.

It is to become a familiar refrain over the next few days. I decide to grab a sandwich in the coffee shop where I meet a woman who projects a palpable aura of genteel tranquillity.

"Hello. I’m Helen," she says.

I am still coming to terms with the friendliness of everyone I meet, my natural inclination being to regard unsolicited friendship with suspicion.

My wife frames it differently. "You just don’t like most people," she says.

Perhaps she’s right.

Helen is Helen Smith and she moved in when the first buildings were completed in 2009 with her husband Ken.

"We moved here from Graceville. We had a big house and the kids had all left home and I was tired of it.

"I picked up a leaflet advertising this place in a shopping centre one day and that was that," she recalls.

Her husband, she says, had a distinguished career as a mathematician.

"When the Concorde was being built he worked on the wing design," she says of one of aviation’s greatest engineering achievements.

"We went to England after he got his Masters degree at Sydney University and went to the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough and they said: ‘We’re going to build a new aircraft and we want you to work on it’. In the end we were there for nine years," she says.

"We came back with three adopted children. Then I had two children and we adopted another one," she says.

I am about to ask if I could meet her husband but thankfully pause and allow her to continue.

"He’s gone now," she says. "He died almost two years ago. Sometimes I still turn around and go to tell him things.

"I’ll be 86 at the end of the year. When we first moved here I thought it would be awful being all close together but we don’t go to each other’s units. If you want company, you come down here to the coffee shop.

"It’s funny, you know," she says. "Everyone thought Ken was an interesting man. I just thought he was a husband."

It’s late afternoon and I decide to explore the surrounds and spend an hour wandering the streets and admiring the beautifully restored Queenslanders that are a feature of the riverside suburb.

On Sunday afternoons in this same suburb many years ago, my friends and I would gather in the yard of just such a grand, sprawling home, hoist a five gallon keg of beer into the fork of a giant camphor laurel tree and party.

I walked until I found the street. The house, now being renovated, is still there and so is the tree.

"Maybe I am getting old,’’ I thought as I walked back to The Village and realised just how many years ago that was.

That evening I was officially welcomed to my building by the other residents on my floor over drinks and savouries. There were no class distinctions in The Village I was told, the people in the most expensive dwellings mingling with those of lesser means.

Car parks, I find, provide an accurate social topography and a stroll through the basement the next day revealed Jaguars, Porsches and Mercedes-Benzes balanced by Mazdas, Volkswagens and a shocking pink Toyota Yaris.

If Gillian had briefed her guests on what to tell me, she had done an outstanding job. Their backgrounds were diverse but their answers to my questions hardly varied. They simply enjoyed living there.

They loved the company, the security, the location, the lack of maintenance and the choice of being as socially engaged or disengaged as they chose.

It’s 6.50 the next morning and I’m pulling on a sweater and track pants. At 7am I meet Sir Leo Hielscher and join him for his morning walk through the park.

Queensland Under Treasurer for 14 years and chairman of the Queensland Treasury Corporation for a further 22 years, he is arguably the state’s best known and most respected public servant.

He lives in The Village with Lady Mary, his wife of 68 years, and will celebrate his 90th birthday in October.

"You know the average age here is 81. I’m dragging the figure upwards," he says grinning.

Downsizing, he confesses, was difficult, even though they now live in a penthouse.

"We had a large house and I had a garage out the back, a work bench, a storage area and a garage attached to the house," he says.

"But it’s a great community here. It’s not just the bricks and mortar. They’re very friendly people. We looked around a fair bit before we decided on here. They have a good reputation.

"The one negative is the number of funerals," he says. "On my floor there were four couples when we moved in and now there is one couple and three widows."

As we walk he recalls his early life.

"I was born in Eumundi where Dad was the town blacksmith and this was during the Depression. We lived in a four-room house with no sewerage, no electricity and only tank water. That was what motivated me in life to improve things for people later when I was in a position to do something about it.

"I left school in Grade 10 and did my university many years later, at night. There were 10 years of austerity after the war and in the Sixties we turned it all around."

Sir Leo is credited with having convinced the financially conservative then-Premier Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen of the need to borrow money to generate growth and prosperity.

"I had to convince them to use overseas capital. We were broke at Treasury," he says. "At one point I had to borrow money to pay the public service wages."

We talk politics and personalities and agree that the days of an apolitical public service that provided frank and fearless advice to the government of the day are gone.

"You know, I served 10 Premiers and 15 Treasurers," he says as we part, summing up an extraordinary career.

I leave him wondering if I’ll possess his mental acuity and physical fitness at 90. Somehow I doubt it.

My preconception of retirement villages being populated by doddering octogenarians is taking a battering. Most of the people I’ve met are more alert than my mates.

Residents self-cater or send out for meals but lunch and dinner are served once a week in the dining room and today it is lunch so I take a seat with four women, all of them living alone in The Village.

Alwynne Bailey is 79 and recovering from cardiac surgery.

"I lost 11kg but I’m slowly regaining my strength," she says.

Judy — "they call me Garland" — Angus is 76 and moved to Yeronga from Burleigh Heads. Marjorie Morland and her husband had a dairy farm out near Beaudesert. My now old friend Marjorie Smith completes the tableau.

All four agree that companionship is one of the attractions of Village life.

"There’s always someone to talk to if you are in the mood. The coffee shop midmorning is a great meeting place. It’s a bit quiet in the afternoon. Quite a few of us have nana naps," says Judy Garland.

The health of other residents is discussed in hushed tones. One woman has just been admitted to hospital and the prognosis is not encouraging.

"I don’t think she will be coming back," says one of my luncheon companions.

"It’s just the way it is here," says Judy. "People pass on. You get used to it after a while."

I’m up at 5.30 the next morning to meet Alleyne Withey at 6am.

"We’re going for a drive," he says and we head off along the river in his LandCruiser.

"I normally leave at 5am," he says and I thank him for allowing me an extra hour of sleep.

We drive to the Highgate Hill side of the "green" bridge and walk across to the University of Queensland and to the campus gym where he works out every morning. Dawn breaks as we arrive, rowing shells disturbing the mirror sheen of the river.

Alleyne is 90, has maintained a personal fitness regimen all his life and believes it’s essential to maintain the quality of your life as you age.

"I’m in the gym by 5.30am. That’s when it opens," Alleyne says. "I’ve had a few doses of cancer and you’ve got to keep as fit as possible to survive that chemo. I’ve had cancer three times but I’m good now."

Alleyne came to The Village via the St Lucia Bowls Club where he and his wife Gerry were regulars.

"One day one of their reps came and gave a talk and handed out some brochures. We came over and had a look and that was that," he says.

His family ran a sawmill in Murwillumbah which they sold in 1982.

"My father was a sawmiller for years. It was steam operated when I first worked in it. There was no electricity. Dad died when I was about 26 and left the sawmill to my brothers and I. We got stuck into it, sold some other assets and modernised it.

"My other three brothers did the marketing and I did the sawmilling. We bought other sawmills, closed them down and used their timber licences so we could get bigger supplies.

"We had over 100 on the staff. Then we got caught up with the Greenies and (then NSW Premier) Neville Wran decided to close the forest to logging. We could see the writing on the wall so we spent a year getting our things in order. We were able to sell it and I invested in real estate."

Alleyne introduces me to his mates at the gym, all early morning regulars but out of deference to me, skips his morning workout. His wife Gerry has breakfast waiting in their unit when we return, a three-bedroom apartment on the top floor with views to the city.

"My only regret is all the lovely antique furniture we had, which I left behind," she laments. "My daughter said it was too heavy for the apartment. We love it here. The people are friendly. It’s a pleasant environment. We go away most weekends to our beach house at New Brighton so we have the best of both worlds.

"We had a four-level house at St Lucia and it all became too much for me. We haven’t looked back since we moved in here," she says.

On my last evening I have drinks with "the boys" and some of "the girls" by the bowling green, where I canvas them for complaints.

Some say the green is not quite flat and then there’s the matter of the bocce court which should be decomposed granite and not turf and this is the sum total of the negative feedback that I receive in the four days I spend at The Village Yeronga.

Before I leave I meet with sales manager Kathy Harrison who runs me through the figures. If I wanted to move in and let’s just say, hypothetically, that I was 65 or over, I’d be parting with anywhere between $450,000 and $1.65 million for a 99-year lease with the average price around $650,000.

The prices vary depending on the aspect, the floor level and whether you choose two or three bedrooms. The prices are more than reasonable compared with traditional unit developments, so how does The Village Retirement Group make its money?

The average resident spends 15 years in The Village. When you leave, either to go to your eternal reward or perhaps to a high-care facility, the company charges an exit fee.

This is on a sliding scale which is capped after six and a half years at 34 per cent of the initial purchase price.

Never before have I met such a friendly, contented group of people. My perception of retirement communities, or at least those modelled on The Village, has changed.

Is it for me? Perhaps one day. I just don’t know if I could cope with that much contentment. In any case, my 89-year-old mother is still living in our old family home and there would be something not quite right about her visiting me in my retirement village.