Dogs, walks and weeds: an RBA board member’s therapy
Elana Rubin, Reserve Bank board member, loves getting out with her border collie-cross poodles, Lucy and Maggie, to start the day with a clear head. Just don’t mention meditation.
Elana Rubin’s father, David, lost all of his family in the horrors of the Holocaust. The only physical memory he has of his childhood is a single black and white photo of his mother, Eva.
Remarkably, he survived and emigrated from eastern Europe to Melbourne to start a new life.
He worked on the wharves until the early 1970s, when he set up an accommodation business.
After David and his wife separated while Elana was young, throughout the 1980s his beloved canine companion was a loyal German shepherd named Che.
Che lived a good life but tragically, at the age of 12, developed chronic arthritis and had to be put down.
Elana Rubin will never forget the day she and her father drove Che to the vet in St Kilda for the last time, from their family home in Balaclava.
She was then working for the ACTU but took the day off to be with her dad at such a difficult moment in his life.
“My father was a Holocaust survivor, this incredibly strong personality who always filled a room. Yet he could not get out of the car to put his dog down. It is one of those things in life, those memories that you have. You just realise the connection that people have to their animals,” she now says.
“I just thought of all the things my father went through in life. Everything from his childhood was lost, but he literally could not get out of the car that day. So I had to take Che into the vet to say goodbye to him on my own.”
Despite the trauma of that event, dogs have always had a special place in Rubin’s life as she has blazed a trail through Australia’s boardrooms.
Her life changed forever when former ACTU secretary Bill Kelty persuaded her to do postgraduate studies in applied finance and investment instead of labour law.
It opened a pathway to the burgeoning superannuation sector and she joined the Australian Retirement Fund, a forerunner to AustralianSuper, as chief investment officer.
She subsequently became chair of AustralianSuper and then the buy now, pay later juggernaut named Afterpay, and now sits on the boards of the Reserve Bank of Australia, Telstra and law firm Slater & Gordon.
Today Rubin has two border collie-cross poodles, named Maggie and Lucy, who are 10 and 9 years old.
“I grew up around dogs so having dogs for me is a natural thing. Dogs teach children about being responsible for someone other than themselves. They also teach kids unconditional love and I think those factors continue onto adulthood. They get us out and about. They introduce us to people,” she says.
“It’s always one of those funny things that when you walk down the street on your own, often no one says hello. But when you walk down the street with dogs, people stop you, they engage, they ask about your dogs, and you talk to them about their dogs. So that just helps connect people. Dogs are not only important for the lessons that they teach us, but they are also a really nice anchor back to the community.”
Rubin starts each day walking her dogs for up to an hour, either at the local park if she is in her Melbourne city apartment, or along the beach if she is at her country home.
She walks at a brisk pace, making sure to never listen to music or take phone calls.
“I just walk and clear my head, and it is the best way to start my day,” she says, adding that she also did clinical pilates for many years, in line with her life motto of “no pain, no gain”.
“I have tried yoga, and I should be a candidate for meditation because I am sometimes a little bit too focused and driven. But I just can’t do it. I sit there and it’s just a bit too gentle. I’m sitting there saying ‘I’ve got things to do, hurry up!’ Which probably goes to why I like walking at a fast pace. I just like getting it done.”
Rubin is a proud vegetarian, which she traces back to her teenage years when she regularly watched lambs being carted off to an abattoir along the busy road outside her high school.
She calls it the “Bambi complex”.
Given she eats out and travels frequently with work, she says being vegetarian and having a plant-based diet is much easier than it was in the past.
“There are many more options these days, so I think it is much easier to manage having to eat out,” she says.
Rubin has never been a big drinker, and often dilutes her wine with water, a sacrilegious practice to wine connoisseurs.
She also now swears by putting magnesium oil on the soles of her feet before bed to ensure she gets a good night’s sleep, whether it be at home or on a long flight across the world.
But her favourite pastime is getting away with her husband to their rural holiday home on Melbourne’s Mornington Peninsula.
“We live in an apartment in the city so it is reasonably dense. The opportunity to come into a more rural environment is just such a privilege. As you drive down past all the green foliage and the farms, you just feel yourself relax,” she says.
They have a small garden at the property and Rubin is now working hard to transform what she calls her “brown thumb”, when she previously inadvertently damaged or killed most plants she touched, to a green thumb.
“I can now understand just why people talk about the therapeutic effects of gardening. It is that whole thing about putting things back into the soil and watching them grow and that cycle of life. Plus when you pull out a weed, all that frustration of the week comes with that,” she says.
Some weeds, she jokes, are even sometimes personalised.
“If I’ve had a bad week, I’ll name some of the weeds as I pull them out,” she quips.
“That makes you feel really good.”
