Author whose voice was added to aged care sector debate dies

A Hobart author who had a contagious love of literature and a “dangerous” level of honesty has died after an amazing 93 years on the planet. READ HER DAUGHTER’S TRIBUTE >>

• Critically low staff levels at core of aged-care disgrace

AN inspirational author and member of Hobart’s Bunyips has been remembered as a curious, compassionate woman who shared her contagious love of literature.

Berenice Eastman died in the aged care home where she had been living with her husband Walter — and then on her own — on March 10.

Mrs Eastman passed just nine days after her daughter Merridy pleaded for change in the aged care industry following the findings of the Royal Commission into Aged Care.

Merridy said chronic understaffing meant residents were not getting the compassionate care they deserved from stressed out workers and the elderly were existing rather than thriving under such conditions.

Merridy Eastman, herself a best-selling author and actor who starred in Packed to the Rafters, told the royal commission that when her father, Wal, was still alive, her frail mother, often had to help him toilet and wash because he was not being tended by staff..

Berenice Eastman’s three children, Merridy, John and Virginia said their dear “Roxie” could not have loved her family, her friends or her community more.

“We will miss her curiosity, her compassion, her contagious love of literature, her loud laugh, her lack of filters and her tight, tight grip of the hand of whoever she was talking to,” the trio said on Monday.

Merridy Eastman, actress on Packed to the Rafters.

Berenice Eastman. Picture: SUPPLIED

Berenice Eastman’s book My Capacious Hold-All of Recollections was launched at Fullers Bookshop in 2017 and it tells an amazing story of a woman whose life was full to bursting.

Mrs Eastman was 90 and a member of the Bunyips — a group of writers who regularly met over coffee and cake to share their essays, stories and poems – when her book was launched with the help of fellow bunyip Avril Caney.

“Whether you know our Mum as a friend, family member, teacher, student or colleague, you know and I know that she’s one of a kind,” Merridy said at the book launch.

“Dangerously honest, genuinely self deprecating, curiously childlike, ridiculously over-accommodating, terrifyingly angry if you ring her while The Insiders is on, unbelievably well-read, hysterically funny, dainty, eccentric, and a constant source of inspiration to all of us.”

Berenice grew up Sydney and became a teacher and the family said she lit up the imaginations of her lucky students at various primary schools in Rockhampton, Brisbane and Hobart.

“She writes with such happiness about her four-year scholarship to Sydney University and her gap years in London where she worked at the Times Bookshop,” Merridy said.

She returned to Australia in 1954 aged 26 and landed a job back at her old university as secretary to the Professor of Applied mathematics.

Wal and Berenice Eastman. Picture: SUPPLIED

She then moved to Canberra where she was accepted into the National Library Training School, and again ran into the man who was to be her husband — Wal Eastman.

“She could have been a pianist or a ballerina, but instead she found her bliss in literature, particularly in biography and mythology,” Merridy said.