Where I live, a whole new industry has grown during the past decade. Swaths of the semi-rural township and pastoral environs have been bulldozed, flattened, rezoned, redeveloped, and covered with "people farms".

People farms are the dream schemes of entrepreneurs who pour capital into building gated communities, with the aim of separating baby boomers from their superannuated wealth.



They have nothing to do with geriatric or aged care, simply wealth separation. In their dreams (and in their long lunches with accountants and investors) the people farmers spin a trance-like spiel about a huge cohort of baby boomers soon to reach retirement, empty nesters without responsibilities, eager to wile away their twilight years in glorious consumption, placidly awaiting the dying of the light.



Glossy advertising to attract this baby boomer herd tends to feature gentle images of arcadian bliss, of smiling men and women, white, smiling, heterosexual, smiling, holding hands, smiling, enjoying communal barbeques minus smoke and smell, smiling, playing card games in ordered, uncluttered scenes of dustless domesticity, smiling, dressed in styles that don’t come out of local chainstores, smiling, a couple frolicking on a swing, smiling, she's in sensible lavender swirl, he's outfitted by RM Williams, and is pushing her, gently, smiling, against a background of manicured lawns and gardens, all bathed in photoshopped sunlight.



As the people farms begin to dot the landscape like melanomas, locally the numbers of beds in the local public and private hospitals do not increase; local footpaths remain largely inaccessible to the motorised scooters and wheelchairs increasingly used by the ageing and medical and support services for the aged and ageing do not keep pace with the size of the population planned by the people farmers.

Indeed, thinking grimly about future logistics, the local cemeteries, already crammed and close to full, will be unable to cope with demand. The closest crematorium is a few hours away, closer to the city, but a very long trip for mourners.



Perhaps, however, the reality is that people farming is like investing in the Titanic: a good idea in theory, glossy and wonderful to look at upon completion, but doomed when it comes to reality of actually functioning effectively. The people farmers tend to pitch their advertising to an imagined population of self-funded early retirees, generically beginning the low end of their pitch at the over-50s, factoring the age of 65, traditionally the age of pension entitlement in Australia, in their calculations. All up, it is a mind blowing 5.5m or so people, a market ready to be tapped.

In the main, however, Australian baby boomers are not the savings-rich, generously superannuated cohort of popular mythology. Nor are they especially eager or financially able to retire early, let alone retire full-stop. Nor are they all empty nesters, downsizers, or responsibility free, many engaged in unpaid babysitting/childminding roles with their grandchildren, a necessity in a society where "working families" are often the only way survive, yet one in which priority is not given to ensuring readily available and affordable childcare.



Then there is the dissident model: 85-year-old pensioner Vilma Ward, who gave it to prime minister Tony Abbott in a post-budget interview. Vilma is a "granger" – a term I coined to describe the "grey anger" of those who won't willingly enter the people farms, who don't want to spend their retirement twiddling thumbs and perennially tapping little white balls into a hole in a patch of cultivated grass.



Instead, grangers are active, reengaging with the activism of the 1960s and 70s, out on picket lines, cooking up food for strikers, getting arrested at protests, rallying in the streets, peopling anti-fracking and anti-logging and anti-McDonalds and anti-war actions – organising, planning, plotting. Yes, they are relatively few in numbers, but anecdotal evidence suggests our ranks are growing. Ironically, the recent unleashing of the work-until-you-drop demon by the Coalition government has the potential to "grow" the granger population even more.