Dianne: I'd been managing organisations in Katoomba. When we moved here, I thought, "I need a break. I might get work in a gift shop or something". But I ended up landing a job with young refugees in Coffs Harbour. It's been eight years and I absolutely love it, even when it's exhausting. None of them have their aunties, uncles or grandparents here, so I kind of represent that role. They come from cultures with enormous respect for older people. Some weeks we have 70 teenagers and none of them has to be there, they just want to come.

Chris: I do internal work with people as a therapist, around trauma, and I can only do that because I've done my own work. Everything about my trauma was compartmentalised into an over-functioning person in the world. I didn't slow down and start doing the internal work until I was 50. I'm now 68.

Dianne: We are both survivors, so trust and individual support is a pivotal part of our relationship.

Chris: In my work, I'm interested in how people live with themselves. I've had to learn how to live with myself, and to be alone and not be scared. I grew up in a large working-class family, very poor, public housing, a fair amount of poverty and emotional neglect, in Western Sydney. My early years were pretty rough. My parents were good providers, but there was lots of stuff that wasn't easy.

Dianne: My father was a Jewish refugee. They lost everything. He came here with his family from Germany just before the Second World War. My mother was from an English/Irish and - I've recently found out - an Aboriginal background. When you're growing up, you just think your situation is normal. I've realised that mine wasn't.

My grandmother was so traumatised that she spent the last 22 years of her life in a psychiatric hospital. I didn't take on the mantle of having a refugee background for a long time. Because my mother wasn't a Jew, I was not considered to be Jewish and my father rejected God because no God would allow the Holocaust. I always wished things could have been different for my family because if they'd had support when they came here, it could have been so much better. That's why I think that I am now doing my life's work.

Chris: I was in the middle of four boys and doing the tomboy thing. Between 10 and 27, I had no inclination of my sexuality.

Dianne: I'd done quite well at school early on, but then I bombed out. I remember my economics teacher said, "I don't know why you try so hard to come first, you're only going to get married anyway and it's going to be a really big waste of your time". That was what was said in those days: "Why bother?" My father must have been really disappointed. He actually started the first credit union in Australia. So when people run down refugees and say they don't give anything to society, that's always a good comeback for me.

Chris: I became a fundamentalist born-again Christian. I'd married a minister and had a child It wasn't until my late 20s that things just blew apart. I left the church and my marriage with just my baby daughter. It was very messy.

Then I found feminism. And the Women's Movement. I was in a consciousness-raising group with other women in suburban Sydney in 1975/6. I remember the first time we had dinner together. Everyone jumped into the pool afterwards naked and I thought, "wow, this is just wonderful!" I wasn't perving on anyone, I just felt so free.

I went to the second Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras in 1979. After the violence at the first one, we were all determined to show up. I was a bit shy because I was so suburban. You could see the city enclave - the dykes on bikes - and I was in awe. If I sat on a motorbike, I'd fall off. But the very idea that this could happen was just amazing. It was so new.

A group of us set up women's services in the Blue Mountains with no funding or support. We'd have to work out who was going to open their houses so women who were fleeing domestic violence would have somewhere to go.

Dianne: We worked together at TAFE there when we got together in 1993. We both had children. Chris had recently separated from her partner and I was shocked: they were the lesbian icons of the Blue Mountains. I wasn't in a relationship and I thought, I'd better get in before someone else does.

It wasn't easy at the beginning. One thing for me was grappling with identity: to go from heterosexual to being gay. I had this dream, though. In the dream, I came out of my back door and there was a path straight ahead. I got beside the path and pushed it aside. When I pushed it aside the ground opened up and it was full of treasures, like a pirates' den. And somehow then I knew: I can do this. I can be a lesbian. That's it for me. There's the treasure. She is my treasure.

We have a biological daughter each who are very significant in our lives and three non biological children and ten grandchildren and a great granddaughter. We have great joy in our lives with them. I've really never been so happy in an ongoing way.

Chris: Last year we got involved in the young LGBTI group "Be Young and Proud". We went on their camp and we cooked, deliberately not taking a leadership role. We became the Camp Grannies and that was a lovely experience for us, to slip into a role that suited our age but also to have the depth and the capacity to support any of the young people that wanted to talk with us. I learned from them too: I wish I was young again in some ways, to explore gender identity the way these young people can.

Dianne: I loved being Camp Granny and not being the leader. The role we played felt really important. We weren't giving advice or making solutions, just holding space in the background.

Chris: We're still in that luxury of not really feeling our age, and I do think that's a transition state. The thought of either of us being dependent is confronting. But we're trying to prepare and think creatively so we never have to leave this place. I don't feel so afraid of dying, it's more how long could it take? What supports have we got? Some choices we've made may seem an overreaction, but that bit of security you claimed can make a huge difference to your peace of mind.

Dianne: I think I learned from my father. It was very hard for him in his eighties, trying to process things that were not familiar to him. People in my family just didn't talk about anything. It's not a criticism in any way because my father lived with so much terror and he did the best he could. The more we can be open with each other and ourselves about what's happening: that's the way to do it.

Rod and Ruth Holmes

Ruth Phillips

Colin Slack

Dorin Hart

Wal Tyson