The first strums of Alan Buckley’s guitar cut through the quiet in Borella House on a miserably wet Wednesday afternoon in Albury.
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“Do you know A Dime and a Dollar?” he asks, in a thick English accent.
The 21 residents sitting before him all react in agreement – whether it be a noise of approval from bowed heads, or a clap from those sitting alert on their walking frames.
“Well I’m not going to do that one!” he exclaims and begins another of Guy Mitchell’s hits, She Wears Red Feathers.
Buckley uses these cheeky remarks to set the mood when he visits aged care facilities across the Border to play residents music.
Another joke is that he “never learned Australian” – coming from Leicestershire to the Mornington Peninsula in 2005, people would hear his name and spell Bookley.
But sometimes – like when he visits dementia units – he skips the humour and simply lets the power of music take hold.
“I’ve lost count of the number of times people have come to me and said, ‘You take me back to my youth when I used to go dancing’,” he says.
“They’ll sing and dance – even if they’re in wheelchairs, you see their feet and hands going.”
The joy Buckley’s music has brought over a decade, to hundreds of residents across Melbourne – and in the last six months, on the Border – is apparent today.
As he sings Johnnie Ray’s Walking My Baby Back Home, there are wide smiles, phones on record and feet tapping.
Joy Power, who has dementia, watches Buckley, enthralled – the hits of the 1950s and 60s bring her back to her “single days”.
“This kind of music I can relate to, because of the types of songs,” she says.
“I remember it used to turn me on a bit in my younger days.
“I’m very privileged I had a few bars to sing along with, and didn’t ruin it too much.”
Buckley never ceases to be amazed at the healing effect his music has.
“A few years ago now, somebody asked me for Danny Boy, the old Irish song,” he says.
“There was a lady in the group in one of the big bed chairs and she wasn’t moving.
“After, one of the carers came to me and said, ‘I could see her lips going – she never stirs, but she was signing that’.
“Her daughter came at the end and said, ‘Oh, I wish I had of seen that’, so I told her, ‘I’ll do it again if you like’.
“I sang it and she started tearing up.
“Her brother was killed in a car crash, and this lady’s mother used to sing it to them when they were kids, but she wouldn’t sing it anymore because he used to love it.”
Stories like these have been Buckley’s motivation to give up hundreds of hours over the past decade, with no return but his own enjoyment.
Speak to any person who fits the bill during National Volunteer Week and they will likely give you a similar reason.
According to Jemma Toohey, the Albury Wodonga Volunteer Resource Bureau chief executive, a week isn’t nearly enough to honour all the people who give up their time to help others.
“In our community, the bureau assisted 2787 people towards volunteering in the past year,” she says.
“We work with over 100 local organisations and a further 50 between NSW and Victoria at state levels.
“We say a huge thank you to the more than six million Australians who volunteer.”
You wouldn’t exactly put resigned nurse Kerrie Jones in the group of people solely motivated to volunteer by the thought of helping others.
Ten years ago, she decided she needed a social place to go to – settling on the Lifeline retail centre on Wilson Street in Albury.
“I was retired and had my elderly mother living with me,” she says.
“There was a respite person who visited one day a week to be with her so I could go, and this is where I came.
“The other workers were very supportive and so welcoming.”
When Kerrie’s mother died in 2009, the Lifeline team became more than a source of recreation – it became her rock.
“When she died, it was my support service altogether – even more so than any of my family,” she says.
“Everyone gathered around me and came to her funeral.
“That sort of support is immeasurable.”
That’s not to say Kerrie doesn’t dwell on the value of her ten years of service.
As she gives me a tour “behind the scenes” at the shop, each sorting section comes with a story – from the box of flippers sitting in the bric-a-brac aisle (reserved for someone who started a swimming school) to the mammoth book pile, which was once nearly stripped bare by a woman who helps Indigenous children learn to read.
Kerrie points to two metal cages overflowing with clothes.
“When it’s sorted, some things go to Southern Globe, which is a charity for places like Indonesia – we have to make sure all the clothes are modest though,” she says.
“Some of the summer stuff from last season, we keep to send to the warmer places.
“There are also crates with flannelette and toweling that are baled and sent off for rags to Melbourne.”
Lifeline’s benefits are close to home too.
“We have a whole mixture of people who come in … I know about 20 by name,” Kerrie says.
“We have a couple of Indigenous people we’ve got to know really well.
“We know a lot of families that come in for two reasons – for the social contact as well as the reasonable prices.
“It’s sad they have to come to us, but it’s good we’re here.”
Kerrie says there’s a list of support services behind the counter, so the 30-odd volunteers know where to refer people on to when they are in a crisis.
“There was a lady in a few days ago who was buying things,” she says.
“She and her two children had left a violent relationship with nothing.
“She came in to get clothes for the kids to start again – she told us all that over the counter.”
And of course, we can’t forget that 13 11 14, the national suicide hotline – which receives more than one million calls every year – would not exist, if not for the retail stores across the country.
“The money from the shop supports the telephone counselling service,” Kerrie says.
“The number is recognised in the community but I don’t know they realise the shop workers are who support it financially, because it’s not-for-profit.”
By no means is Kerrie the longest-serving volunteer at Lifeline – Lexy Peric is four years shy of three decades – but she expects to be there for many years to come.
Alan Buckley can’t see himself stopping any time soon, either.
“I earned my living playing music but I would have done it for nothing – but don’t tell the people who paid me that,” he says.
“But I do always say, if a nice bottle of wine comes my way, I won’t turn it down.
“Music is therapy, and there’s things that happen that make you think, you just can’t buy that.
“I’ll be doing this until I drop, I should think … as long as I can sing, and my fingers move.”