Diversity Spotlight: Elena
About Our Place, Our Woollahra
Our Place, Our Woollahra is a community inclusion and cohesion initiative that is proudly funded by Woollahra Municipal Council in partnership with Holdsworth. Built around three objectives – Inclusion, Participation, and Recognition – the program celebrates the people, cultures and stories that make our community what it is.
Each month, our Diversity Spotlight shines a light on a resident, local business, or community group whose story reflects the richness of cultural diversity in our neighbourhood. These are authentic voices, shared in their own words, to help us all feel a little more connected – and a little more at home – in the place we share.
This month, we sat down with Elena.
Written by Angie Vriens
"I learn a few words in each language
When I met Elena for a coffee in Double Bay, the first thing I noticed was that she knew everyone.
She greeted one barista in Spanish, another in Italian, and offered a warm word to a third in a language I didn’t quite catch. Each of them lit up. It was as though she’d been part of the furniture for years.
“That’s impressive,” I said.
She waved it away with a smile. “I just learn a few words in each language,” she told me. “That’s how I connect with people.”
And really, that single sentence tells you almost everything about Elena. At 72, she has built a life out of connection – across languages, across cultures, across continents – and she carries it as lightly as a coffee order.
From Argentina to Australia
Elena’s story begins, as she tells it, with her parents. “The most important thing has been my parents,” she says. They worked hard and, with great sacrifice, made sure Elena and her sister were educated.
But by the 1970s, Argentina was in upheaval. One night her sister came home terrified, and their mother – who had already survived a war – simply said, “not another war.” Around that same time, immigration to Australia had opened up. Elena had fallen in love with an Italian man who told her, “Well, I’ll come too.” So they made the journey together and Australia became home
A life dedicated to movement
In 1991, Elena was employed as a bilingual fitness instructor and educator, working with Sydney’s Spanish-speaking community. It became her calling. She helped found the Gentle Exercise Association of Australia and threw herself into movement in every form – dancing, teaching, and yoga.
“That became my passion,” she says. “I dedicated my life to it.”
In 2000, when the University of Technology Sydney opened a course for experienced practitioners who lacked formal qualifications, Elena seized the chance and completed a Bachelor of Adult Education. “It was one of the best times,” she recalls.
Her path took her to the South Coast, where she ran surf and yoga retreats, and then – remarkably – to Hong Kong, where she spent ten years studying wellness, electromagnetic energy and therapeutic practice with a community she came to love.
Coming home
The pandemic changed everything. Travelling in China when borders closed overnight, Elena found herself unable to return home. During those years she lost her mother, who died here in Australia while Elena was stranded overseas – a grief made heavier by distance.
When she finally returned to Sydney in 2022, at 72, she found her old life had scattered. Her yoga community had dispersed; her friends had moved on. “It was a real turning point,” she says. But she came to see it as a gift – a chance to begin again.
One day she simply picked up her phone and searched for what came next. Up came a caretaker role with accommodation in Double Bay. She packed a single suitcase and moved in. Today she lives in a shared house of around twenty residents – older people like herself and younger students – where the kitchen is a gathering place and no one need be alone.
Building connection, one word at a time
Since coming home, Elena has woven herself back into the fabric of the community. She volunteers as a health-promotion educator, travelling to Spanish and Italian community groups to speak on topics like falls prevention. She volunteers at the local library and with a philosophical society in the city. She has returned to gentle yoga with a teacher she once, by pure chance, studied nutrition alongside decades earlier.
She has also found new stages for her voice. At Los Miércoles de Magia – “Magic Wednesdays” – a Marrickville gathering where women share their knowledge, Elena gave a talk on “What The Four Agreements, the seven chakras and belly dancing all have in common”. Thirty women came, laughed and asked her back.
And when a workshop called Recipes for Connection invited women to cook a dish from home, Elena chose her late mother’s dessert – the one she would take to parties as a young girl. It was selected, photographed and published in a magazine. “I loved that,” she says, “because it included me and it let me honour my mother.”
Elena is deeply aware of how isolation can affect people, especially older members of the community. She has taken courses on dementia to better understand it. “I see so many people who sit here and won’t even look at you,” she says. “So I sit down beside them and say, ‘Hi. Hiiiii.’ The next day they probably won’t remember, but you have to keep trying.”
“You could never go unnoticed”
Not long ago, at a wedding, Elena met a doctor who had worked in her old community. “All my patients used to talk about you,” the doctor told her. “They all went to your classes. You’re famous!” Elena laughs, telling it. She hadn’t realised the mark she’d left. “I liked knowing I hadn’t gone unnoticed,” she says. And the doctor’s reply seems to sum her up perfectly:
“You could never, ever go unnoticed.”
Back at the coffee shop in Double Bay, watching her greet each person by name and in their own language, it’s easy to see why.
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About Angie Vriens
Angie Vriens is Head of Community Programs and Inclusion at Holdsworth, leading engagement and inclusion initiatives across Woollahra. For her, the Diversity Spotlight series is about making sure members of our community feel seen and heard. Everyone carries a story worth sharing and when we listen, we discover how much we have in common and how much richer our community is for its differences.
Our Place, Our Woollahra is proudly funded by Woollahra Municipal Council in partnership with Holdsworth. If you'd like to share your story for a future Diversity Spotlight, we'd love to hear from you.
Please contact Angie Vriens.