You've spent decades building a life for others,
The Wellbeing Design Studio offers two nine-week, face-to-face, interactive courses for people navigating retirement, pre-retirement, and other major life transitions. Led by Stuart Porteous, a landscape architect, social ecologist, and educator who has spent fifty years working with people and place across Victoria, Queensland, the Northern Territory and Tasmania. The two courses work beautifully as a sequence, but each stands entirely on its own. The distinction is simple: one designs the approach, the other redesigns the arrival.
Retirement feels distant yet surprisingly close. You’re beginning to wonder: “Who will I be without my work identity? What will genuinely satisfy me? How do I prepare for a transition I can’t quite imagine yet?”
This course is for people who are still working and sense that arriving at retirement well requires more than financial planning. It begins with an honest audit of current identity — the roles, relationships, and purposes that presently define you, and what will genuinely travel into the next chapter and what won’t.
From that foundation, the work moves into the deeper question the course considers its real work: “who are you becoming, not just what will you do?”
The second half brings that inner clarity into relationship with the physical world. You’ll learn to read your living environments with fresh eyes — understanding how space either supports or undermines your emerging self, and making practical, intentional changes accordingly. The rhythm of daily life is also designed: the structures, rituals, and relationships that create meaning once the scaffolding of work has gone.
The course closes with a personalised wellbeing design document — a genuinely useful, written synthesis of what you’ve discovered about yourself and a clear direction for what comes next.
What distinguishes this course is its refusal to treat retirement as an ending that needs managing. It treats it as an uplifting threshold — one worth crossing with as much intention as any major design project.
You’ll leave with:
The structure of work has disappeared. Some days feel liberating; others, surprisingly empty. You’re discovering that retirement isn’t just about having free time — it’s about knowing who you are when nobody’s asking what you do.
This course works with people who are already on the other side, and who are discovering that retirement, for all its freedoms, doesn’t automatically deliver the life they imagined. It’s designed for those somewhere in the span from recently retired to a decade or more in, who feel a gap between what they hoped for and what they’re actually experiencing.
The course begins by naming that gap honestly, without shame. Participants explore what they genuinely value at this stage of life — not what they should value, or what they valued in their working years — and use the Five Streams framework, designed by Stuart, to assess where their current life is nourishing and where it’s starving them.
From there, the work becomes practical and environmental. Participants look closely at how they’re actually living — in their homes, their communities, their daily routines — and begin redesigning those environments to better match who they now are. The course draws on landscape architecture, social ecology, and Indigenous relational wisdom to offer a richer vocabulary for what makes a life genuinely sustaining at this stage.
The course also attends to something that tends not to get spoken about directly: the ongoing renegotiation of identity, purpose, and contribution that retirement asks of people, often for many years. It takes that renegotiation seriously and gives it a practical, creative form.
You’ll leave with a clear design for your current chapter — a document you’ve built yourself, grounded in genuine self-knowledge and reflection, that you can keep returning to and refining.
You’ll leave with:
The Wellbeing Design Studio offers two nine-week, face-to-face, interactive courses for people navigating retirement, pre-retirement, and other major life transitions.Led by Stuart Porteous, a landscape architect, social ecologist, and educator who has spent fifty years working with people and place across Victoria, Queensland, the Northern Territory and Tasmania. The two courses work beautifully as a sequence, but each stands entirely on its own. The distinction is simple: one designs the approach, the other redesigns the arrival.
Sometimes the most important conversations happen one-to-one. These two private sessions give you dedicated time with Stuart to explore what’s emerging for you personally, questions that don’t quite fit the group, decisions you’re sitting with, or simply the chance to go deeper into your own design process. Confidential, unhurried, and tailored entirely to you.
Your enrolment doesn’t end when the course does. You remain part of a growing community of people who are thinking seriously about how they want to live — sharing ideas, resources, and encouragement as life continues to unfold. It’s a place to stay connected to both the work and the people who’ve walked alongside you.
Ten percent of every course fee is directed to three organisations doing work that matters:
The Black Hill Microforest Project in Ballarat — a living environmental education initiative involving more than 300 children and community partners, co-led by Stuart alongside Colleen Philippa from 15 Trees
The Microforest Collective A.C.T — founded by Stuart’s son Mitch, expanding the microforest model nationally.
Your investment in your own next chapter simultaneously plants trees, educates children, and honours Indigenous elders and Indigenous-led stewardship of Country. That is not an incidental detail. It is part of what this work is for.
The Wisden Room, Soldiers Hill, Ballarat
Wadawurrung Country, Victoria
For each cohort, one of the three elders from Yurrwi Island, Crocodile Islands NT will be sharing in a mid-course session on wellbeing from an Indigenous perspective.
Between 2001 and the early 2013, I lived and worked in remote Yolŋu island and mainland communities in northeast Arnhem Land. Between 2016 and 2022 I lived with Anindiliyakwa Clans on Groote Eylandt. Those times were not a research project or just a professional placement. It was life shared, demanding, transformative, and relational in ways I am still understanding.
Within the first year, I was adopted into Yolŋu kinship by Lapulung Dhamarrandji of Yurrwi (Milingimbi Island), receiving the name Dhanbaniny Wanybarrnga Dhamarrandji. That adoption is not a credential. It is a responsibility and a relationship that continues to shape everything I do.
Lapulung Dhamarrandji
Elder, artist, musician, cultural custodian and community leader — Yurrwi (Milingimbi Island)
Lapulung has spent more than four decades building, sustaining, and expanding community life on Yurrwi through art, music, governance, and cultural ceremony. As founder of the Gattjirrk Cultural Festival in 1982 — now more than forty years old — he embodies the understanding that creativity and contribution are not luxuries of youth but the very substance of a purposeful life at any age. His presence in these courses speaks to what the Five Streams of Contribution and Creativity can look like when they are lived, not planned, across a lifetime. Lapulung is also my adopting brother in Yolŋu kinship, and it is through his generosity that I carry the name Dhanbaniny Wanybarrnga Dhamarrandji.
Gwen Warrbirrirr
Elder, educator, first language specialist and cultural advisor — Yurrwi (Milingimbi Island)
For more than forty-one years, Gwen Warrbirrirr gave herself to the children and families of Milingimbi School, as teacher, linguist, cultural advisor, and keeper of Yolŋu language and learning. Her career was not a single role but a deepening spiral of commitment, each position more richly informed than the last by everything she had seen and carried before it. Gwen represents what the stream of Connection looks like when it is truly rooted, in language, in place, in the patient, accumulated knowing of a community held tenderly over decades. Her quiet authority is its own kind of teaching.
Ganygulpa Dhurrkay
Elder, community leader, board member and civic voice — Yurrwi (Milingimbi Island)
Ganygulpa Dhurrkay has led from within her community across multiple spheres of civic life, governance, culture, commerce, and community authority. Her engagement with institutions that shape daily life on Yurrwi speaks to a form of Contribution that is neither loud nor self-promoting, but sustained, accountable, and deeply purposeful. She embodies the understanding that civic presence, showing up, speaking clearly, holding others to account, is not the work of the young and ambitious alone. It is, perhaps, most powerfully the work of those who have earned the right to say what needs to be said.
If this course doesn't change something significant for you, you shouldn't have to pay for it. That's not a marketing line. It's a genuine expression of confidence in this work, and a commitment to the kind of integrity that I believe should underpin any serious professional relationship.
If you complete the full nine-week course and honestly feel that the experience has not been personally transformative in any meaningful way, I will refund your course fee in full, with one transparent deduction.
Fifteen percent of every course fee is distributed at the time of enrolment to organisations doing important work in the world: the Black Hill Microforest Project and the Microforest Collective. That contribution is made on your behalf as part of your enrolment and cannot be recalled once given. Your refund will therefore be 85% of the fee you paid.
No argument. No drawn-out process. A straightforward, respectful resolution.
This guarantee exists to protect participants who engage fully and honestly with the work and still feel it hasn't delivered. It is not available to participants who disengage from the process.
To be eligible for a refund, you will need to have:
completed all weekly reflective exercises in your personal design journal, engaged genuinely with all residential, lifestyle, and joyspan assessments, actively participated in the group work across all nine sessions, and attended both individual consultations with Stuart at weeks three and seven.
If significant life circumstances prevented you from completing one or more of these elements, please speak with Stuart directly. Genuine exceptions exist and will be considered with care and without judgement. What this guarantee is not designed to cover is non-participation, turning up in body but not in practice.
If at the conclusion of the nine weeks you feel the guarantee applies to your experience, simply contact Stuart within fourteen days of the final session. You'll be asked to briefly describe what you felt was missing or undelivered, not to justify your claim, but so that Stuart can understand where the work fell short and do better. Your refund will be processed within fourteen days of that conversation.
There are no forms, no panels, no uncomfortable hoops to jump through. Just an honest conversation and a prompt resolution.
This guarantee is offered directly by Stuart Porteous trading as the Wellbeing Design Studio, ABN 33900635820. It applies to both the 'Before Retirement — Designing the Years Ahead' and 'Life In Retirement — Designing for the Best Years Yet' nine-week courses.
The guarantee applies to the course fee only. It does not cover any travel, accommodation, or other costs you may have incurred in attending sessions.
For couples who have enrolled together, the guarantee applies to each participant individually on the basis of their own engagement with and experience of the course. A refund for one partner does not automatically apply to the other.
The 85% refund reflects the non-recoverable third-party contribution described above and constitutes the full extent of the financial remedy available under this guarantee. No additional compensation is offered or implied.
This guarantee does not affect any rights you may hold under the Australian Consumer Law, which provides protections that apply regardless of any voluntary guarantee offered by a service provider. If you are unsure of your rights, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission website at accc.gov.au is a helpful and accessible resource.
Stuart reserves the right to withdraw this guarantee from future course offerings at any time, but it will always honour the guarantee for any participant who enrolled while it was in effect.
Because asking someone to invest nine weeks and a real financial commitment in their own life is a significant request, and it should be backed by something more than good intentions.
And because in thirty years of working with people through significant transitions, the participants who have engaged fully with this kind of process have without exception found something of genuine value in it.
That's not a boast. It's an honest record, and the clearest indication I can offer you that this work is worth your trust.
In each cohort, Stuart reserves one place for someone for whom the full investment would be a genuine barrier. This isn't a discount or a hardship fund — it's a recognition that the people who most need this work aren't always the people best positioned to pay for it at this moment in their lives.
If that's you, Stuart would welcome a quiet conversation. There's no application form and no means test. Just an honest exchange about where you are and whether this is the right fit.
A participant who has the means may also contribute toward that reserved place for someone else. Some people at this life stage are looking for exactly that kind of purposeful generosity, and it transforms the supported place from Stuart's gift alone into the community's.
