As global demand for longevity treatments surges, Australia is fast becoming a player in this lucrative industry.
3 min
There was a time — not so long ago — when the idea of an indulgent spa day was simply about relaxing massages and therapeutic facials, followed by a five-star lunch and perhaps a dip in a mineral pool. But the health and wellness industry has evolved rapidly, bringing with it an explosion of cutting-edge treatments designed to slow ageing, boost vitality, and extend healthspan.
Cold-water plunge pools, infrared saunas, and float tanks have taken over as the staples of health spas, wellness centres, and high-end gyms. Even real estate developments are tapping into this trend. But now, high-tech longevity treatments — from cryotherapy and IV infusions to genetic testing and advanced cellular therapies — are taking the wellness scene in Australia to unprecedented levels.
A burgeoning market globally, the health and wellness industry is estimated to have been worth more than US$5.6 trillion in 2022. Projections suggest this figure will grow to a staggering $13 trillion by 2031, with Australia steadily catching up to the US and Europe, where longevity treatments are thriving. High-profile figures like Gwyneth Paltrow, Jennifer Aniston, Chris Hemsworth, and even Tom Brady are among the faces championing biohacking and experimental therapies, from stem cell infusions to blood transfusions.
The Rise of Longevity Clinics in Australia
One of the key players in Australia’s emerging longevity scene is Tristan Sternson, founder of Super Young. Sternson’s foray into the world of longevity treatments began as he approached 40 — a milestone that made him reflect on his health. As a former elite athlete, the transition from feeling invincible to feeling vulnerable led him to explore solutions that would help him reclaim vitality.
Initially frustrated by the lack of accessible health data locally, Sternson turned to overseas clinics for tests and treatments that painted a clearer picture of his biological needs. His experience inspired him to create Super Young, a Melbourne-based clinic offering evidence-based therapies tailored to individual needs. Services include cryotherapy, IV infusions, genetic testing, and biological age assessments. Memberships range from $85–$289 per week, while one-off tests start at $899.
Sternson emphasises the importance of personalised treatments. “I want people to start with the evidence side of it so they can really understand their own body and what treatments will work for them,” he says.
The Science of Longevity Medicine
Dr Karen Coates, an integrative medical doctor and a presenter for The Longevity Project at Gwinganna Lifestyle Retreat, echoes Sternson’s emphasis on personalisation. She explains that longevity isn’t just about living longer but about living better — optimising health today while securing vitality for the future.
“One-size-fits-all approaches don’t apply when it comes to longevity,” says Dr Coates. “It’s about understanding your body’s genetic makeup and adopting personalised strategies to support health and longevity.”
At Gwinganna’s four-night Longevity Project retreat, guests can undergo gene testing, biological age assessments, and learn strategies to bridge the gap between chronological and biological age. Packages for the retreat range from $2915 to $5460.
Biohacking for All Budgets
Not all longevity treatments come with hefty price tags. Health coach Camilla Thompson points out that simple lifestyle adjustments — like cold showers to stimulate circulation or adding Celtic sea salt to water for better hydration — can supplement advanced therapies.
While advanced treatments like stem cell and peptide therapies are yet to gain widespread regulatory approval in Australia, Sternson is optimistic about their future. He envisions a time when longevity centres will be as common as gyms, giving clients the tools to monitor and manage their health with precision.
“What I’d love to see is health insurance companies get on board,” Sternson adds. “If they can give discounts for safe driving based on car data, why not for healthy habits based on glucose monitoring or other health indicators?”
As Australia continues to embrace longevity medicine, it’s clear the industry is poised to reshape not just health and wellness but how Australians approach ageing itself.
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Randy Boyagoda’s new novel, “Lords of Serendipity,” delivers a biting satire of cheating, politics and dysfunction across modern universities.
5 min
Administrative cowardice. Rampant cheating. The soaking and scamming of undergrads and grad students. Performative wokeism. Intensifying competition for international tuition dollars from an expansive China.
These are either the latest dire headlines about American higher ed or the myriad subplots of “Lords of Serendipity,” an ambitious new novel by Randy Boyagoda. Unlike most campus fiction, its scope extends well beyond the cloister of the liberal arts classroom to whammy the entire university system, from its financial model to its function within a globalized economy. Along the way, it skewers its lightning-rod targets with a precision too sharp to be considered entirely fictional.
That its author is not only well-versed in satire, having written four other novels in the genre, but is also a professor of English at the University of Toronto and an experienced college administrator, further blurs the lines between comic fiction and brutal fact. It’s the kind of no-holds-barred book only a consummate insider would know to write—but only one who is also conveniently outside the American university system could get away with writing.
“This is someone who’s got the inside dope on what can go on at universities, especially with international students, and what kind of con games are going on,” said Margaret Atwood, a friend and fellow Torontonian.
The novel, like Boyagoda himself, is often very funny—even as the dilemmas its characters face read as tragedy. Its cast includes the bickering members of a Sri Lankan hotel cleaner’s family, insecure American freshmen, dead-end third-tier college professors and their highflying Ivy League counterparts and dispirited university functionaries. An old-fashioned Dickensian tale, it sweeps across continents and campuses, from a classic liberal-arts college to a stand-in for Harvard University to an urban technical school to the dilapidated buildings of a state-run university in Sri Lanka.
“I’m a joyful person,” Boyagoda said in an interview, though he prefers to see his outlook on academia as “hopeful” rather than optimistic. He smiles and laughs frequently. He bikes everywhere. He derives energy from his students and from his four daughters, ages 14 to 20. They help him and his American wife, Anna, also an educator, care for Boyagoda’s father, an immigrant from Sri Lanka who has dementia and lives with the family.
The germ of the novel came to Boyagoda during the pandemic, when he was serving as a vice-dean. An urban legend was circulating about a statistics grad student selling passing grades to international students. The cheating scheme itself may well have been apocryphal, but it felt tantalizingly plausible.
“As a novelist, it stayed with me,” Boyagoda said. “Who would sell grades for a stats course? Why would someone buy grades? What’s motivating them? Why wouldn’t the university be doing something about it?” What he didn’t want to do, he explained, was write “another novel about a creative writing professor and his drama with students.”
In addition to writing novels—the first of which was a finalist for Canada’s prestigious Giller Prize; he’s written eight books in total—Boyagoda teaches literature full-time. For his students next semester, kids raised in a purportedly “post-literature era,” he’s assigning three 700-page novels, he noted mischievously, books by George Eliot, Ralph Ellison and Kiran Desai.
On RateMyProfessors, students remark on Boyagoda’s heavy assignments, tough grading and distaste for cellphones, but also hail his “comedy.” When alerted to these reviews, Boyagoda laughed. “Guilty as charged,” he said.
“Randy’s one of those people in academia who is very well educated but doesn’t have an ounce of superiority about him,” said John Irving, who frequently guest lectures in Boyagoda’s classroom. “It’s amazing to see how willing students are to talk in his classrooms, how little afraid they feel of being mocked or put down—he gets complete candor out of them.”
Negotiating competing interests seems to come naturally to him. Like many college campuses, after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, the University of Toronto was embroiled in protests, encampments and discord; part of the school’s response was to convene a working group on civil discourse. Boyagoda was put in charge, serving for two years. It’s the kind of thankless task many professors would flee from, but Boyagoda relished the prospect and thinks the group, which is ongoing, made progress.
He has since pivoted to another formidable academic concern: the waning prestige of the humanities. In July, Boyagoda became the director of the Jackman Humanities Institute and special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science. This fall, he is starting a series of gatherings he calls the Dead Book Club. (Dead writers feature heavily among his favorites: St. Augustine, Dante, William Faulkner, Evelyn Waugh, Saul Bellow.)
“The goal is to encourage students to read for its own sake and have conversation for its own sake,” Boyagoda said. “The importance of the humanities will be revealed to those who participate.”
“Lords of Serendipity,” which publishes next week, reflects Boyagoda’s commitment to the pursuit of knowledge: “I’m supposed to say I learn more from my students than they do from me, but no,” Boyagoda said. “I enjoy sharing my excitement and joy about literature and ideas. There are these moments when you are teaching and you can see someone’s face change because they didn’t know something and then they did. That moment when you’re actually watch someone enlarge themselves is deeply satisfying.”
In literary circles, Boyagoda is often referred to as a Catholic novelist, a description he embraces. “A novelist willing to give shape and voice to contemporary religious experience is needed,” Boyagoda said. “I understand myself as a Catholic novelist, provided that I’m not only a Catholic novelist, I’m also a South Asian novelist and I’m a Canadian novelist. I don’t want to be captive to one label.”
His characters, he said, are subjected to what he calls “Graham Greene character situations.”
“They are trying to do good in a fallen world and realize the most they can do is less harm than someone else would do in that same role,” he explained. “They have to accept they are complicit in something that provides some good thing to others. It’s a very Graham Greene way of thinking about sacrifice.”
The campus green they inhabit is a febrile zone in which lofty ideals and cynicism regularly collide. It’s a place where a traditional holiday college celebration is now an occasion for political protest. Kids freely police one another inside and out of the classroom with social media their constant, ready weapon of choice. International students, knowing their family’s financial futures hinge on their degrees, operate in terror of failure and deportation.
Early readers of the book include Gary Shteyngart and Junot Diaz, both of whom have taught at universities and written comic novels. They each contacted Boyagoda midway through to say, in essence, “You nailed it.”
As biting as “Lords of Serendipity” can be, Boyagoda’s faith in higher education remains undaunted.
“It’s absurd that we live in societies that make the decision to take people between the ages of 18 and 22, when they are most physically capable of contributing to our nations and communities, and tell them, ‘Go away for four years, and read and learn and have conversations,’” he said. “I want students to be aware of what an incredible privilege that is.”
Corrections & Amplifications
Randy Boyagoda is a special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science at the University of Toronto. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said he is a special adviser to the dean of humanities. (Corrected on Sept. 2)
