Tuesday, 12 November 2024

Breast cancer

Pauline RICHARDS (Cranbourne) (19:14): (918) My adjournment is to the Minister for Health, and the action I seek is an update on how the Victorian government is supporting women with metastatic breast cancer. On Sunday 8 September we lost our darling, silly, sassy, smart, supersavvy and stoic Janine Callanan after a fierce battle with metastatic cancer. Janine was so full of love, and I felt that love in the room at Ringwood Private Hospital in her final days, when she brought so many people together. I am in awe of the love from J’s family, who shared her with us, especially in those last precious days, including Vanessa, Leigh and all the Queens and St James children. I am grateful to have watched this woman demonstrate how to have a great love in her life – in her partner and husband John Sexton. Both of their eyes sparkled when they spoke to and about each other. J had great love for her parents, Paul and Norma, her brothers and sisters, Meghan, Paul, Kate, Sean and Patrick and of course her many cousins, nieces and nephews, who she followed with pride. J had huge love for her friends, because Janine was a ripper friend, and that is what I miss most. But more than any other part of her life, the one role she loved most was as a mother to her five children. So to Matilda, Charlie, George, Henry and Mary: she loved you fiercely. And her children are so much like her mother.

Twenty-two years ago I met this woman at kinder. She was always just on time but usually a little bit late, and alongside Beth Barcley and Leanne Cairnduff we became each other’s village. Janine loved being a mother, and she loved to make us feel good about ourselves. She never used words like ‘validate’, because she was not a Kumbaya type, but I reckon that was exactly what she did with her smile as big as Christmas, sparkling wit and gentle encouragement that we were good enough. I could have sold tickets to a spot beside Janine on a Saturday watching netball or on Sunday at soccer.

Janine was first diagnosed with cancer 11 years ago and continued to have a huge life with metastatic breast cancer since 2018. And when I said she lived with cancer, did she ever. In the last year alone she worked in a job she loved at the Australian Council for Educational Research alongside her lovely friend Rose Knight. She travelled to Europe and Vietnam. She was an accomplished historian, including on the SBS program Who Do You Think You Are? with Heather Ewart. And of course she continued raising her family and raising awareness and support for metastatic breast cancer, including with her beloved Thursday Girls. She walked 5 kilometres just six weeks before we lost her. I pay credit to Janine Margaret Callanan for always being more about action than talk, and I very much look forward to the minister’s response.