Some walks help you clear your head. Others are taken because the sun is out and the coffee is better in another city. And then walks carry something bigger – grief, gratitude, hope, and the quiet determination that things can, and should, get better.
Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!This June, Australians are lacing up for the Breast Cancer Trials Big Bold Walk, a nationwide movement raising vital funds for breast cancer research. But for some participants, it’s more than a fundraiser. It’s personal. It’s lived. And, it’s shaped by years of waiting rooms, treatment plans, and the long shadow of a diagnosis that rarely affects just one person.
For Jane Inger, the walk is all of those things at once. She’s had breast cancer once. Her mum, Jean, has had it twice. And between them, their story spans three decades of change in treatment, survival, and what it means to keep going.
A diagnosis that changes everything – twice over
Jean was 44 when she was first diagnosed in 1994. At the time, she was running a small guesthouse in Lincolnshire and, by all accounts, living a life built around movement – as a former fitness instructor, healthy eating advocate, and someone who took family hiking holidays in stride.
So when breast cancer arrived, it didn’t fit the picture she had of herself.
“She had previously been a fitness instructor… so her diagnosis was a huge shock,” Jane says.
Treatment came quickly – a mastectomy followed by chemotherapy and radiotherapy, delivered an hour away from home. Like many women at the time, Jean had little visibility over options or pathways. The system moved, but she often felt like she was simply moving through it.
For Jane, watching her mother go through it left a mark. “There isn’t really much you can do,” she says. “So one thing I did was walk across the country… raising money for cancer research.” Even then, movement became meaning.
When history repeats, but the outcome shifts
Twenty years later, in 2014, Jean faced breast cancer again – this time in her other breast. The diagnosis was familiar, but the experience was different. Treatments had improved. Outcomes were stronger. The language around care had changed.
It wasn’t easy, but it was better.
By then, life had taken Jane to Adelaide. She had two children, a new home, and an ocean between her and her mother. When Jean was unwell, Jane couldn’t be there physically – a distance that made the experience even heavier.
And yet Jean kept going.
The diagnosis that came closer to home
Because of her family history, Jane was considered higher risk and monitored closely with annual mammograms. It was one of those routine checks that doesn’t feel particularly remarkable – until it is.
In May 2024, aged 53, Jane was diagnosed with HER2 positive breast cancer. The kind of news that rearranges everything in a single sentence.
Doctors picked up her diagnosis early through screening, and she joined the Lollipop breast cancer trial at Monash University, part of a broader network of research helping shape future treatment pathways.
What followed was treatment alongside life: surgery, radiotherapy, fatigue, recovery – and somewhere in the middle of it all, a decision to keep moving.
Walking through treatment, not around it
Jane had previously been a runner. During her recovery, she found her way back to it through the Big Bold Walk – a 100km challenge that landed right in the middle of her radiotherapy.
Not exactly ideal timing. But sometimes timing isn’t the point.
“Taking part in the 100km Big Bold Walk was a massive success, motivating me to keep moving even through the radiotherapy tiredness,” she says.
“I raised funds, yes, but the impact it had on my own wellbeing and mental health was huge. I felt I was doing something positive and part of a community of support.”
In a time defined by appointments and uncertainty, the act of walking became something steadier. Not a cure. Not a distraction. Just forward motion.
A mother, a daughter, and the distance between “then” and “now”
Despite living more than 16,000 kilometres apart, Jane and Jean are closer than ever. Their connection now runs through shared experience – not just of illness, but of survival across very different eras of treatment.
“The improvement in treatment from mum’s experience to mine is beyond compare,” Jane says. “In another ten years, let’s hope we’re even further along.”
It’s a quiet reminder of what research actually does. Not in abstract statistics, but in real people. In earlier detection. In more options. In better outcomes. In time gained.
“My breast cancer was treated effectively because of the research done to date,” she adds. “I want those with more difficult cancer experiences to be able to be treated as effectively as I was.”
The Big Bold Walk: more than kilometres
The Big Bold Walk, led by Breast Cancer Trials, invites Australians to walk – in any way, at any pace, over any distance – throughout June to raise funds for life-saving research.
It’s not about athletic achievement. It’s about participation. About turning something as ordinary as walking into something that can help shift outcomes for the future.
Breast Cancer Trials Community Fundraising Coordinator Kate Campbell says the mission is simple but urgent: to reach a world that no longer loses lives to breast cancer.
Because one in seven women in Australia will face a diagnosis in their lifetime. And behind every number is a person – someone’s mother, daughter, sister, friend.
What happens when movement becomes more than movement
Jane’s story doesn’t sit neatly in inspiration or tragedy. It sits somewhere more real – in between hospital corridors and walking shoes, in the long stretch between diagnosis and recovery, in the shared understanding that progress is never abstract when you’re the one living it.
And maybe that’s what the Big Bold Walk really represents.
Not just steps. Not just kilometres.
But the idea that movement – in all its forms – can carry us forward, even when the path itself has changed
