Some legacies are statues. Jane McGrath's legacy answers the phone at 2am in a country town when a frightened woman has just found a lump.
The flight attendant and the fast bowler
She was Jane Steele from Paignton in Devon, flying for Virgin Atlantic, when she met a shy Australian cricketer in Hong Kong in 1995. She followed the love to Cronulla and became one of ours. Then in 1997, at just 31 — before the wedding, before the children she'd been told might never come — breast cancer.
What stayed with her from that first fight wasn't only the surgery and the chemotherapy. It was her breast care nurse — the person who, in Jane's own words, let her be “Jane McGrath — the friend, the mother and the wife” instead of just the patient. Hold that sentence. It's about to become national infrastructure.
Love, organised
When the cancer returned in her bones in 2003, Jane and Glenn didn't retreat. In 2005 they founded the McGrath Foundation with a mission she set herself: a breast care nurse for every Australian family experiencing breast cancer — free, no matter where they live. She died on 22 June 2008, aged 42, with the first nurses funded and the mission underway.
The following January, the Sydney Cricket Ground turned pink for the first Jane McGrath Day — and it has every summer since. What began with a handful of nurses has grown into hundreds, standing beside more than 160,000 families, most of them in the regional towns that would otherwise have no one. In 2025 the Foundation widened its arms to families facing any cancer. Her sentence about her nurse became everyone's.
Why she belongs beside our other women
Belinda's page in our Book carries the breast cancer story from the patient's side — the openness that sent a generation of women to their GPs. Jane's carries it from the builder's side — the care that catches those women when the news is bad. Two Australian women, gone within two years of each other, who between them changed both ends of the same story. The Book exists to notice exactly that.
Rest gently, Jane. Every January, the whole country wears your colour.
If breast cancer is part of your story, McGrath Cancer Care Nurses are free — mcgrathfoundation.com.au — and Cancer Council is on 13 11 20.