I'm now a Zero Hero
I'm hosting an event because I want a world where there are ZERO deaths from breast cancer. I believe every death from breast cancer is one too many. To achieve this, I’m raising funds for more research. All donations made to this page will help do exactly that.
The National Breast Cancer Foundation (NBCF) is Australia’s leading national body funding game-changing breast cancer research with money raised entirely by the Australian public.
I really believe research is the best way to prevent deaths, and improve how breast cancer is diagnosed, managed and treated. NBCF is working towards one goal: zero deaths from breast cancer by 2030. Together we can help them get there.
Click 'Donate' to make a secure online donation and help me reach my goal. Every donation, big or small, will help me get there. Please donate today.
All donations over $2 are tax deductible and you will be issued with a tax-deductible receipt via email as soon as you make your donation.
Thank you so much for your support!
Karajane Chapman
Event Information
Sunday 18th September 11:00 - 13:0010 SURREY ST, RINGWOOD VIC 3134
My Achievements
1. My Pink Hero Pledge
2. Uploaded Profile Picture
3. Shared My Page
4. Received First Donation
5. Halfway to Fundraising Goal
6. Reached Fundraising Goal
My Updates
It's My Birthday Soon!
Sunday 5th Mar
It's my birthday soon, and I am famously difficult to choose presents for! Please, when you're considering a gift for me, donate the money you were going to spend instead to the Breast Cancer Foundation.
Lots of love,
Karajane Penelope
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Speech for Miss Diamond International - Karajane Chapman: Breast Cancer Stole My Mother
Tuesday 31st Jan Share
We Did It!
Tuesday 15th Nov Well team, there are only two more sleeps before I leave for the pageant, and we far surpassed the goals I made for my fundraiser!I can't tell you how it feels to be at the end of this journey. I lack the words. But I'm so glad to be here right now, knowing that in total we raised $798 over the past year for the Breast Cancer Foundation.
There will be a day of reckoning for this awful disease: its cure. I hope I'm there when it happens. Knowing that this disease will never kill again is my ultimate lifetime goal, and because of the support behind me during the lead-up to this pageant, I know that I can do it!
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The Invites For the Next Morning Tea Have Gone Out!
Thursday 15th Sep The invites for my next Morning Tea have gone out this week. If you have not received an invite and would like to come to the next Morning Tea, which will be held on Sunday, September 18th 2022, please contact me via Facebook, email or phone. Share
The Official Invites Have Gone Out!
Tuesday 12th Jul
You Only Get One Chance to Escape
Sunday 10th Jul
When I was kid myself, I loved to teach other kids how to play the piano. There is music inside of us all, and when kids access that part of them that can play - and every child and play - something special happens (I have studied neuroscience and neurology and I can tell you that when a person makes a discovery like this, it really does create something special inside their brains).
At school, the kids would gather around the piano in the music room and I would teach them music by Beethoven, Handel, Mozart...the look of sheer delight on their faces when they realised they'd just played something by one of the masters was all the payment I needed. It still is, but I'd like to raise money to support those who are suffering from the disease which took my mother's life,
My mother is Penelope Eileen Brill, and hers was a tragic life. Her dreams were shattered when, at thirteen, she underwent an osteotomy to straighten her right hip, which had been dislocated at birth. This is called hip dysplasia. Mum had been a prodigal roller skater and dreamed of competing professionally. That dream was taken from her when she at the tender age of thirteen, and instead of spending all of her free time at the skating rink, which was just down the road from her house, Mum spent most of that year in traction.
She met my father on a blind date soon after her mother died.
My kingdom for the name of the person who set them up, despite the fact that I wouldn't be here if they hadn't.
My father was a serial killer. He wasn't "active" during my lifetime as far as I know, but he was paid for the work that he did do in duffel bags full of money and we were constantly on the move. My father was a sociopath, you see - he'd been diagnosed with Antisocial Personality Disorder whilst serving time in Long Bay Prison for manslaughter. Ironically, he was convicted of killing a man in self-defence. The only time he was caught, he had a legitimate reason for his actions (the victim had just stabbed him).
Posthumously, my colleagues and mentor have remarked upon the fact that my father would meet Cleckley's definition of a Primary Psychopath in addition to his being a sociopath. Being a psychologist myself, I agree with this. My father was also a Type II alcoholic, and he drank to try to escape from his demons. But his demons became larger when he drank, and he beat my mother like she was a man twice his size. When I was fourteen he started in on me. At that age, I had just had my own dreams of competing in the Olympics stolen from me. My parents hadn't paid my gymnastics tuition fees...for five years. The coaches had been happy to let this slide when, on the day that they were going to tell my mother that I couldn't be trained for free, I suddenly did a back handspring and three layout somersaults on the high beam. This is an Olympic level acrobatics element that is now illegal. It wasn't then. I was eleven and I had perfected it on the "beam" in my backyard - a plank of wood stretched between two sawhorses. The wood was rough, but the top of it became smooth due to constant use as I practised on it.
The picture, below, accidentally portrays my family's situation spectacularly - there's eleven-year-old me with the family dog, a pedigree tricolour collie. She had been given to my mother, whose family had acquired something of a patrician status within New Zealand society, when I was four years old.
My mother's money was still mostly there when we acquired this dog.
Then there's the beam, the only piece of equipment that I had to train on except for the iron bar (not pictured) upon which I did pull ups every day. Don't assume that my "beam" was secured to the sawhorses, because it wasn't. How I didn't go flying off that thing as I practised back and forward somersaults, handsprings, double pirouettes, and a famously difficult element called the Onodi, I'll never know. Mum wasn't comfortable with me training on that thing, but what could she do?
Then, behind the beam, we've got a broken down jalopy and a corrugated iron fence, both of which are true representations of my father, who by the time I was two years old, had drained the family fortune, and forced my mother to sell all of the family businesses and properties, including her childhood home, which had been in the family for generations.
When I was five-years-old and had just completed my first year at primary school, my father decided that it was time to move. He at first told us all that we were moving to Australia, the land of sunshine and oranges. Instead, we spent three months travelling around the North Island, during which time my father behaved like a king and spent my mother's money like a king too. We saw New Zealand/Aotearoa from the perspective of tourists with a sound knowledge base of the country already and I experienced things that none of my peers ever would in the city at which we ended up - Rotorua, the town upon which Once Were Warriors was based.
My father was supposed to be looking for a small business to invest in as we t ravelled around the country, but instead we behaved like royalty. Mum always preached the importance of making the most of your situation, and she practised this herself. She taught us proper table manners, and we began to learn not only about which fork was used for which table item, but also about our ancestry. We have an enormous family tree which stood at attention beside the tapestries my mother made in every house we ever lived in. At that time it was in a storage unit in Rotorua and my mother retrieved it so that we could study the names of our ancestors together. Later, my aunty would distribute enormous books to her brothers and sisters containing information on the family members who until then had been just names to me.
My parents dressed my sister and I in fine clothing and foreign tourists stopped in their tracks, tearing their eyes away from the magnificent geothermal activities they were looking at to look instead at my sister and me. They snapped pictures of us everywhere we went. My parents delighted in this and really played to it. It was, truthfully, a lot of fun.
All good things come to an end and by the time we ended up in Rotorua we were bankrupt. My mother was the first person on that enormous tree to have lost her inheritance. But my father, being a smooth talker who was apparently quite handsome at his peak in his mid-thirties when he met my mother, lured this rich, grieving, unworldly woman straight into he net. Mum had spent the last decade on Norfolk Island, and she returned home to care for her mother when her mother was diagnosed with bowel cancer. My father then slowly broke my mother down with his acidic tongue.
People often wonder how victims of domestic violence walk into abusive relationships. They don't understand that a perpetrator never throws the first punch as soon as they meet their victim. No, they scan their victim first to detect vulnerabilities - and my mother had plenty. She'd been sent to an expensive boarding school, but she dropped out as soon as she turned sixteen. She hated school and thought secretly that this was her fault because she was ""dumb."
She was actually shockingly intelligent, and behind the rich clothes and little spontaneous photo shoots we were conducting out in the open, she had made discoveries about the growth of the human brain twenty years ahead of today's neurologists and neuroscientists. She established for herself the idea, for example, that children should not be exposed to screens for longer than half an hour a day, and that they should not be taken to big supermarkets and malls, places that are bright, loud, and scary to children whilst also offering sweet prizes at their eye level. She mixed folk knowledge - like the fact that reading to your young children will help them learn to read themselves - with her own discoveries (she had worked as a kindergarten teacher). Because of my mother's attention and influence, I skipped two years in primary school. I was reading at the age of eighteen months and playing the piano by ear at the age of two (we were living in a farmhouse in Foxton by then, and Mum used the expansive front room as a Reading Room. The piano was also kept there and she played for us every single day. One day she stepped away to check on a cake she was baking - she was very multi-talented - and when she came back to the Reading Room she found me standing on the piano stool, tapping out Mary Had A Little Lamb on the keys).
By the age of eleven I was a concert pianist; at twelve I was an elite gymnast. Today, people often express disbelief at the things I accomplished at a young age. The truth is that although I worked extraordinarily hard - one had to when one was constantly having to pack one's things into cardboard boxes and move to a different house in a different town AGAIN. Sometimes we just moved to another house down the street from our previous house, my father having not bothered to pay the rent - my mother was behind me every step of the way.
My father loved me in his own way, but I could always count on my mother to be there for me.
Until she developed breast cancer.
Mum knew that she had breast cancer. She was vigilant at self-checking, as she'd had a benign mass extracted from her left breast when I was a toddler.
Mum also knew that her teenage daughter needed to escape that town and that country, which at the time showed no prospects for young people.
I was doing the dishes one day when Mum walked up to me quietly and said,
"I need you to promise me something." I turned around, wiping my hands on a dish cloth. It was a sunny day and I was just running out the clock, waiting for my high school diploma to be delivered.
"You must promise me never to come back to Ne Zealand," she said urgently. :Laughter was on the tip of my tongue - I'd already made that promise when I was sixteen. I'd thought at the time that it was a warning. Actually, both of my parents were glad to hear me say it.
"If one of us gets sick, you must never come back," she continued, The laughter in my mouth died. I looked at her and I knew.
"You have cancer," I said softly. She just continued to look at me with those determined, sparkling sapphire eyes of hers and said,
"You will only get one chance to escape. Don't come back."
It is only now, at this very instant, as I am writing this, that I realise that my mother escaped New Zealand when she was a teenager. She was living an ideal life on Norfolk Island with her sister and was planning on travelling the whole world. She had her whole life ahead of her and she was excited.
But then her mother was diagnosed with bowel cancer.
She came home to care for her beloved mother.
Her mother died. She met my father, And she was trapped forever.
That wasn't going to happen to me! She was determined that I would escape. So we carried on like nothing had happened, or rather, was going to happen - she had not been to a doctor to have her suspicions confirmed, despite my urging, and later I figured out why. We had our Going Away Parties - one for just our friends so that we could party like it was unsafe for 2006; the other for our adult friends and relatives. At that parts my mother served hors d'oeuvres from silver platters and champagne in crystal flutes. My mother-in-law almost spoiled the party with her screaming. She wailed like a banshee, shrieking that she "never going to see my son again." My mother was standing there with what she knew to be a cancerous lump in her breast, but she shed no tears. She played the part of the hostess to a T, despite the fact that I hadn't asked her to.
At the airport, all the adults were crying (obviously this was a more appropriate time and setting for tears) and I was just starting at my mother. How could I run off to Australia to become a model when my own mum was sick? As my lips began to open so that I could call it all off, my mother reached out and took my passport out of my hands. She flipped through empty pages, holding it up to my eye level so that I could see the empty pages and their scent could waft over to me, that new-and-unused passport smell.
"The next time I see you," I want to see stamps on every single one of these pages," she said, handing it back to me. Then she gently turned me around and pushed me over the line that the adults were referring to as The Point of No Return. I walked through the Departures Gate. Tears splotched onto my Departure Card and my hands shook as I wrote it.
Two months later both my then-boyfriend, who is now my husband after he proposed to me atop the summit of Mt Yasur on the island of Tanna, one of the most active volcanoes in the world as it hurled lava, rocks and ash into the sky, had gained employment and were moved into a rental property.
At last, Mum went to see a doctor.
She had breast cancer. Finally, it was confirmed officially.
As my mother's cancer spread to her brain, spinal cord and bones, my father was diagnosed with lung cancer.
Dad died first, in April 2011. He had spent the last few months of his life trying to repent for his crimes against my mother, lovingly caring for her and carrying her to bed each night in his arms, tucking her in and kissing her on the forehead. He didn't care about himself anymore - he only cared about Mum.
Mum lost both of her breasts to cancer and then she lost her hair to chemotherapy while in Melbourne my modelling career was starting to look like it might take off. I felt like I lived a bifurcated existence.
Mum died eight months after my father.
It was like something out of a V.C Andrews novel.
"You only get one chance to escape," Mum had said. I think of this every time a bored Customs Officer stamps my passport...which is almost full despite the fact that these days you often don't need a physical stamp to enter a country if it's affiliated with an alliance of other countries, For example, during my first tour of western Europe I visited dozens of nations but my passport was stamped less than half a dozen times. Mum would have been quite annoyed by that! But I have dozens of souvenirs and the memories of a life well lived, having travelled the world myself now. There are still so many places to visit though, and I will take my mother's memory with me when I visit them.
I escaped that hellhole.
Almost nobody else managed to escape, and most people took with them at least some psychological trauma. I had Survivor's Guilt for years before I finally realised that Mum would not want me to live my life feeling guilty.
She would want me to live my life to the full, accomplishing every I have ever dreamed of.
And that is exactly what I'm doing.
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Thank you to my Supporters
$158.25
Ian Wilson
$105.50
Anthony Hume
You got this!!
$52.75
Jie
Thank you for your generous easter eggs. Kids appreciate it so much!
$42.20
Anthony Hume
Now get the rest!!
$36.93
Steve Lee
$36.93
Anonymous
$30.38
Michael Williams
$30
Cara Williams
$21.10
Cyn
A noble cause to support indeed. Especially in memory of your mum, who was a lovely woman.
$21.10
H. J. Tipping
God Bless 🥰
$21.10
Nisha
$20
Michael Williams
$15.83
Karajane Chapman
Money raised from the collection of aluminum cans.
$10.55
Michael Williams
$10.55
Michael Parry
$10.55
Jefferson Francis
I know every bit helps to reach your goal. I wish great success in all you do to beat this terrible disease. Thank you for sharing your compassionate story, and God bless.
$10.55
Michael Williams
$10
Anonymous
$5.28
Anonymous
Good luck! You're never alone, kiddo!
$2.11
Anthony Hume
Thought this would help for now 🙂
$1.06
Ashley Cook
Good luck Karajane, your an awesome person raising funds for such an organisation x
For you Karajane... With love.. let's get to ZERO DEATHS xx