Beth Trevan AM was named the Lismore electorate’s Woman of the Year this week for her work over decades as a health campaigner and community advocate. Over that time she’s achieved great things as far afield as Pakistan by fearlessly championing her causes and being unafraid to go straight to the top to get something done. But, importantly, she says she’s never fought alone.

When Thomas George contacted me to tell me about the award, I felt humbled but not deserving.

I've never planned anything - I've just managed to fall into it right across the board. Some issue would arise and I'd take a look and think, well, gee, that's not very fair or that needs fixing or whatever and I'd pick it up, and there were always people around me who, once they understood the situation, were really supportive and came with me. So nothing was ever done just on my own.

It was always a group of people who could see that there was a problem and I guess I had the skills to maybe be the leader and that was how all the different issues went forward.

I suppose you could say there were areas where there was bravery concerned because in nearly every issue it was stepping into an area that hadn't been done before. I don't know. I just fell into everything.

I think one of the qualities that’s allowed me to get things done is probably a fearlessness - not being afraid of approaching the people at the very top. I always believe they're human beings, the same as all of us. Everybody's gotten to where they are often by very serendipitous means.

I've always found that once I actually got to the person that was at the very top of the organization, you got a really good hearing. In fact, often they were in a situation where they hadn't heard directly from the community what the major problems were because all along the line there were other agendas that were being put into the information that was going forward.

But also I think I’ve got an ability to work with people at all levels and bring them along with me. I'm a people person. I've always loved people more than anything else. And really the thing that's driven me is injustice. I cannot abide injustice.

It’s hard to say what I’m most proud of doing, because everything I’ve done has been so different.

In the ‘70s, it was about establishing play lady volunteers at the Lismore Base Hospital and then getting the policies changed on how children and families were dealt with. Then being coordinator of the the Lismore Base Hospital Children's Ward appeal that raised all that money.

A story on the front page of the Northern Star about the childrens' ward fundraising campaign. PHOTO: Supplied.

I think the thing that I loved most out of that was the community learned very much, very strongly - and it's really carried through for another generation - that if everyone worked together, driving towards one goal, then you could achieve what you wanted to achieve even though it appeared to be impossible at the beginning.

An advertisement calling for donations to the childrens' ward. PHOTO: Supplied.

The kids’ ward community campaign then led to being asked by the Cancer Council to work on a pilot program on the North Coast, because at that point in time, 1979 and the early ‘80s, it was the start of health promotion and there was no cancer education program outside Sydney.

I was also involved with the P and C Association at the state level so I led a contingent to the Department of Education and - even though it took us 18 months to get an appointment - it only took me 10 minutes to convince them that every school needed to have a "no hat, play in the shade policy”. Otherwise they were going to be sued down the track by every adult that was diagnosed with skin cancer who had not been protected at school.

The deputy director that we met with laughed and said: "My son wagged the swimming carnival last week because he wasn't prepared to sit there and get sunburned and my wife's a nurse and she's been telling me we need a policy like that me for years, it's ridiculous.”

Within six weeks over the Christmas holidays, the teachers employed by the Cancer Council wrote the policy and it was in the schools the following February.

From there working with Margie Young and Vivian Hoskins of the Health Department we went into women's health projects, developing posters and brochures, videos, things that no one else was doing anywhere in Australia. And all this material was used around Australia.

Around 1991,  I saw an ad in the Sydney Morning Herald one Saturday calling for applications for breast screening programs. The next day I was running a battle station on the beach with Bill Buddee, the surgeon, with 300 people queued along the sand in their swimmers for him to check out for skin cancer.

At the end of the day, I got Bill a beer and asked him if he’d seen the ad. He said, no and I showed it to him and together with colleagues he put in an application for a screening program for the Northern Rivers only.

The application was successful and I became part of the steering committee and we were given the job for the whole North Coast, from Port Macquarie to the border, and because I'd been working with health promotion and women's groups in the same area and spoken with about 42,000 people over the previous six years, they asked me would I be the founding director of the establishment director, so I said yes.

One of the first women’s health promotion stickers produced locally to alert women of the need to examine their breasts which saw the number of women having mammograms increase locally by over 400 per cent over four years. IMAGE: Supplied.

Had I ever done anything like this before? No. But I started here at home at my dining room table with no money, a computer that was borrowed from the health department and worked out all the issues related to how we could get the service going and whatever. And by the end of the 10 years that I was director, we had a fixed site, three mobile units, and were screening 56,000 women every two years and had the highest recruitment rate in the state.

It's all changed since then. Modern technologies have come in and everything's done very differently. But that was that.

Again, it didn't matter what I looked at, there were always people who had an interest in the issue and I guess I ended up the one that was leading it, but you can never do it on your own. Never ever.

In 1998, one of my sons was living in Italy and I went to see him and went to attend an international breast cancer conference in Florence at the same time. It had 3,200 registered participants and was being held in a castle.

On the first morning it was going to start at 10am. I made sure I arrived at 8:30am to find myself a seat, and there were only about 200 people scattered throughout this entire auditorium.

So I was just quietly sitting there reading through my papers with about 3000 empty seats around me and a woman walked through the whole of the auditorium and sat there in the seat right there next to me. We said hello and I could see she was dressed in a salwar kameez. She said she was from Pakistan and a surgeon.

I asked her what she was hoping to get out of the conference, and she said: "Well, I'm really, wanting to set up a breast clinic and I know enough about all the clinical side of things, but I know absolutely nothing about administration. I'm desperately hoping to meet someone who knows something about administration”. And I just roared laughing.

I told her I was the director of a breast cancer screening program and my background was in administration. "What can I do to help?” I said.

So two years later, when I was turning 60, I decided I wanted to go trekking in Nepal and when I looked at the map, Pakistan was just there beside it.

In that two year period, we had kept in contact and I'd been sending her lots of information. So I sent her an email saying  I was going to Nepal, but had some time to come to Pakistan if that'd be any help. Well, four days later, I got an email back to say she'd organized nine talks in seven cities.

Beth Trevan conducted many women's health promotion events in villages in Pakistan. PHOTO: Supplied.

Beth Trevan also did workshops in private homes. PHOTO: Supplied.

Beth Trevan with some of the doctors she worked with in Pakistan. PHOTO: Supplied.

That started me going to Pakistan. I went every year more or less, sometimes a couple of times a year, over the next 10 years.

Every time I went, another group would come out and say, will you help us here? So by 2010, there were quite a large number of organizations that I was actually working with.

Unfortunately by that time it was becoming more and more dangerous. I wasn't worried about myself, but I became a risk to the families that I was staying with. I was staying in people’s homes and going out into villages and giving talks to women who were absolutely poverty stricken and I became a risk to them.

The last trip I did was for the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission evaluating breast services in seven of their hospitals. I had to ride in a bulletproof car with two army officers inside the car with AK 47s and I had an armed military escort in front and back. When I went into the hospitals to evaluate the services, I walked around with an army colonel beside me with an AK 47.

Beth Trevan poses with an army officer's AK 47 in front of a bullet proof vehicle while inspecting a hospital in Pakistan. PHOTO: Supplied.

I loved what I did over there and I'm still in touch with a lot of the people I met. I’ve brought a few of them over to Australia for training in Lismore and Sydney. A couple have come out and stayed here and we've gone traveling together and whatever, which is lovely.

Then I had grandchildren and which meant I was very busy from 2010… well from 2006 really. I was doing a lot of tripping with them and a lot of travel.

And then along came the flood.

It was funny how the Lismore Citizens Flood Review came about. I organize school reunions for all the locals that are still here from Lismore High School class of 1953 to ‘57. We are still very, very close. Anytime anybody comes to town, we just use that as an excuse to get together and have lunch.

So we had organised to have lunch at 11:30am on April 4 of 2017 at the Rous Hotel. Well, the flood came on the 31st March and I looked at what was happening at the Rous and water would have been over the bar counter and mud was everywhere. And I said, well, that's no good. We'll do it up the top at the Workers Club in Goonellabah.

There were 14 of us, some of them hadn't seen one another for 50 years, which was just lovely. So we’re sitting there, and obviously the talk was about the flood. I was sitting next to Peter Thorpe, a retired engineer who was opposed to the Lismore CBD levee because he was concerned about the loss of flood memory, but ironically enough ended up helping build it.

He was appalled by the flood response and said to me: "We've got to do something about this. We can't have this. Something's gotta be done.”

And I went, oh, all right, and I came home and I thought, well, where will I start? So I got former mayor Ros Irwin on board and Keith Alcock, who I’d never met before but called me saying he’d heard we were getting something together. He was actually the SES region controller and held other posts from 1960s or something through till 1995. I asked many questions of former Lismore City SES Unit controller Lindsay Matterson, who provided  us with a lot of information.

Tony Madden got involved as well and we felt we had enough history among and different areas of expertise among us to actually be able to put something together.

We went to the public meeting that was held at the council where the council staff gave a report to the councillors and a slide went up to say there were 12 reviews being done and 11 of them were being done by government agencies and universities. There was nothing that was coming from the community. So we said, well, maybe we should put one together, which we did.

I’m not sure that we've gotten anywhere but we haven't given up yet. We're still going. We’ve had had some terrific, fabulous support from both Thomas George and Kevin Hogan. Fabulous support. When we asked to have a meeting with them and gave them the presentation on all the issues that we really looked into and what we'd found, Kevin went away and insisted the national director of the Bureau of Meteorology come and meet with us and Thomas organized for us to meet with the commissioner of the SES.

We had a four-hour meeting with the Bureau of Meteorology, the national director and the state director and the senior hydrologist, and they were shocked to see what how the community had interpreted what they were saying and what they were doing.

Initially the SES had difficulty with us because they saw us as troublemakers whereas we've never ever tried to do anything other than make things better for the community, but that's gradually changed.

Apart from Flood Mitigation, what we’re trying to do now is get the State Government to implement a statewide integrated emergency information portal that includes all the agencies, like they have in Victoria.

So we're still monitoring that and we're keeping up the pressure. We can see we're going to really have to keep pushing. You know, the wheels of government move incredibly slowly but we'll get there in the end.