Carrie Bickmore, Bryan Lipmann, Abraham Kuol and Linda Widdup recognised
Ten years ago, radio and television presenter Carrie Bickmore wore a blue beret when accepting her Gold Logie on national television and asked Australians to do the same to start a conversation about brain cancer.
Brain cancer strikes an Australian every five hours, kills more children than any other disease and kills more people under 40 than any other form of cancer, including her late husband Greg, who died in 2010.
Bold statement: Carrie Bickmore.Credit:
“Throughout his cancer journey, he wore a lot of hats and a lot of berets, and it was because he was embarrassed by his scars and his head,” Bickmore said in 2015.
“I want the nation to talk about brain cancer. It gets almost no funding, which is ridiculous because without funding more people will die.”
Since then, the charity Carrie’s Beanies for Brain Cancer has raised more than $27 million for research into the disease.
Bickmore was recognized as the 2026 honoree on Thursday for her work to change the way brain cancer research is funded in Australia. Australian of the Year for Victoria.
In 2021, Bickmore founded the Brain Cancer Center, which supports more than 70 of our brightest people to develop new treatments and world-first clinical trials.
Bryan Lipmann, CEO of Wintringham.
Bryan Lipmann, Victoria’s 2026 Senior Australian of the Year, witnessed first-hand the dire conditions many elderly homeless people were forced to live in when he was a young social worker.
