A group of women raising funds for the Cancer Council will go nude for a calendar to recreate their memorable efforts to support cancer research five years ago.
The women from Young At Heart are now a little older but, at the urging of their regional South Australian community, will again bare all to recreate their 2018 photo shoot and charity calendar.
Young At Heart co-ordinator Cathy Megson-McAllister said their original shoot took a lot of planning.
“We had 22 girls put their hands up, we did the photo shoot in March of 2018,” she said.
“We had to do everything for the calendar: the layout, the distribution, the printing.”
This time, however, they have some help from the Cancer Council, and all they need to do is show up for a chilly photo shoot in July.
“People have been asking when are you doing it again? We thought no, no, but (the Cancer Council) asked us. I asked the ladies and within five days they had agreed.”
Ms Megson-McAllister and Young At Heart are no strangers to Cancer Council fundraising.
This coming Wednesday, Ms Megson-McAllister will host her 16th Australia’s Biggest Morning Tea in her town of Macclesfield, about 45 km southwest of Adelaide.
Cancer has had a huge impact on Ms Megson-McAllister’s life; aside from her own battle with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, she lost her husband and both her parents to different forms of the disease.
She said the women in Young At Heart, like many Australians, also had their lives affected by cancer in one way or another.
“I spent 80 days in hospital being treated where I saw the great work Cancer Council was doing,” Ms Megson-McAllister said.
“I thought this is incredible. In 2008, when I was feeling better, the Young at Heart club – there was about 12 or 14 of at this time – decided to do the morning tea.
“We had our first biggest morning tea in May 2008 … we raised $906, and it took off from there. We’ve raised nearly $200,000 as of this year.”
But it wasn’t until 2017 when they got the idea for the “nudie calendar”, as they call it.
“Back in 2017 we were running a stall at the local strawberry fete and one of the girls said ‘Why don’t we do a calendar like the Calendar Girls did’?”
Taking inspiration from the 2003 film, based on a group of Yorkshire women who raised money with naked calendar pictures in the late 1990s, the women had their own version up and running the following year.
Anyone donating $100 or more to Ms Megson-McAllister’s fundraiser can score themselves a copy of their latest calendar.
More information can be found here.