‘I couldn’t get out of my house’: Aunty Bev’s journey back to good health
When Bev Donovan lost her mother she fell into a depressive spiral that saw her reach a weight of 185kg and risk heart failure. Her journey home brought her back to good health.
For Gumbaynggirr and Djangadi elder Bev Donovan, the memory of how she “spiralled out of control” in the wake of her mother’s death still brings her to tears. A loss for her whole community, the death left Aunty Bev adrift.
She turned to binge eating and alcohol in the years after her mother’s death in 1998, slowly reaching the brink of immobility. She was twice hospitalised for heart failure.
“She was my rock,” Ms Donovan said of her beloved mother.
“When Mum died I just bucketed the weight on. I was always drinking, I was eating, just not looking after myself because I had to go through the grief.”
It took returning to her home town of Kempsey for Ms Donovan to make a change.
“That’s where my mother’s from, and that’s when I thought, ‘this is where I can do it’, and that’s where I did it, and I thought ‘my ancestors brought me home to do this’,” she said.
“She was a strong woman, she was my rock, and she’s made me do all this too.”
She chose to walk every day and what began as a personal health journey quickly gained pace when Ms Donovan went back to Mount Druitt and started a walking group. She now belongs to four groups and her weight has dropped from 185kg to 67kg.
“I couldn’t get out of my house, and now you can’t keep me in,” she said.
Ms Donovan is an Indigenous caseworker for the Marrin Weejali Aboriginal Corporation in Mount Druitt, but for 32 years before that she worked as a community liaison officer for NSW Police. During her health spiral, she was saddened to see the impact it had on her social work.
“Police didn’t want to work with me, I got the impression that they were embarrassed by the way I looked,” she said. “Everyone in the community knows how big I was. They know I couldn’t walk, I couldn’t do anything.
“I get emotional when I think about being such a big girl, but I always looked after my presentation. I always made sure I looked nice. But being so big, I had to make my own clothes.
“My granddaughters are big girls, and I hated being overweight. I’m pushing them now to come and walk with me, and not only my grandkids. There’s a lot of community kids.”
Her drive to keep the communities of Kempsey and Mount Druitt in good health helped to shape her role as an Indigenous elder, and brought her into the view of some of Australia’s most respected health and Indigenous advocacy groups.
Among her four walking groups she has supported the work of Too Deadly for Diabetes, the Heart Foundation and the Indigenous Marathon Foundation. She also has a group of her own, dubbed the Deadly Chicks.
“They call me Mrs Gump, because I just walk everywhere,” she said.
“I’ve encouraged a lot of young girls here to come out. All the young ones here see me walking and say ‘If Bev can do it, I can do it’.
“I’m so proud of myself as to how far they’ve come.”
For week five of The Australian’s series on walking, in collaboration with the Heart Foundation, we are focusing on walking groups and their role in creating community and fitness accountability.
Ms Donovan credited exercise physiologist Ray Kelly as one of the experts who pulled her back from the brink. Throughout his career he has worked to improve community-wide health and fitness among Indigenous groups, praising the role walking groups have had in that progress.
“Some people like to be physically active on their own and some want to do it in a group,” Mr Kelly said.
“When we start up a program, we put ownership of all these decisions on the actual individual, rather than supplying it. We had a program in Jilkminggan in the Northern Territory when 18 women put their hands up and they all started a walking group. They just started on their own. That’s what we try to encourage. You just need one of the people to take ownership and take leadership in that area, and they’ll do it. They’ll step up.
“For long-term success, people have to have that accountability.”
Heart Foundation physical activity senior adviser Elizabeth Calleja said walking groups needed access to well-kept public spaces, which tended to be less common in poorer areas.
“We know that people who have more active environments are 1.5 times more likely to be active,” Ms Calleja said.
“Having that walkability and then also having a program that supports them to be active is key to helping people to move more.
“The groups are there in a supportive way. My favourite quote is, ‘they come for the walk and they stay for the talk’, … which is great for reducing loneliness and social isolation.”
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