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Jenny Prowse upended her life to move to one of Victoria’s most picturesque waterfront towns.
She didn’t expect to confront her own mortality so soon after arriving in Paynesville.
Jenny Prowse relaxing on her recliner in Paynesville.
Prowse, who moved to the holiday hotspot in the state’s east four years ago, decided to complete a home testing kit for the National Bowel Cancer Screening Program in 2021.
“I thought nothing of it,” she said of the kit, which had been gathering dust in a drawer for four months.
Prowse had no symptoms or family history of the disease, so was surprised when she received a letter saying some abnormalities had been picked up.
She visited her GP and arranged a colonoscopy at a local hospital, but the procedure couldn’t go ahead. A large tumour was blocking access to her colon.
“I knew it was cancer,” she recalls. “I had a gut feeling.”
Her gut feeling was correct: the mother-of-two had rectal cancer.
The 60-year-old’s brush with cancer is not uncommon in the Gippsland town. Prowse knows 10 residents who have been diagnosed with cancer in the past three years, including a friend who passed away six weeks ago.
More than 6 per cent of Paynesville residents say they have been diagnosed with cancer, compared with a statewide average of 2.8 per cent.
As well as cancer, Paynesville also has the state’s highest proportion of residents who say they have been diagnosed with heart disease and arthritis, according to The Age’s State of Our Health project, which is based on 2021 census data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
The prevalence of these conditions is inextricably linked to the town’s ageing population. You can use our interactive tool to check the state of your area’s health.
While the median age in Victoria is 38, the median age in Paynesville is 61, which means the town is home to the state’s oldest residents, many of whom have moved their during retirement.
Craig Sinclair, the director of Cancer Council Victoria’s prevention division, said age is a key risk factor for many cancers. This is because as we age, our body’s ability to repair damaged cells which can cause cancer, becomes less effective.
Paynesville in Gippsland is known as the state’s boating capitalCredit: Visit Victoria
Older people have also been exposed to carcinogens such as cigarette smoke, alcohol and ultraviolet radiation for a longer period of time.
“When you have a population like Paynesville, with many retirees and a greater percentage of the population in their older years, that is a substantial contribution to cancer risk,” Sinclair said. “Paynesville is a beautiful area. There is nothing environmental that would be causing [the high proportion of cancer cases].”
Obesity and smoking, which Sinclair said are more prevalent in regional and remote parts of the state, are also major risk factors.
