She Fills a Room of Over 1,000 Every Year: Meet the Lane Cove Local Behind Sydney’s Sold Out Breast Cancer Lunch

If you were hoping to grab a ticket to this Friday’s Sydney Breast Cancer Foundation (SBCF) Ladies Lunch, we have bad news: it’s sold out. It sells out every year. So this isn’t a “buy your tickets now” story. It’s a story about who will be in the room, because the person who organises the whole thing is a Lane Cove local, and so are a surprising number of the people involved: walking the runway, speaking on stage, stocking the silent auction and booking tables.

And if you can’t be there, you can still take part. The silent auction is already open online, anyone can bid from their phone, and the money goes to the same place. More on that below.

Friday at Randwick

The 2026 Ladies Lunch, now in its 22nd year, is on Friday 23 October in the Winx Stand at Royal Randwick, with Jessica Rowe and Angela Bishop returning as MCs. Between courses there is a panel discussion with NSW Chief Cancer Officer Professor Tracey O’Brien AM and Greenwich GP Dr Jo Mackson, a live auction called by Andrew Morello, two major raffles (a $15,000 British Airways experience and a Canturi 18ct gold bangle) and the fashion parade, with the models dressed by 10 labels including Carla Zampatti, Oroton, Watson x Watson, MJ Bale and Rachel Gilbert. The silent auction has prizes from more than 100 supporters, and there is an afterparty up the escalators when it all wraps at 4pm.

The foundation is aiming to raise more than $450,000 on the day. The money funds specialist breast cancer equipment, surgical and radiology fellowships, breast awareness initiatives, a hardship fund for families under financial strain during treatment and SBCF’s mental health support program, which has grown to 14 hospitals and delivered 539 counselling sessions to patients in the past 12 months, with more hospitals asking to join. As the foundation puts it, cancer is expensive.

A lunch with a long history

The Ladies Lunch has been running for more than two decades. It began as a gathering for breast cancer patients and a way to help fund specialist staff and services, supporting people through diagnosis, treatment and recovery. The foundation itself is now in its 31st year.

Last year’s lunch coincided with a milestone for the foundation, marking 30 years of SBCF’s work, and raised around $400,000.

The centrepiece every year is the runway. The “Meet the Models” parade puts women and men, all of them breast cancer survivors or still going through treatment, on the catwalk alongside the clinicians who treated them. It is the part of the afternoon nobody forgets, and it is usually the part where the tissues come out.

The Lane Cove local who pulls it all together

An event this size does not happen by accident. It happens because one Lane Cove local organises the entire thing. Renae Buckley is a director on the SBCF board and sits on its risk and finance committee. She also heads up this event with a very small team. On lunch day, her real job title is “the person who made all of this happen”: the venue, the sponsors, the auction, the models, the programme and a room of 1,120 guests. She has not had fewer than 1,000 in the room in a long time. From where In the Cove has sat for the past two years, she is the person everyone is looking for, and somehow she is always smiling.

What we love most is how much of her own community she has brought with her. Every year we go, we spot more Lane Cove, Greenwich, Riverview and Longueville faces: at the tables, on the sponsor list, on the donor boards and, this year, on the runway and the stage. The lunch is a Sydney-wide event, but it has a very strong Lane Cove accent, and that is Renae’s doing.

She says the community response is what keeps the event going, and that the same local faces return to support the foundation every year. Plenty of this year’s tables have been booked by locals, and Renae says taking a table is one of the most important ways to support the lunch.

“Awareness is everything,” Renae said.

Jessica Rowe, back on the mic

Holding the whole afternoon together is Jessica Rowe, who returns as MC alongside Angela Bishop. Jessica has hosted every Ladies Lunch In the Cove has attended, and she is very good at it: warm, quick and able to move a packed room from laughing to teary and back again in the space of a course.

She also comes with a Lane Cove connection of her own. Her husband, Nine News presenter Peter Overton, started at Lane Cove Public School 55 years ago, was school captain in 1977, and came back in August to help the school celebrate its 150th, where he told students to live their own dreams, not their parents’. His parents still live in Longueville.

The Lane Cove table

I have been at the lunch for the past two years, and both times as a guest of Lara Wehby, a Riverview local who sponsors a table every year through her business, Well Run Consulting.

Lynette Bolton on the catwalk

This year, Lane Cove local Lynette Bolton is one of the SBCF models and will walk the runway dressed by Rachel Gilbert.

In her model profile in the event programme, Lynette is honest about what treatment was actually like.

“I don’t think I woke up every morning feeling courageous or strong. There were plenty of days when I was scared, exhausted, angry or completely over it,” she writes. “You don’t have to get through six months of treatment today. You have to get through today. Ask for help. Let people show up for you. Most importantly, don’t put pressure on yourself to turn cancer into some profound life lesson.”

Her way back has been to start small. “I would never have chosen what happened to me. But I do get to choose what I do with my life now. One appointment. One walk. One trip. One plan. One slightly scary thing. Then another. That’s how I found my way through it and I think that’s how I’m finding my way back too.”

We will have more on Lynette’s story after the event.

Breast health, from a Greenwich GP

The clinical voice on stage this year is also local. Dr Jo Mackson, a women’s health GP at Sydney Women’s Wellness on Greenwich Road, Greenwich, joins NSW Chief Cancer Officer Professor Tracey O’Brien AM for a panel discussion led by Angela Bishop. Dr Mackson is a Fellow of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners with specialist training in reproductive and sexual health, and spent 17 years in the Royal Australian Air Force as an Aviation Medical Officer before moving into community women’s health. Her areas of interest include breast health, perimenopause, menopause, fertility and pregnancy, and she is known for a calm, evidence-based approach that helps women feel heard.

Her message is one worth hearing well beyond Randwick: know your own body, get checked, and don’t put off the follow-up appointment you have been meaning to book.

The Lane Cove businesses behind the auction

A silent auction with more than 100 supporters does not fill itself, and a loyal group of Lane Cove businesses donates time, products and services year after year. This year’s local supporters include Iris & Lin, Everywhere Beauty, Lane Cove Aesthetics, Well Run Consulting, Lusso Kitchen, Rawson Print & Packaging, Zjoosh and alcohol-free drinks brand Sammy Piquant, whose founders are also locals. Several of them have donated every single year the lunch has run, and turn up the day before to help set up.

If you want to support them while supporting the foundation, you do not need a ticket to bid.

No ticket? Here’s how to get in on it anyway

The lunch itself is full, but the fundraising is not. The silent auction is open to anyone with a phone, wherever you are on Friday.

In the Cove will be at Randwick on Friday. After the event we will bring you the full story: who was there, who walked, what was raised and the Lane Cove people and businesses who made it happen.