In her own words, Shanna Whan has found it fairly ironic indeed to have gone from being a "small-town drunk" to winner of the Australian of the Year Local Hero Award for her work in alcohol awareness.
From a solo, broke, volunteer in the wilderness to "game changer" in the way people in the bush relate to and speak about alcohol.
Winning the award has been the cherry on top of a cake she's worked at since 2015.
More and more invitations to speak all over the country. Meetings with government departments. Increased radio and TV interviews. All of it to get her message out there that it's OK to say "no" to a beer.
And now, after five years of voluntary work and several years running her charity, Sober in the Country (SITC), philanthropic partner The Snow Foundation recently announced further support for 30 funded home-based detoxes for isolated Australians. These free places will be delivered by charity partners Clean Slate Clinic.
This new venture will allow the SITC charity to support a group of at-risk rural Australians who can't travel away from home to get the help they need.
Twisted and broken, Shanna hits rock bottom
When her name was called out by the prime minister on Australia Day, she thought "her heart would actually explode clean out of her chest". For Shanna, it was not just how far she had come in life, not just the country roads she had travelled to get to Canberra, it was that she was alive at all.
On Boxing Day in 2014, she nearly wasn't.
Her husband, Tim, found her unconscious at the bottom of the stairs, a big gash over one eye, bruised and covered in blood.
When she had walked out of a family party in absolute despair and bought three bottles of wine, "I was kind of hoping maybe I could take my own life. I'd thought about it so many times."
Instead, she woke up in emergency, twisted and broken but still alive. And she knew she was "going to die soon — very soon. And I have to do something, I have to do it now".
Her drinking had escalated from wild party girl to chronic alcohol abuser. One glass had turned into three or four bottles of wine. "I was one of those people where one was too many and a thousand was not enough."
Shanna had gone from being the cool girl, the larrikin, to, says her friend Sharyn Graham: "An absolute mess, an absolute nightmare for those who loved her."
Shanna was in her early 30s when she started dating a former work acquaintance and ''the good bloke she'd previously overlooked'' in Tim Whan. He could see that there was a big issue there and yet he simply didn't know how to help her.
"It wasn't a pretty sight when I would come home and she'd had had two bottles of wine. She'd often be lying on the floor." But he knew Shanna was "worth fighting for".
When Shanna finally decided to get sober, she found there was a "horrifying lack of relatable conversations, services or support options for people like me."
She knew firsthand that the outback culture revolves around drinking. Just about every sporting, social or business gathering is celebrated with a few beers.
She tried to set up an AA group in her local area but soon found there's no such thing as anonymity in a country town.
''Models like AA are effective when anonymity is assured, but when it's not possible, well, we can't help people if we can't get them in the door to start with.''
No one spoke about it. It was a silent but deadly epidemic. "I recall a little inkling of an idea forming in the back of my mind. That one day I would do something very significant with the miracle that I have been given."
Shanna and Tim made a commitment, once they knew she was going to make it, to dedicate their lives to helping others in some way.
Shanna lives that promise tirelessly day in and day out by "being the change" she saw was desperately needed in outback Australia's "booze-worshipping culture".
Shanna 'throws herself under the bus' to create change
A year into her sobriety, Shanna had an epiphany — she would follow her gut and simply speak out, rather than choose anonymity. She decided to share her own horribly common story as a way of starting an honest and overdue conversation about challenging the culture of drinking in small towns.
"I made a very conscious decision that I would basically take my own very painful and private story and open it up for public discussion," she says. "And basically throw myself under the bus as a way of helping others to feel less frightened to ask for help.
"My story isn't the slightest bit unique, but I don't know anyone else from the country who was willing to step up and speak about it openly, publicly, without filters. So, I decided to go first, because somebody had to do it."
Shanna called her Facebook discussions Sober in the Country, as a daggy dig at the television show Sex in the City.
She shared her truth openly and candidly and invited others to share and interact, too. There was a "little trickle", but she soon realised people were too ashamed to even comment on social media threads publicly.
It was six months before a "light bulb went off".
"You silly bugger, what you need to do is create a private offshoot [group] of this page so that people can speak without fear of judgement!" Shanna realised.
Within six months, she had 200 people sharing their stories online. People who were choosing "bush sunrises over hangovers".
SITC was formally registered as a national charity in 2019 and, seven years on since those first tentative steps, blogging and ''feeling the waters'', SITC now reaches about 200,000 people on social media alone.
"It's a soft place for people to land. An online hub, where our aim is to catch people upstream. It's like a big warm group hug."
The grassroots bush charity is today the go-to voice for addictions in the rural space and is leading radical social change across rural Australia.
"We now have had 800 people come and go from our Bush Tribe peer support group," Shanna says.
"But that's only a tiny portion of our impact. It's the families, the friends, the communities and the ripple effect that is extraordinary to behold. They say that for each addicted person, seven are impacted. So, you do the maths.
'Frustrating' funding shortfall for rural Aussies
But despite her momentous award as Australian of the Year Local Hero, she still has frustrations at the lack of support from governments. SITC has not yet received any state or federal funding.
"We're saving lives, we're preventing harm," Shanna says. "It has been really frustrating and quite heartbreaking that some of the people who publicly spruik about being there for the bush have actively ignored me for years."
Since 2017, she has been reaching out to New South Wales politicians because even though SITC has a national reach and impact, NSW is her own backyard and where a disproportionate percentage of Bush Tribe members live.
"I keep hitting roadblocks, I hardly get a response from most of them. We are not being heard properly yet by our leaders."
Being Australian of the Year Local Hero is opening doors and allowing Shanna to waste less time at a local level and go up the chain.
"Now I have the platform, the voice, the opportunity. It's given me a way to go straight to the top and deliver some really hard truths to people who are influential," Shanna says.
"I hope with all my heart that some change and balance will come out of that. I'm really not going to let it rest until they respond and help us.
"We are shifting a culture as old as time, in one of the hardest-to-reach demographics of all. Imagine what could be done with serious commitments from leadership for long-term change.''
Shanna says people in the country are 150 per cent more likely to have struggled with alcohol harm and only 17 per cent will seek help.
"What we are bringing is lived experience to the bush," Shanna says. "Because what happens from a city-centric perspective makes no sense to people like me."
But to keep doing it, Shanna says: "We probably need 22 people doing the job that two full-time staff are doing. We need a lot more help, a lot more support."
There are those who might need far more than peer support and who need to detox or who need ongoing intensive psychological support but can't leave their properties to go to rehab. "We need to be able to get that care at home if we can."
The funding for the 30 telehealth in-home detox places announced recently to support SITC will allow at least some of these vulnerable people to get the support that they need to get well before the crisis happens.
Shanna's second chance at life
These days, the Bush Tribe family comes together for campfires under the stars rather than at the pub.
"It's like old school wholesome awesomeness. They want to live a healthier, better life," Shanna says. "They want to have less alcohol or none at all. And they have found a safe space to do that where they are fully supported and fully accepted. And it's literally that simple.
"The charity's core message comes down to this: we have a mission that every single person in the bush knows it's OK to say no to a drink. And we're doing that together, collectively. It's a remarkable thing to witness.''
After spending years "working my little bum off to make change happen", Shanna and Tim have moved into a little church in the bush that was built by Tim's great-grandfather and converted into a cottage by his father. She's now in a happier place than she imagined possible.
"I'm just a person sitting on the verandah with a dog, having a coffee, watching the sunrise, listening to the cockatoos fly overhead. I've got my dogs, I've got my horses, I've got my good husband by my side," she says.
"It is so unbelievably basic and humble and simple. I honestly feel like the luckiest person in the world because I had a second chance."
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