This is an edited extract from Magda Szubanski’s forthcoming memoir, ‘ I Can’t Tell You But I Will ‘. Available from Text Publishing from September 29, 2026.
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Of course, I had begun dying, although I didn’t know it then.
My cancer diagnosis in May 2025 changed everything — literally.
My bone marrow, my mitochondria, my nerves and tendons.
I’m still processing it all.
Watch: Magda shared the news of her diagnosis in 2025 on Instagram. Post continues below.
Magda Szubanski shares her cancer diagnosis.
But most of all, it changed my understanding. I wept when I finally knew — or rather my body did (pure, mammal knowing) — what it must have been like for my father to be diagnosed with such a lethal cancer, as he was in 1965 when we had only been here for a year.
He was 41; a stranger in a strange land with a wife and three kids to support.
The phrase ‘loss of independence’ is so laughably inadequate, so paltry. It’s the loss of everything; trust in your body, trust in the future, worrying if you even have the strength to lift your foot onto your front doorstep.
Yes, yes. I know we’re all passengers on a one-way trip to Death City. But only some of us get pushed out of the plane, hoping the parachute works.
I wanted to be a doctor when I was young and the fascination with all things medical has never left me. This curiosity has absolutely helped me on this journey. That sense of vocation was, I am certain, inherited from my dad, who studied medicine at Edinburgh University for three years after the war, until the authorities cancelled the course.
Magda with her father. Image: Supplied.
This impulse to heal had nothing to do with ambition; it was a deep calling.
Mine didn’t survive the tedium of Year 11 chemistry and physics. But I believe it has found its expression in many other ways and is the driving impulse behind a lot of what I do.
It makes me wonder now if it wasn’t selfishness or wilfulness that made Dad decide not to have his leg amputated as Ian Gawler, who had the same cancer, had done. Maybe it was an informed choice, based on those three years of medical training.
My god, the way he faced that existential threat with such intelligence and courage. What a gift he gave me.
It utterly destroys me that I can’t thank him now.
***
Cancer has changed me. I have less to lose. More to do.
***
By nature I am, like many in the arts, an ambivert: half show-off, half hermit. Apart from work, I was always very private. Coming out changed all that. In 2017, because of the Same-Sex Marriage Survey, I decided to step forward — and up. First, I needed to make sure I was standing on solid ground. I had to get under the hood of my belief system, understand how it worked and what it was capable of. And, oh! what a time to be forging my social self in the heat of battles both public and personal.
My mother was dying. Those of you who know what this means don’t need to be told. The rest of you will find out. (And with all my heart I wish you strength and courage. You will need it. It can be the most brutal and beautiful experience of one’s life. The death of one’s last parent, especially one’s mother, is a primal, visceral experience.)
The world order was dying, as it still is. Decades of inequity have made the social fabric brittle. Like all my countrymen and women, the only Australia I have ever known is democratic. There is much we take for granted. But now, that plodding beast lurches around the arena, charging at its own shadow as the Instagram paid influencers and Russian troll farms and techno-capitalists of the attention economy goad and game it to death on the pointy end of their algorithms.
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****
Part of me really doesn’t want to write this book. I’ve done this before. I know how the process will contort me. It will push and twist me, crack my bones and stretch my emotional tendons, like a chiropractor with a ballet company. It will force me to look at things I don’t want to see and remember things I would rather forget.
I have cancer.
Should I focus on healing myself? Retreat from the public, keep my head down and my trap shut? Or, knowing that my time is shorter than I thought, put my shoulder to the wheel?
Can’t I just stay here, stuck? Would that really be so bad?
But that’s just it. It’s not in my nature. The sleeping dogs won’t lie. They wake me in my dreams.
I can’t tell you. But I will.
Magda Szubanski is one of Australia’s best-known and most loved performers. She began her career in university revues, then appeared in a number of sketch-comedy shows before he iconic character of Sharon Strzelecki rose to national fame in ABC TV’s Kath and Kim. Magda’s second memoir, I Can’t Tell You But I Will , follows her journey from daughter to orphan, from comedian to campaigner. It’s available from September 29, 2026, from Text Publishing Company.
Feature Image: Supplied/Darren James.
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