In memory of my husband - for your unwavering belief in me -
and for always encouraging me to keep going.
♡
About THE FOUNDER
I'm Jessica Blue. Property consultant. Mother of three and founder of Abeaud.
Before any of this — before Abeaud — I was a girl from Mount Isa.
A small country mining town so isolated, that you learn from a very young age that no one is coming to hand you the answers or make life easy for you. It's a place that's built on hard work, where you back yourself and keep going.
A place dear to my heart that help shape the woman I am today.
That woman eventually left Mount Isa, built a career in project management and property consulting and one day, like thousands of Australians — decided to build a home.
What happened next changed everything.
We entered the building process prepared and ready — yet getting a straight answer from anyone proved harder than it should have been.
Vague answers. Conflicting communication. The frustration of being dismissed simply for being a woman — yes this still happens.
Right from the beginning — the land sales agent who glossed over crucial body corporate details. The sales consultant who tried pushing us to sign our tender before we were ready. The builder who hoped we'd stop asking so many questions.
No transparency. No integrity. No In-depth guidance — and we were far from alone.
There were thousands of people were signing contracts they didn't understand and being churned through a system that was never designed to thoroughly inform or protect them.
So I started taking notes. The questions nobody answered. The lessons nobody teaches. The things I wish I had known before we started.
Matt, my late husband and greatest supporter, believed in what I was building before it even had a name. He thought it was very 'me.'
He never got to see what it became.
Just after we moved in, he was diagnosed with stage IV brain cancer and three months later he was gone.
Through grief. Through motherhood. Through the exhaustion of losing the person you built everything with — I kept building Abeaud.
To help others — especially women — navigate their build with confidence and to make sure nobody has to fight as hard as we did, for information they deserved from the beginning.
Brain cancer took Matt in just three months after diagnosis. It was an aggressive Stage IV Glioblastoma.
Research is the only thing that changes that timeline for someone else's family.
In his memory - and in hope that no family faces what ours did, please consider supporting brain cancer research.
donate today & help beat brain cancer
Brain cancer is the leading cause of cancer death in children, and adults aged under
40 in Australia, yet alarmingly very little is known about brain cancer, its causes or how it is treated.
That’s why we need your help. Every dollar helps in the fight against brain cancer.
Your donation will go towards vital research to improve patient treatments and, hopefully, find a cure one day.
The Mark Hughes Foundation raises much needed funds for research, creates awareness and supports brain cancer patients and their families.
This Foundation – The Mark Hughes Foundation (MHF) – is a Non-Profit, Health Promotion Charity that my wife Kirralee and I began in 2014, after I was diagnosed with brain cancer. We began the Foundation when we realised how underfunded brain cancer was in Australia in comparison to other cancers. The lack of funding meant very little research into treatments or cures for brain cancer and, as a result, not much has changed in the shocking brain cancer mortality rates over the past 30 years.
We had no idea when we started our Foundation and set about raising funds for some much needed research, the incredible amount of support we would receive from people everywhere.
In 2014 we kicked off our first simple fundraiser, Beanie for Brain Cancer Campaign. Since then we have grown from selling a few hundred beanies locally to joining forces with the National Rugby League to create an annual Beanie for Brain Cancer Round.
Our Beanie campaign is now a nationally recognised fundraiser which has seen over 1 million beanies sold!
All donations of $2 or more are tax deductible.