Miss Universe Catriona Gray says Australia is a big part of her
After being crowned Miss Universe, Miss Philippines Catriona Gray says she is staying grounded thanks to her Australian roots.
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Her swimsuit-clad, signature sashay helped propel her to the role of Miss Universe and a glamorous new life in New York City, but sometimes there’s nowhere Queensland-born and raised Catriona Gray would rather be than curled up at home with her dogs.
The 25-year-old Filipino-Australian, who took the top pageant crown late last year, has packed plenty into her short life, from an idyllic and “normal” upbringing on the hazy beaches of Cairns to a stint working with a charity in Manila’s slums and a fledgling career as a pop star in the Philippines.
But even though she’s worked for eight years as a model and dominated the pageant scene in Australia and Asia for most of her life, Gray says she’s most comfortable in minimal makeup and less-revealing clothes.
“That’s much better,” she smiles as she changes from a low cut fuchsia gown into a more demure wrap dress for our shoot.
“In reality I am quite a grandma and I like being covered up. I really prefer this kind of more modest stuff.”
A month into the whirlwind of being crowned Miss Universe, a role made famous locally when Jennifer Hawkins was the first Australian to take the title in 2004, Gray is still coming to terms with the changes in her life.
The singer, model and actress has moved into a mid-town Manhattan apartment and stepped into a daily routine that includes charity events and society appearances, international travel and TV interviews, all of it planned and managed by her full-time Miss Universe handler.
She has amassed 4.6 million Instagram followers and become a household name in the Philippines.
“My life is honestly what I never would have expected,” she says.
“But I think because I have the Australian attitude in me, you know, it’s all kind of low key. No worries, you know, I just go along with it.”
Gray is the fourth Filipino Miss Universe and while she is representing the country of her mother’s birth on the pageant scene, the dual citizen is also proud to call herself half-Australian.
Born in Cairns to Ian Gray, now 75, a retired engineer who had emigrated at the age of seven from Scotland, and accountant Normita (Mita) Magnayon, now, 54, Gray spent her early childhood moving through several mining communities, including Wagga Wagga and Tennant Creek, for her father’s work.
The family also lived briefly in Sydney when Gray was younger, before returning to Earlville in Cairns for her high school years, where she was a top student at Trinity Anglican School.
After graduating, Gray says she took herself to Manila at the age of 17, with no clear idea about what she wanted to do with her life.
Eight years working in the Philippines has seen her lose her Aussie accent, and she speaks with a slight American-sounding twang.
Although close to two half brothers from her father’s first marriage, Cameron and Stuart Gray, aged in their 50s, she considers herself an only child because there was such a big age difference.
Gray’s parents met when her father visited the Philippines for work and have been married for more than 35 years.
They remain “extremely close” to her she says, and are travelling in North America this year to support Gray in her duties as Miss Universe.
She was last in Australia for Christmas 2017 and her birthday in early January 2018, and while she has retained some school friendships “a lot of them have moved away from Cairns”.
“It was my first time back home since 2012, when I left. So that was a very sentimental trip for me because my parents still lived in Cairns and I went by my old high school and my old house, just going down memory lane,” she says.
Gray refers to both Australia and the Philippines as home.
“Australia represents my childhood, me as a teenager, me at school, and that’s a very big part of who I am,” she explains.
“But home is also the Philippines because that’s how I grew into adulthood, that’s what made me the young woman that I am today.
“I’ve always felt that presence of both cultures, both nations in my life being represented through my mum and dad. And even though I grew up in Australia, I visited the Philippines almost twice a year. So I’ve always felt like I belonged to both.”
But while Gray is diplomatic about her dual heritage, her many fans in the Philippines are not so understanding, and social media there had a slight meltdown when she was celebrated on the front page of News Corp’s Queensland paper, The Courier-Mail as an Aussie.
“Pageants are pretty big in the Philippines, kind of our national sport,” she explains.
“In the Philippines we don’t have Superbowl, we don’t have footy, but we have basketball, boxing and pageants.
“I don’t feel like a big deal, but I guess I am a big deal. I don’t want to sound like I’m up myself by saying that. But in the Philippines … I spent my new year watching reaction videos of people there from when I won. It’s pretty full on.”
Gray’s first pageant was at the age of five, when she won Little Miss Philippines in Sydney.
“It’s definitely been something that was in my life because of my mum,” Gray says.
“She loves Miss Universe, Filipinos in general love Miss Universe. I know it makes her sound very much like a stage mum, but she’s quite relaxed.
“I guess she’s just a very proud woman and me being an only child, you know (she wanted to give me opportunities).
“So she put me in a lot of competitions growing up, not necessarily pageants, but also as a young teenager, she let me do all sorts of things like presenting and different musicals and choir and stuff. I also did different modelling competitions, like the Girlfriend model search and you know, random stuff like that.
“So I really feel that’s how I overcame stage fright. I never had any fear as a young teenager because I was always on stage. I love performing and I believe it’s because I had that exposure at a young age.”
Gray speaks daily to her parents, but that bond didn’t stop her from moving out of home as soon as she graduated high school.
“There was an expectation that’s on a lot of us as teenagers, like ‘you need to know what you are doing, you need to apply for your college degree’, and I just had no idea what I wanted to do,” she recalls.
“So I thought ‘I’ll take a gap year’. And I never envisioned myself as a model or in this kind of industry, but I figured I would use that gap year, earn some money by travelling around Asia to model.
“I chose the Philippines because I had spent my holidays there growing up, and it was also an aspect of rediscovering my roots because my mum is a Filipina.”
Gray, who is a Christian, was making a good living modelling in Southeast Asia but felt after a while that it wasn’t rewarding her spiritually.
“I was around 21 years old, and I was really frustrated at that time, also because my parents had come over to live with me, and all of a sudden I was the breadwinner for our family, and having that kind of line of work, of being a model, it’s very sporadic and I just wasn’t up for that kind of responsibility,” she says.
“So I was just very overwhelmed and I told myself I needed to think of someone else’s situation, I can’t think about my own anymore. So I found charity work.
“Growing up in Australia, there are not really many instances where you would experience real poverty. But when I went to the Philippines and I found myself in this part of Tondo, Manila.
“This is capital city Manila. It’s not far. It’s accessible by road, it’s not far flung or anything. It’s very accessible, right there on the outskirts of our capital city.
“It’s known as Smoky Mountain because it is an actual mountain but it’s made out of trash. And families live there, they make their living from scavenging through the dumps to find and sell recyclable materials. “
Grey started working with a charity called Young Focus, which provides free schooling to the slum children, and plans to use her platform to promote education.
“They have their own teachers, their own programs, their own facilities and then as the ages go up, they provide school sponsorships along with even their school supplies, their uniforms, their reading materials,” she says of the program, with which she volunteered as a teacher’s aide for children aged three to six.
“One day they took us for a walk to a place called Happyland, and the name is nowhere indicative of what it looks like. Happyland is one of the most under-served areas there.
“Even though it’s temporary housing, people never left. So it all just fell apart and it’s just filled with trash. And if you imagine that along with the elements, because in the Philippines we have extreme heat in the summer and wet season floods, typhoons and then you imagine these families don’t have shelter from any of that.
“They don’t have access to basic hygiene, sanitation, healthcare, schooling and that was what really impacted me the most.
“I was a young adult who was very frustrated. I was concerned with social media and how I thought my career should be progressing. And then I came to this community and I realised how blessed I am.”
Gray is enjoying the platform her pageant wins — she was crowned Miss Philippines earlier in 2018 — bring to her charity work.
“Seeing the platform that pageantry had in the Philippines — we love pageants, it’s such a socially relevant thing to us,” she says.
“We love supporting the girls. It brings us so much pride as a country. And when I saw that and I was doing charity work already, it just made sense to match the two together.”
With the next year carefully planned out, Gray says she hasn’t yet decided what she wants to do after she steps down as Miss Universe.
She is newly single after breaking up late last year with her boyfriend of several years, 25-year-old Filipino popstar and model Clint Bondad.
“I greatly respect him and the time we had together. It just didn’t work out,” she explains.
It could be a music career in the US or returning to Asia, where she has left her two pet dogs in the care of a family member.
No matter the destination, she says she won’t be there alone, with her parents promising they will stay close.
“I know that I can support them now, especially after this year, and my dad already is 75 years old,” she explains.
“Growing up, because of his work, he wouldn’t be at home a lot. He would have three weeks away for work and then a week-and-a-half back home. And so since he is that age now, I would love nothing more than to be near them.”
Gray says she feels immense gratitude to her parents for the way she was raised, and now she wants to look after them.
“I had the most amazing upbringing with them. We are so close the three of us because we were the only family a lot of the time,” she says.
“My mum has such a big family, but we were the only ones in Australia and my dad’s side was in Perth and we were of course in Queensland, so it was always the three of us.
“We were just very tightly knit up until now and I really feel like they raised me the right way, because when people hear someone is an only child, they think, ‘oh, your must be very sheltered. But they raised me to be independent and I am thankful.”
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