‘I feel like a failure’: the reality of life after Big Brother for Australia’s favourite Reggie

Reality TV star Reggie Bird has won Big Brother twice, and has revealed how she’s had to spend the $500,000 in total prizemoney she’s won.

Reggie Bird is unquestionably one of Australia’s most beloved reality stars ever, winning Big Brother not once, but twice.

The single mother of two though has lamented the fact she simply can’t get a job and says she is living off a small disability pension and her winnings from the popular TV show.

Legally blind, but still with some vision, the 50-year-old said: “I sort of feel like a failure. I’m starting to think, why doesn’t anyone want to give me a job? I want to work and that starts to make you feel like … no one wants you.”

Bird spoke openly of her struggles in the latest episode of the Mental As Anyone podcast.

Reggie Bird poses for portrait near their home on the Gold Coast. Photo: Regi Varghese

“I could answer phones, you know, I’m good at talking to people,” she said.

“I’m limited to what I can do because of my eyes are so stuffed. I’ve now got nine degrees of pinhole vision, no peripheral vision and no night vision left. I only just see what’s in front of me, it is like looking through a straw, that’s how I explain it to people.”

Bird is originally from Tasmania but has lived on the Gold Coast for many years.

She was regaled as a national hero in 2003 when she first won Big Brother, taking home $250,000 prize money. Bird was celebrated as an everyday Australian for being down to earth with a strong work ethic running a fish and chip shop in Tasmania with her then husband Adrian.

She won a further $250,000 from her second Big Brother stint in 2022, and receives a blind disability pension “that covers my rent, that’s it”.

Her children are son, Lucas, 15, who has cystic fibrosis, and Mia, 17, who has just finished Year 12.

“I just feel hopeless ... stuck,” she told the podcast.

“I feel like I’m going nowhere.”
It was after the first Big Brother that Bird was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, a rare degenerative eye disease. In 2008, she was declared legally blind when she lost 90 per cent of her central vision.

Another setback came after she won the 2022 Big Brother series when Bird was diagnosed with stage-two Usher syndrome, a genetic condition that causes deafness and hearing loss.

Her resilience and Aussie battler spirit has continued to endure Bird to Australians.

“But no one wants me,” she joked.

“I haven’t been able to get a job, so I’m just living off the bloody winnings. Because I rent, that is just sky high, bloody rents. They won’t give me a loan because I don’t have a job. So it’s just a vicious cycle.”

Depression has hit hard over the years, she revealed.

And growing up, she said her mum, who she describes as the “most beautiful, kindest, caring person”, was diagnosed with schizophrenia.

“She had this nurse who used to come to the house to check up on her, and she called the police, and they dragged mum out of the house and put her in handcuffs and took her to the hospital,” Bird recalled.

“It was horrible. We’ve come home to find mum overdosed on her tablets. So she overdosed a couple of times and even back then, when she did her first overdose, all they did was, pump her stomach. I remember seeing her with all the charcoal over her mouth, and they pumped her stomach and sent her back home with a prescription for the same bloody pills that she just overdosed on, and then she did it again.”

She continued: “So a lot of memories of that growing up, and I also remember another time … she picked me up and threw me down the hallway but that was like she was possessed, it was like there was a devil inside of her. It was the weirdest, strangest thing. But that’s all the medication that wasn’t working. It wasn’t until I was older that I kind of understood what it was. I guess we knew no different really growing up.”

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* A new episode of Mental As Anyone drops each Tuesday morning.