Nova Peris on playing the Survivor game: ‘They just bull****ted away and that is not me’
Survivor Australia will be a fiery affair if Nova Peris’ words are anything to go by. The former professional athlete and politician has called out her fellow contestants for lacking loyalty before the reality series even kicks off later this month.
Survivor Australia will be a fiery affair if Nova Peris’s words are anything to go by.
The former professional athlete and politician has called out her fellow contestants for lacking loyalty before the reality series even kicks off later this month.
“If that was them being true to themselves, it is a bit sad,” Peris told Confidential of her fellow Survivor contestants.
“Loyalty is very important to me and if you were to use the word loyalty as being important to me, it wasn’t important to others. They just bull****ted away and that is not me.”
Peris will join the likes of rugby league great Andrew Ettingshausen and marathon swimmer Susie Maroney when Australian Survivor: Champions V Contenders premieres on Channel 10 on July 24.
They will all compete on the Champions team against everyday Australians vying for the series crown on a Fijian island. Production on the series has already wrapped with details of who wins being kept a closely guarded secret.
“There were a handful of us, my personality is very similar to ET and Susie Maroney, our mentality is very different to others,” Peris explained. “I would say we were true to ourselves.”
Peris, 48, won Olympic Gold for Australia in Women’s Hockey at the Atlanta games in 1996, as well as gold at the World Cup in 1994 in Dublin.
She became the first indigenous woman elected to the federal parliament in 2013 after being invited to join the Labor Party by then Prime Minister Julia Gillard.
Professional sport and a career in politics served Peris well for her time on Survivor.
“I call things for how I see them,” she said. “I guess it is hard for me to sit back and not say anything. If there is something that needs to be said and no one has the guts to say it, I will. People pussy foot around and I will say it.
“Coming from my sporting background, playing elite sport, if you stuffed up, you had to own the consequences. You had to own your mistakes and that was how I was conditioned in 13 years representing Australia.”
It isn’t Peris’s first run at reality TV — she competed on Celebrity Overhaul in 2004.
She was inspired to sign up to Survivor because of her grandparents and mother, who were members of the stolen generation.
“My grandmother was 12 years old and lived off the land,” she explained. “That is what inspired me; to put myself in almost a similar environment where you have to go through the hard times and there were days on end where it rained and it was cold and it is not like you had a roof to shelter you from the rain. It was challenging and I think I am a better person for it having gone through that experience.”
She continued of her learnings: “As humans we are gluttons in a way. We don’t actually need a lot of food to survive. When you are on that island, if you want to eat, you’ve got to go and find pawpaw or open a coconut. You’ve got to do the hard yards in that respect. As hard as it was, I loved it.”
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