Why Chrissie Swan got fed up of talking about her body
In her first interview in nearly five years, Chrissie Swan reveals how a bruising job loss and successful stint in the jungle helped her realise what she wanted from life – and why she’s fed up of talking about “the size of my arse”.
Stellar
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Chrissie Swan is deep in her “compound”. That’s the code name she uses for her home in Melbourne’s leafy east, and it is the setting for her first major interview in nearly five years.
When she greets Stellar, Swan is fresh from her breakfast radio show on Melbourne’s Nova 100, and still enjoying the novelty of professionally straightened hair from her cover shoot four days prior.
“I didn’t wash it all weekend,” she says. “The best thing about a photo shoot is the blow wave.”
The 46-year-old admittedly shares plenty about her life with listeners for three hours of a morning but, Swan tells Stellar, she has not missed sitting down and being grilled by a journalist.
“I did 10 years where the size of my arse was the focus of every interview. So when I stopped long enough to think about what I really wanted to do, talking about my body wasn’t included.
“It’s been bigger, it’s been smaller, it will be bigger again, it will be smaller again. Some bodies are like that, and that’s the way my body is.
“Every interview tended to focus on my body or the fact that I’ve had children. There may not be anything else interesting about me, I don’t know...”
When Swan joined the cast of reality TV show Big Brother in 2003, it was to amuse her friends who all watched the show together. She was working in advertising as a copywriter, and expected to be voted out of the house instantly – she’d even organised a pal to babysit her business for two weeks.
The fans had another idea, and Swan proved so popular she became the runner-up to Reggie Bird.
“I was in there for three months,” says Swan. “Can you imagine? Doing Big Brother was the best thing I ever did, in hindsight and at the time. I loved every minute of it. It was so fun. I love how it changed my life.”
Peter Abbott, Big Brother’s executive producer at the time, once told Swan he cast her “for her keen sense of the absurd”. In response, says Swan, “I do find things funnier than other people. If I have a slip, I’ll sometimes laugh myself to sleep reliving it.”
Swan’s endearing personality and natural charm (and that laugh) took her a lot farther than the Big Brother house – soon after it ended, she left her hometown of Melbourne (and her reignited copywriting career) to accept an out-of-the-blue offer to do breakfast radio in Queensland.
“I had no idea what I was doing,” she admits. “I thought, ‘They’ll give me some training.’ No. I arrived on a Saturday night on the Sunshine Coast and I was on air on Monday morning.”
By 2007, Swan was homesick. She returned to Melbourne and her old career. A year later, radio came calling again – she’d wind up on another breakfast radio show with Australian Idol judge Ian “Dicko” Dickson and comedian Dave O’Neil, and in 2010 switched mediums to morning TV, where she co-hosted Network 10’s The Circle with Yumi Stynes, Denise Drysdale and Gorgi Coghlan.
At the following year’s Logies, Swan won the Most Popular New Female Talent gong and was up for the Gold Logie against the likes of Karl Stefanovic, Rebecca Gibney and Asher Keddie.
That elicited a salty response from Eddie McGuire, who called a vote for Swan a vote for “the dumb kid in class to gee up the teachers”.
“There’s a dark horse for the Gold Logie every year now,” says Swan. “I must have been the first. I agree it was odd; I had no control over it. But also, so what? Maybe I broke the Logies? Maybe that was the start of it.
“What’s the big deal? People vote for somebody and they get nominated. Eddie couldn’t understand it, but The Circle was really important to a lot of people. It was like a lifeline for them.”
Swan returned to radio on Mix FM (now the KIIS network) with Jane Hall that year, initially on an afternoon show, then back to breakfast in 2012 – it was the first show in that timeslot in Melbourne to be hosted by two women – and also ended up hosting Network 10’s night-time talk show Can Of Worms.
At the end of 2014, Swan’s “dream show” with Hall was axed by radio management. She was blindsided, but quickly rebounded by signing on for I’m A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here! and heading to South Africa in January 2015.
While the reality show has since been truncated to 30 days, that first season was a gruelling 45 days long. Still, Swan came in third behind British cricketer Andrew Flintoff and former AFL footballer Barry Hall.
It also marked the longest she had ever been away from her partner, carpenter Chris Saville, and their children, Leo, now 11, Kit, eight, and Peg, six. As she looks back on the chaos of that time, Swan is reflective.
“All of a sudden, I lost my job at Mix and went straight into the jungle. There’s a danger I see in women – maybe both genders, but definitely women – where we tend to get our self-esteem from our work. If people are asking you to do something, that must mean you’re good. That feels good. That’s where I was getting my self-esteem.
“The problem with that is that someone can completely explode your whole life if you lose a job. And radio can change on a whim. That’s why I took it so personally losing the job at Mix. People say easy come, easy go. But in radio you’re not just doing a role. It is you. It’s my whole life – on-air, off-air. There’s no work-life balance; that’s the only way that I can do it.
“Losing that job coincided with six weeks being completely isolated in the jungle. I thought, ‘Where can I get my self-esteem if it’s not work?’ It had to be from my family. I can’t be fired from them. I love being a parent, my kids are excellent, they’re fun and they’re clever. I just like their company.”
It was one of many life lessons Swan holds on to from that period. “The 12 years previous to going on that show had been unbelievable,” she says. “I met someone, had three kids, went from completely unknown copywriter living in a flat in Hawthorn to covers of magazines and five jobs at a time, plus all the kids in there.
I never stopped working. I never had more than five weeks’ maternity leave. Those years had been complete chaos. I don’t know how I did it.
“All of a sudden I went on [I’m A Celebrity], I just thought it was a TV show, but it was like seven weeks at [famous Australian health retreat] Gwinganna. Everything stopped. It was really hard but also life-changing. I got to untangle what I wanted and how I wanted my life to go instead of doing everything. I was so busy I never thought ‘no’ was an option.
“It sounds so crazy to say it. ‘OK, so I’m writing a column, I’m filming a TV show, I’m doing that second radio show, I’m doing every bit of publicity offered...’ I just never said no. When I got out of that period of no phone, no email, no requests, nothing – I’ve got goosebumps thinking about it all these years on – I changed everything.
“I do one job. And I parent. And that is actually enough. My kids were little then, they’re all at school now so that changes things again, but I was so busy. What for?”
That one job – her show Chrissie, Sam & Browny with comedian Sam Pang and ex-AFL star Jonathan Brown – is now in its fifth year, marking her longest consecutive stint on one show in radio.
They ended 2019 as Melbourne’s number-one breakfast FM radio program. Even the 4am alarms every weekday don’t deter Swan from loving her job.
“Normally work is something that empties your cup, and for me, by some miracle, my job is something that actually fills my cup. I get so much from it. I miss it when I’m on holidays. It’s where I get all my social stimulation.
“We have become such good friends. A lot of women my age, and with as many kids as I’ve got and a busy job, they all complain they never see their friends. Your social life really takes a dive. You can feel really lonely. But because my work is my social life as well, I just get so much from it.”
Swan admits it was only after the show’s third year that she felt job security. “Before that, I still thought I could probably go back and work in an ad agency. I was a copywriter; I never thought I’d still be here.”
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Indeed, after Big Brother, Swan’s accountant asked her to start a company. She thought of the name in an instant, calling it 15 Minutes. “I thought, ‘Let’s see how long this lasts,’” she tells Stellar. “That’s still the name, but it’s 17 years later... it’s crazy. And it’s getting to be more fun. Nobody really has that.”
In a couple of weeks Swan will take part in Priceline’s Beauty Runway for the Sisterhood at the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival, sashaying with the likes of Ita Buttrose, Poh Ling Yeow and Tanya Hennessy.
“When I was first asked, I said, ‘I can’t do that... I’d rather die!’ It fills me with total panic and fear. But it’s good to do stuff you’re scared about sometimes. Plus, I don’t have to walk in high heels – I couldn’t do that.
“And it’s all about diversity, [which] just makes me happy. It makes people happy because it makes them feel included. Feeling like you belong is really powerful.”
It is one of the few non-radio gigs that she has opted to take. Because while Swan has co-hosted shows such as Long Lost Family and The Great Australian Spelling Bee in the past, she has stepped away from regular television work, aside from occasionally filling in for host Tom Gleisner on Have You Been Paying Attention ?
“Most of the shows are filmed in Sydney and I just don’t do well away from my family on any level, even for a night,” she explains.
“I don’t know if I’m a sook, but I just don’t do well out of my role as a mother. I wish I did. I’ve tested it enough times to know, and the result has been the same. I get in a funk in hotel rooms. I just get so sad away from the kids.
“I’d rather be here at home. I’ve turned it into a compound – I’ve got everything I need here.”