This season’s Survivor contestants are a pack of liars — and it’s great TV

The sneaky tactics on Survivor have stepped up a gear this year and the contestants are being exposed as a pack of liars.

This year’s Australian Survivor cast members have been remarkably eager to lie to their tribemates — and for several players, the lies were planned way before they even appeared on the show.

A number of contestants this season have fibbed about key aspects of their back stories, shaving years off their true ages, fudging their real-life occupations and even inventing fake children. And in an Australian Survivor first, the deceit has even extended to the show’s tough physical challenges, with several contestants secretly plotting to deliberately lose.

It’s a surprising development for the Aussie version of the franchise, given most contestants across the three previous seasons on Ten appeared reluctant to lie, cheat and backstab like their American counterparts.

In the US, Survivor has notched up an incredible 38 seasons across 19 years on air — and at this stage, some players have been plotting literally since they were children about how they’d like to play the game. Lies and deception par for the course.

It seems Australian Survivor is finally catching up.

Let’s start with this season’s latest evictee and perhaps its most prolific liar:

ANDY’S LIES ON TOP OF LIES

A golfing travel writer? Sure, let’s go with that. Picture: Nigel Wright/Channel 10

Noosa marketing executive Andy Meldrum, 47, conceded as he left the game that there had been “a lot of lies” in his gameplay, but argued that, this season, “everybody’s lying to everyone”.

“I lied about my professional background. I lied to my alliance. I lied about throwing challenges. I lied about votes. I think in the end, there probably were too many lies, and they caught up with me,” he said after he was voted out.

Andy’s first lie came on day one when the self-described Survivor superfan told his tribemates he was a golf and travel writer. His reasoning: Who’s going to trust a marketing exec?

“It meant that around the campfire at night, instead of having to talk about corporate marketing and advertising, which would bore anyone, I got to talk about golf or travel,” he explained (although the jury’s out on whether golf would’ve been a more interesting topic of campfire conversation).

“There weren’t many people in the entire season with a corporate background. It’s about, ‘How do I best fit in with my tribe?’”

Meldrum said he did regret one of his lies on the show: Pretending he wasn’t in fact a massive fan of Survivor,information he feared could make him a target.

“Shaun and I have talked since we’ve been back, and he said to me, ‘Mate, I’m a huge fan as well — had I known we could’ve nerded out on a lot of that stuff together.’ There are little things like that that you realise could’ve helped cement a connection had you been upfront.”

‘HAIRDRESSER’ HANNAH?

Hannah left the show with her lie still intact.

Meldrum told news.com.au a “much better lie” came courtesy of under-the-radar contestant Hannah Pentreath, who was eliminated after 22 days without ever being found out.

Back at home in Bendigo, Hannah’s a police officer — but she told her tribemates she was a hairdresser.

“Everyone is going to overlook me because of my personality and assume I’m not there to play hard. I’ll be the threat they don’t see, right in front of them,” Hannah said of her tactic before appearing on the show.

After her elimination, Hannah admitted her cover had nearly been blown as time wore on. “Everyone believed that I was a hairdresser. I’ll admit that they thought I was an awful hairdresser because at the start all the girls were like ‘Can you braid my hair?’ and then one by one, they stopped asking me because I can’t braid and I was s**t at it so I think they were catching on!” she told Now To Love.

The 27-year-old also lied about her age, keeping it a secret that she’d been married for five years to help her appear younger than she was. She may have been voted out after three weeks in the game — but her lies remained intact and largely unnoticed, even to many viewers.

HARRY’S FAKE BABY

He’s playing for little Oscar. Oscar doesn’t exist.

Perhaps this season’s weirdest lie has come from Perth ice cream maker Harry Hills, who told everyone on day one that he had a young son named Oscar at home, an invention designed to make him appear softer and more relatable to his tribemates.

Harry’s lie was finally exposed during a lively tribal council on Day 20, but it turns out his tribemates had their suspicions almost immediately.

“That was genuinely hilarious, although basically nobody believed it. He’d been telling us that from the start and there were some suspicious folks around,” Andy said.

“He told us day one that he had a baby, and I knew by day three that he didn’t,” fellow Contender Matt Farrelly told news.com.au this week.

Farrelly chuckled as he revealed how easy it had been to catch Hills out.

Harry, we love your work mate, but if you're gonna make up a kid - decide on the name first. #SurvivorAU pic.twitter.com/xEss8EsFmg

— Australian Survivor (@Survivor_AU) August 11, 2019

“We were talking about what we’d do on a day off, and he was telling me how he’d wake up late, go shopping, play video games … I thought, ‘Don’t you have a baby to look after?’”

Contender Shaun Hampson, a father of two young children, said he too was quickly able to see through Harry’s lie.

“As a dad, talking to him about children, it just didn’t feel right … but at the same time I couldn’t go ‘Harry, Oscar’s fake.’ On the off chance that he’s real, that’s an insulting thing to say to somebody!” he said.

“I think (Harry) had the perception that parents seem more trustworthy, and it’d be a good way for him to relate to older people. He’d tell us stories about him, his date of birth, his middle name … he had everything worked out, but we quickly realised something didn’t add up.”

SHAUN’S SUPERMODEL SECRET

Shaun and partner Megan Gale.

Placed with the Contenders tribe, Shaun Hampson had an immediate obstacle to bonding with his team full of scrappy underdogs: His decidedly glamorous backstory. A 10-year AFL veteran, his partner is one of Australia’s most successful supermodels, Megan Gale.

Andy told news.com.au that Shaun’s attempts conceal his backstory had to rank as one of the “better lies” of the season.

“A few days in I had to say ‘What’s your partner’s name again?’ and put two and two together … Around the same time a couple of the girls figured it out and actually said something, so his cover was blown pretty early,” Andy said.

Shaun revealed to news.com.au last week that he had tried desperately to keep his backstory under wraps.

“I went into the game with (lying) being a real possibility for me. Going onto the Contenders tribe, I thought that if they heard, ‘Hi I’m Shaun, I played 11.5 years of AFL,’ they’d immediately be like ‘Well you don’t belong here’,” he said.

“I didn’t mention Megan … nobody asked ‘Who’s your partner, what does your partner do?’ so I just sort of left it. I didn’t want to walk in and go ‘Hey guys, my partner’s Megan Gale!’ That felt strange,” he said.

CHALLENGE-THROWING: ‘I DIDN’T EXPECT IT’

Pia and Janine deliberately crashed out of this immunity challenge.

Lies have even plagued the season’s immunity challenges, with several attempts to throw challenges so teams can go to tribal council and eliminate rival tribemates from the competition. It’s a surprisingly unsportsmanlike development for the Aussie iteration on the show, which in years past has been heavy on mateship.

Andy’s own unsuccessful attempts to throw a challenge, dithering over a puzzle as tribemate Baden blitzed it, were cringe-worthy to watch.

“It’s definitely harder than it looks to throw a challenge! Particularly when the other person you’re doing a puzzle with doesn’t want to throw a challenge,” he laughed.

“Short of picking up one of the pieces and throwing it 100 yards into the jungle — which I half-considered — it was tough to stop Baden on the puzzle.”

Super-competitive Contender Matt Farrelly, a wrestler back home, told news.com.au that in scenes that never made it to air earlier this season, his Contenders tribe had devised a secret plan to throw challenges once the tribes had swapped so they could easily pick off the Champions.

“We knew the tribe swap was coming, and the Contenders — mostly Shaun and Daisy — got everyone together and said, ‘Let’s agree to all throw the challenges and get rid of all the champions because we have a numbers advantage’,” he confessed.

“I told them straight up, ‘I don’t think I can throw a challenge.’ It’s not my mindset or how I play. Seeing it happen on the show … some of those Champions I really have a lot of respect for, and I didn’t expect it from them.”

Farrelly said that ultimately, he couldn’t judge his competitors for their sneaky behaviour, offering some words of wisdom viewers would do well to remember: “Sometimes when you’re off playing Survivor … you do things you wouldn’t do in your normal life.”

Australian Survivor airs 7.30pm Sundays to Tuesdays on Ten.