TasWeekend: Shane Gould proves she is a born survivor
FEW live life as fully as Shane Gould. The Olympic gold medallist is studying for her PhD, caring for Tasmanian devils, advising elite athletes, designing swimming courses and now she has become a reality TV star.
Lifestyle
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WINNING the latest season of reality TV show Australian Survivor has thrust former swimming champion Shane Gould very much into the national spotlight, more than 40 years after she first became a household name for her multi-world-record-breaking performance in the pool at the 1972 Olympics in Munich.
Back then, as a teenager, she retired from swimming soon after the Olympics, finding the immense pressure from the media and the public to be difficult to deal with at such a young age.
But when I ask her how she is coping with the renewed media attention, given her reputation for being publicity-shy, the 61-year-old swimmer feels a need to set the record straight.
VICTORY FOR THE AGES IS AS GOOD AS GOULD
THE BIG LESSON FROM SHANE GOULD’S SURVIVOR WIN
“That whole media-shy myth, it’s a furphy,” she says. “I love the attention! I do like the media and being able to express my opinions. But the sudden explosion of interest around me, from around the globe after the Olympics was intense. I was 16 and 17 at the time. I had no managers. It was just my parents trying to help me work out how to speak to the media and make these speeches.
“Often I felt really silly, I was just a teenager trying to communicate with all these adults. But at the same time I appeared mature and poised, so they asked a lot more of me than they might have from anyone else my age. It all felt so out of control. It would have been impossible for anyone to manage what I was being asked to do, let alone a teenager, and I didn’t think it was fair on my parents either.
“In 1976 I moved to Western Australia, at Margaret River, and with most of the Australian media being based on the east coast, WA was treated as if it was another country. It was simply too far to go and I think media outlets considered it to be too difficult to reach me, which perpetuated this myth that I became reclusive, but it’s just not the case.
“I was very active in the Margaret River community, I had four kids there, did lots of youth work, my [then] husband had a lawnmowing round, we were an emergency accommodation place for people in distress, and I even ran a swimming school there. So we weren’t hiding by any means, but I think I just didn’t fit the stereotype of what famous people were meant to do, so they gave up.”
Born in 1956 in Sydney, very little of Gould’s life story could be called stereotypical, or even typical. At just 18 months old her family moved to Fiji, later going to primary school in Brisbane and high school in Sydney.
Always an excellent swimmer, Gould was trained by acclaimed coaches Forbes and Ursula Carlile and Tom Greene and was 15 when she competed in the 1972 Munich Olympics. She won five medals, including three gold, a silver and a bronze, and in each of those gold medal races she broke a world record.
After rocketing to fame, she retired from competitive swimming aged 17 and married her first husband, Neil Innes, at the age of 18. The couple moved to a property at Margaret River where Gould became a Christian, started studying a degree in environmental studies, and they had four children together.
Twenty two years later, that marriage ended and eventually she met American swimming coach Milton Nelms, marrying him in 2007 and moving to Tasmania.
Gould might not be a hermit, but it is certainly true she prefers the quiet country life over the big city, which is one of the reasons she relocated to the East Coast Tasmanian town of Bicheno about a decade ago with Nelms.
GOULD HAPPY TO BE ALL AT SEA ON THE EAST COAST
She still swims in the ocean every morning, rain or shine, and enjoys keeping physically fit, so when she was asked to be a contestant on the Ten Network’s Australian Survivor last year, she immediately went into training mode.
“An email came through from the casting agency just before Christmas asking if I would be interested. As it happened, I had been thinking about taking a holiday somewhere and thought Fiji sounded nice!” she says.
“I’m a person who likes to go into things with research and preparation, so I studied the game over the Christmas/New Year period. I watched the past Australian seasons and some of the American ones, I watched the way people played the game, what they wore, the strategies they used.
“After about two months I decided I could do it and said yes. I started doing some more physical training like climbing and soft-sand-running and holding ropes and posture and balance training. I knew there would be other athletes on the show and they would be younger, stronger and fitter than me, so while I knew I wouldn’t be capable of being the strongest I wanted to be as ready as I could be and I knew I could be a reliable team member.”
Having spent part of her childhood living in Fiji, and travelling there regularly now for a water safety program she and Nelms run, Gould had something of a home-ground advantage on Survivor, which was filmed on the Fijian island of Savusavu. Familiar with the climate and geography, she knew to bring warmer clothes for overnight, unlike some other competitors who brought only light summer clothes and suffered in the cold nights.
She also says her age, experience raising children, and broad life experience gave her an advantage in terms of knowing how to read people, understanding body language and being resilient enough to be able to bounce back from setbacks.
By the time she was named sole survivor and winner of the $500,000 prize, Gould had earned a reputation for playing a very clean game, which is quite an achievement in a game where being underhanded is often an advantage.
“Well, I wasn’t THAT mild,” she laughs. “I knew there would be times when I would have to betray a promise and where you had to try to get someone voted out before they get you voted out, but I tried to do it as mildly as possible.
“There’s a logic to the game that you have to understand in order to be part of it. I blindsided a few people and helped an alliance to secretly, unexpectedly, vote someone out.
“The hardest part of the game was having to vote someone off. We very quickly got this village community kind of feel together and you’re always very aware that when you go to tribal council you’re going to be spoiling it for someone. But from a social experiment perspective, there’s so much of that in real life: if you get a promotion at work, it means someone else didn’t, and if you get through to a final in sport, it means someone else didn’t.”
Gould cannot speak highly enough of her time on Survivor, saying the experience made her feel like a kid again. And even though she had to keep many details secret from her friends and family for months until the finale had gone to air, she says the Bicheno community was amazingly supportive and positive.
“As it went to air it was really fun to be able to share it with the people around me and have a laugh with them about it. And some of it really was quite funny: some old lady wrestling a young girl for some oranges!”
The Bicheno community and her home by the sea are Gould’s haven. She and Nelms do a lot of travelling interstate and overseas to promote and run swimming and water safety programs they have designed, which means they are away from home for about six months of the year. But when they are not travelling, Bicheno is home.
Gould says she started thinking about a move to the island state in 2002 while showing Nelms around Tasmania during one of his visits to Australia early in their relationship.
“We were trying to decide where we wanted to live together and we both quite liked it here. He is from Oregon and he thought Tasmania was a lot like Oregon, and I saw a lot of similarities to Margaret River in terms of the outdoor lifestyle, hiking, farming, all that, and there’s a lot of creative people working in Tassie, I was very attracted to that.”
Initially they settled in Launceston but Gould realised she missed being on the coast. In the meantime she became involved in the Devil Island Project, a conservation project building double-fenced virtual “islands” on land to house and protect populations of healthy Tasmanian devils, unaffected by a facial cancer that threatens the species’ existence in the wild.
Working in media and fundraising for the organisation, and also as patron, Gould regularly attended meetings at the site of the first island that was built, at Nature World Wildlife Park at Bicheno.
“Whenever I came to Bicheno I loved it more and more, and I got to know the people at the surf club, I started helping out at nippers days. I started getting more and more involved in the town and its community,” she says.
“One thing led to another, a block of land came up for sale in Bicheno and so did a holiday accommodation business and so we just made the move. I’d always wanted to replicate that country lifestyle I had in WA, in some new beautiful place and now here I am living in a house just 30m from the beach with a 180-degree view of the sea.
“It’s a really good base for us to have in between travel, it’s good for the soul, and good for us physically. And being such a peaceful place, it fosters creativity and good thinking. Then I can go out into the big wide world to do my thing and come home to review and write reports from this beautiful spot. It’s just a perfect balance.”
Since moving to Tasmania, Gould has gone back to university to complete her Master of Environmental Management degree, which she started in WA in the 1970s, and has completed a Master of Contemporary Art, completing both degrees at the University of Tasmania.
She is now working on her PhD thesis, a sociological investigation of Australia’s swimming culture and how it forms such a pivotal part of our national identity through sport and recreation. After four years of work, she hopes to complete it by the end of this year.
Gould and Nelms spend much of their time developing swimming and water safety programs for countries such as Fiji and Sweden, and Nelms still coaches and manages elite swimmers, including American Olympian Dana Vollmer. While Gould has been a swimming teacher in the past, she has never had any desire to coach. But she says she enjoys living vicariously through the elite swimmers who occasionally stay with them in Tasmania for training with her husband.
“We sometimes have elite swimmers come and stay with us in Bicheno, they train in the ocean here. I swim with them and go body surfing with them while they’re here. It’s nice having them around. I enjoy being an equal with them, sharing my experience with them, a sort of mentor role helping them to have a more meaningful experience of what they’re going through at the time, and to keep a balance in life,” she says.
Swimming is still a huge part of her life.
Following the success of the Devil of a Run fundraising run for the Devil Island Project, Gould established a similar ocean swim fundraiser, the Devil of a Swim, to also raise money for the organisation. And she is an active member of the Bicheno Surf Lifesaving Club, doing patrols as a lifeguard.
When she noticed there were relatively few people making use of the ocean for swimming in the area, she decided to form her own social swimming group to remedy the situation. Every morning a group of up to 30 swimmers meet on the beach to swim together, even through the winter.
“This is our sixth winter. It gets pretty cold out there! But once you get going, you adapt pretty quickly and warm up. Wearing a wetsuit certainly helps.
“The Bicheno swimmers have become a bit of a tourist attraction, actually. People will stand on the beach watching this group of crazy Tasmanians in their wetsuits diving into the freezing water. We don’t mind.
“I have started riding a bike as well, mostly the ten-minute ride to town and back. It all helps and it all adds up. I go walking and jogging on the beach, I do some yoga and I like to get on the tools in the garden, as well. There’s always gardening to do and always maintenance and cleaning that needs to be done at the accommodation buildings. I love getting my hands dirty, I’m much happier in jeans and a T-shirt than I am in a dress and make-up. Life is pretty good.”
But what of that half a million dollars in prize money from Survivor? Gould, quite typically, isn’t letting it go to her head and she has some very practical, modest plans for it.
“I want to build a nice sustainable house here in Bicheno. I always wanted to have a simple cottage, even when I lived in Margaret River I had plans to build a mud brick house and just never got around to it,” she says.
“While I was doing my Master of Environmental Management at UTAS, I had some great ideas for sustainable houses and how to be clever with things like using the sun properly and cross-ventilation. So after wanting to do this for 40 years, now is the time for me to finally do this dream project.”
And there is a more personal design feature she plans to add to the design.
“My mother died five years ago, and she always dreamt of having a library, a room lined with books. Her uncle had one and she inherited quite a number of the books but never had her own library,” she says.
“We often talked about that and I said to her that one day I wanted to do it for her and create the Shirley Gould Library. So I will be making one of the rooms a library in memory of my mum, it will have walls lined with books, just like she always wanted, in a cottage overlooking the sea.”
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