Lisa: THE INSPIRING #1 BESTSELLING MEMOIR

By Lisa Curry and Ellen Whinnett

The long-awaited memoir of one of Australia's most enduring and inspiring sporting icons.

Triple Olympian and wellness entrepreneur Lisa Curry has lived her life in the public eye for six decades. In this very personal memoir, she shares the untold story of being Lisa.

A swimming prodigy who became one of Australia's first fitness entrepreneurs, Lisa Curry swam to Olympic fame in the '80s and '90s. With celerity and celebrity, she became in equal parts the darling of women's magazines and tabloid fodder, until, at 58, a family tragedy nearly consumed her. From the golden girl of Australian swimming to a 'super mum' and now a proud grannie, Lisa Curry has a powerful story to tell of endurance and enduring.

In 1972, ten-year-old Lisa escaped the heat of a hot and muggy Brisbane day in the local pool when she was spotted by Dawn Fraser's legendary swim coach, Harry Gallagher. Within two years of joining his swim squad, Lisa would be one of the fastest swimmers of her age in the world.

Over the next 23 years, Lisa honed her natural talent with a legendary work ethic and a punishing training ritual of 5 am starts. Countless hours of long, unbroken swimming of up to 60km a week in solitary union with the black lines of the pool would take Lisa to three Olympic Games: Moscow 1980, Los Angeles 1984, and Barcelona 1992; three Commonwealth Games; and two World Championships. By the time Lisa called time on her sporting career, she had become the only Australian to hold Commonwealth and Australian records in every stroke except backstroke, and from 50 to 400 metres, a feat that has not been repeated to this day.

In this funny, heartbreaking but always life-affirming memoir, Lisa Curry reflects on a life well lived and the experiences that shaped her: swimming, family, marriage, divorce, and love found again. It is a powerful story of resilience, of highs and lows, and of starting out and starting again.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: May 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781460714454

Book preview

PROLOGUE

The Hardest Race of My Life

In the backyard pool with Scott, Melanie and Dad. Brisbane, 1960s.

I go through all the boxes one by one until I find what I am looking for – a retro Qantas shoulder bag marked with the words:

AUSTRALIAN COMMONWEALTH GAMES TEAM EDMONTON 1978

Brushing off the dust, I wiggle the zip undone and pull out a tangle of ribbons and pennants. From the same box, I lift out a tattered old shoebox and take off the lid.

Inside are my medals – my Commonwealth golds, silver and bronze from Brisbane and Auckland; and my silver from Edmonton. My Order of Australia medals and my MBE.

But I’m not looking for any of those. I’m looking for the first swimming medal I ever won, when I was ten years old.

The dust makes me sneeze, just as the chlorine I swam in every day for 23 years used to make me sneeze. I have nearly 50 years of memorabilia stored here in husband Mark’s mancave, and it takes hours to sort it all out. I unearth my plush boxing kangaroo from the Brisbane Games. I find all my tracksuits and robes, my goggles, my blazers, my Olympic uniforms.

My name is also on the red bag: LISA CURRY, written neatly in black marker. I was only 16 when I got that bag and boarded the plane for my first Commonwealth Games. It was always so exciting when we went away together. As part of the Queensland team, I’d get a maroon tracksuit, blazer, and white shirt to wear underneath. A maroon cap emblazoned QLD. Maroon togs. It was the first step towards wearing the green and gold of the Australian uniform. And we all wanted to wear the green and gold.

Mark and I spread all the medals and flags and pennants out across a table. I used to go to the state titles every year and swim in 10, 12, often 14 events, usually winning a medal in everything, so there are a lot to go through.

Then I find it. The little gold disc with the words WELLERS HILL on the front, not much bigger than a 10 cent piece. I won it in 1972 at a carnival in the pool at the Wellers Hill State School when I came first in the 50m freestyle.

I will take this little medal along with me when I go to speak to a group of schoolchildren. I will show them that every journey has to start somewhere and sometimes it starts with a dream.

My journey spanned more than 40,000 kilometres, tracking that relentless black line at the bottom of the pool. Up and down until I knew every crack in the pool tiles and how many strokes it would take me to get to the other end; how many breaths I would take.

People ask me how I could have spent 20 years of my life looking at that black line. Some may think that’s incredibly boring, and I can understand why they may think that but, to me, it was always fun and exciting, even when it hurt.

Writing this book has been a different journey; one that didn’t follow a straight line, and one that hurt in different ways. Forcing myself to slow down enough to remember the good things and the bad things. Sorting through 60 years of memories. The achievements and failures. The soaring loves and the losses too painful to bear.

Outside the pool, there’s no black line to follow. All you have to guide you is your head and your heart.

Mum, Scott, me and Melanie, 1960s.

Part One

LISA GAYE CURRY

CHAPTER 1

A Good Start

Scott, me and Melanie, Surfers Paradise.

It was Dad who decided we needed to learn to swim, after a family outing on his boat to Stradbroke Island. I was very little, maybe 20 months old, and Mum was eight months pregnant with my sister. Dad took my four-year-old brother off the boat, carried him to shore and put him on the sand. Mum was too uncomfortable to get out of the boat, being so heavily pregnant, and she couldn’t swim anyway. I was standing on the side of the boat, ready for Dad to take me next, when I jumped in and went straight to the bottom. Mum screamed, and Dad came racing over and pulled me out; a frightening experience Mum remembers clearly to this day.

‘Well, the kids are going to have to learn how to swim,’ Dad declared.

For the first year or so, we just played with Dad in the little circular tin pool in our backyard, getting used to the feel of the water on our skin. That little pool collapsed one day – luckily, we weren’t in it.

A local, Eddie Kitchener, ran a swim school in his backyard pool in Brisbane. I started with Eddie when I was five, along with a bunch of other little kids. The parents would sit along the side of the pool, which was about 12 metres long. There were no lane ropes and the kids would make a lot of waves in the pool, so I’d get mouthfuls of water.

I vividly remember hanging on to the end of the pool, crying and saying, ‘It’s hard, isn’t it?’ to the kid next to me.

Eddie was a good teacher, who taught me all the strokes by the time I was six or seven years old, apart from butterfly, which would come later. We didn’t use kickboards in those days, and Eddie would get us to swim up and down the side of the pool. We’d hang on to the side if we needed a break or had got a mouthful of water. Up and down we’d go, turning our heads this way then that way. Eyes open. Kicking and breathing.

It was my first swimming test. When the whistle blew, I pushed off the wall and swam freestyle down to the other end of the pool without stopping, and got my first certificate. No cap, goggles or earplugs for me in those days.

I wasn’t fast as a little kid, but I could swim technically well. In hindsight, it was the perfect start for my swimming career.

I was the second of three children born to Patricia Anne Dennien and Victor Leroy Curry – everyone called my dad Roy. Mum couldn’t think of a name for me when I arrived at Brisbane’s Mater Hospital on 15 May 1962, so she named me after Lisa Gaye, an actress from the Golden Age of Hollywood. They were watching a movie on TV and her name came up in the credits. Mum told me they had thought about calling me Suzanne; I’m glad I’m not a Suzanne – no offence to all the lovely Suzannes out there! I like being Lisa . . . always have.

I came along three years after my brother, Scott, while my sister, Melanie, is 15 months younger. Mum had two miscarriages between Scott and me.

Melanie is an adventurous, free-spirited social butterfly, who loves being around her friends and the ocean. Tall – much taller than I am – and long-limbed, she was a great swimmer but preferred team sports like netball and water polo. The lonely black line held little interest for her. Mel is a talented artist and sailor, who lives the dream in the Whitsundays where she sails every day. She and her daughter, Bodhi, are proficient free-divers, able to hold their breaths for up to four minutes at a time. They dive into the deep blue of the ocean, marvelling at the stillness and quiet of the vast underwater world, then slowly and carefully make their way back to the surface. The thought of doing such a thing terrifies me – one of my greatest fears is drowning. (How ridiculous would it be for an Olympic swimmer to drown?) Melanie can also navigate the oceans using only the stars. Celestial navigation! My extraordinary sister.

Scott is a classical pianist who lives in Berlin. He’s been there for most of his life – ever since Dad asked him what he wanted for his twenty-first birthday and he replied, ‘A one-way ticket to Europe.’ He went to London first where he worked in a few bars before moving to Berlin. That’s where he always wanted to be, because Berlin is the hub of classical music. We speak occasionally – not often enough – and when we talk, it’s just like old times; what we are doing, how our families are. He’s a good guy, my brother; a really funny human being, so talented, smart and worldly. He plays in huge concerts as the principal pianist and, sometimes, he’s onstage with his partner, Angelo Riciti, an opera singer. Together, they perform duets and people throw roses at them. Angelo is Italian and gorgeous, and they’re so great together; my extraordinary brother and brother-in-law have been together a long, long time.

We often laugh that the only thing we ever had in common was our parents, because Scott is the musician, I am the athlete and Melanie is the artist.

Mum was from Murgon, a little Queensland town about 260 kilometres north-west of Brisbane. She’d come down to the city to train and work as a nurse at the Mater Hospital. Mum had one sister, Noela – unlike their mum, who’d had 13 brothers and sisters. Dad was an up-and-coming high-flyer working in real estate. He’d come out to Australia from Ireland as a young and ambitious 20 year old.

My great-great-grandmother on my mother’s side first settled in Laidley, west of Brisbane, before moving to Murgon. The family was well-known all over the district. Nana Hilda’s house had a big backyard with lots of flowers and a vegetable garden. We loved going up there – Popa Roy had chooks out the back; he used to chop off their heads and they’d run around for a bit without a head, then he’d pluck them and we’d have chicken for dinner. We would collect the eggs and, once, I remember Melanie and I throwing eggs at the side of the barn to see if they had chickens in them. We didn’t know better; we were just being naughty kids. Our favourite thing to do there was sit by the stove in the kitchen, put a piece of bread on a toasting fork and toast it over the hot coals. Then we’d sit there with a big chunk of real butter and a butter knife, and spread it on the burnt toast. It was so good!

Dad’s family were ‘Ten Pound Poms’, who were offered jobs and a new way of living in Australia. Ireland was still going through the war – or, at least, they were in Belfast – and they wanted a better life for their five kids. The whole family came out except for Dad, who stayed behind because he was working there as a salesman. Then his brother wrote to him and said, ‘You’ve got to come out here. There’s sun, surf and sheilas.’ So Dad packed his bag, dumped his girlfriend and pretty much left the next day, arriving on the boat in 1952.

The trip took six weeks and Dad always told the story of how he only had one pair of woolly pants and they shrank when he washed them on the ship on the way out, so then they were shorts! He was quite happy about that, though, because he was coming to a warmer country.

Dad was a real ladies’ man. He always loved women, even when he was in his 80s. He always dressed well – stylish pants and shirts, ties, cool hats. So maybe he had a similar vision for his girls to be well-dressed, well-spoken ladies. He kept his broad Irish accent all his life and, if he’d been drinking, you could hardly understand him. I’d say, ‘Dad, can you speak English!’

Mum and Dad met at a ball at Cloudland, the famous old dance hall in Bowen Hills. Dances were all the go in the 1950s, and Mum and her friends from the hospital would get dressed up and go to Cloudland on a Saturday night. Cloudland has a special place in Brisbane’s history. Built in 1940 to be part of an amusement park, it became the centre of Brisbane’s social scene, even though the amusement park never eventuated. Even Queen Elizabeth went there in 1977 for a state reception. It’s long gone, knocked down and replaced by apartment buildings in the 1980s.

I don’t know who caught whose eye. Dad was dapper and Mum looked like a movie star – they both did. Dad was funny, pleasant and liked to dance – although only at the start, apparently. He never danced again that Mum recalled. Dad fell for Mum’s skin, eyes and beautiful smile. They got married in 1956 when Mum was 20 and Dad was 23.

The second time she met Dad at Cloudland, he asked her if she had any friends she could bring along to meet his shy older brother, Ed, so three of Mum’s friends went along next time. One of them, also called Pat, clicked with Ed and they ended up getting married even before Mum and Dad did, so two of the Curry boys married nurses called Pat.

CHAPTER 2

Like the Ocean on a Good Day

Mum and I drove past this newspaper poster in 1976 on our way to training early one morning.

Some of my first memories as a kid are of our house on Mount Gravatt Capalaba Road in Brisbane, which in those days was all acreages. It was a great house that Dad had built, with a long driveway and huge garden. We would run around in the circular pool until the water started to swirl, then get carried along in the whirlpool. We spent a lot of time outside, playing on a rope swing in a tree – we loved being on that rope. I got my first stitches at that house when I fell on a barbed wire fence, which is why I have a scar under my nose.

Our house was brick with two storeys. We didn’t realise it at the time – a house is just a house to a kid – but the houses Dad built were very upmarket. He was a successful businessman, and we had a boat, a nice house and a beautiful classic Buick car. We didn’t know our life was privileged then; we just thought everyone lived like that.

I used to sneak into Dad’s bedroom and steal his matches to take out the back of the house, where I’d build piles of sticks and dried leaves to burn. I had this fascination with burning things, which I still have today; I love bonfires, and cleaning up sticks and branches around the property. Amazingly, I never got caught taking the matches or making fires. It’s funny what kids get up to; I could have burned the house down!

It was a classic wild and free Australian upbringing with a lot of space to run around in. I remember riding my bike down the driveway with my feet off the peddles and the wind in my hair, before crashing into a clump of banana trees. I remember hot, humid summers and the storms that would bring relief in the afternoons: deafening thunder, pelting hail, the trees whipped about by the wind and sometimes falling. There was always a clean-up to do in the yard afterwards.

Because Dad was in real estate development, Sundays were always spent driving around looking at land. As kids, we were so bored, but we’d stop and get an ice cream, and that made it a bit better. It was the 1960s, so Dad was always smoking in the car, and we three kids would be in the back going ‘Eewww!’ with the smoke, but it was just part of our life. I remember him saying one day, ‘I wish I could give these things up,’ so Mum wound down the window and threw out his packet of cigarettes. He stopped the car, got out and walked back to get them! Every Sunday night, we’d go to Pizza Hut. In those days, they didn’t clear the tables before you sat down: you’d just go in and find a table. Dad was the kind of guy who would eat the leftovers from the people who’d sat there before. If there was a piece left or a few crusts, he’d hoe into them, which we thought was pretty funny.

I went to kindy at St Paul’s Church in Upper Mount Gravatt then, in 1967, I started Grade 1 at Mansfield State School. I remember having half a day off in 1969 so we could watch the first Moon landing. The school’s football field was on our backyard boundary so we were very close, but we never walked to school: Mum drove us – she reckoned it was too far to walk. And we would’ve had to cross main roads. She did let Scott walk to school one day and was sick with worry the whole time.

As a kid, I was close to my dad. When I was little, a couple of times a week, I’d sit on his lap and we’d share a whole box of Samboy barbecue chips. That was our thing to do. He would walk in at 7 pm and, if he had a big brown bag, we knew it was full of treats. He’d have Cherry Ripes and other chocolate bars, and my favourite – those barbecue chips.

Within a few years, Dad built a new place and we moved to Broadwater Road, a two-storey house that had a real pool – not a tin one – with a diving board and slippery slide. Dad played with us kids in the pool all the time, swimming laps in the morning, zooming down the slippery slide or diving off the springboard.

Dad put up a netball ring in the backyard for me to practise, and would play ping-pong with me. I remember when we were playing ping-pong, I’d hit the table with my bat in frustration if I missed a point, so even back then I guess I was a little competitive. Dad would pay me five cents if I won.

We all learned piano, and Scott was always very, very good at it; Dad had bought him a grand piano when he was seven years old. Mum’s sister, Noela, was a pianist for the Queensland Ballet, so there must have been musical talent in the family. We were taught by nuns at a little private studio at Mount Gravatt and they used to smack us on the knuckles with a ruler if we hadn’t done our practice. I never practised much so I used to get smacked quite a bit; I didn’t like that; it hurt my knuckles. You wouldn’t get smacked on the knuckles these days! I remember the nuns’ smell; like talcum powder, and they had very white skin. Strange the things you remember.

I used to play by ear, which annoyed my brother because I once got honours for my piano exam, and I had barely practised. If I sit at the piano now and listen to a song, I can work it out. If I hear a tune, I can replicate it, but reading music or instructions was not (and is still not) my strength. I felt it was a waste of my time – I’d rather just do it.

Another move, another house, and off we went to Wendell Street, which didn’t have a pool but that was okay because, by now, I was training. Melanie was sailing and Scott was playing his piano in a downstairs room that had thick walls, green carpet and a door lined with heavy vinyl for soundproofing. He used to play late into the night – Mozart, Beethoven . . . I was always amazed at how he could read that music. To me, it was just a bunch of black dots on lined paper. I would drift off to sleep while he played. In the early mornings, I’d have to walk through his room to leave the house for training, and he was always asleep.

We had different passions, but that same shared dedication. While he followed lines of little black dots along the page, I followed that black line up and down the pool.

My sister and I grew up doing jazz ballet. I can remember the first show we took part in, up on a Brisbane stage. Wearing maroon-and-white striped dresses and too much rouge on our cheeks, we danced to the song ‘Whistle While You Work’. When we finished, Mum simply said, ‘All that for that?’ She meant the hours of rehearsals and the hair, the make-up, the dresses, the shoes – but then we’re only on stage for two minutes. I’m sure so many parents can relate, but it’s what parents do, isn’t it – we give our children as many opportunities as possible, regardless of whether they progress into a passion or not. Clearly, jazz ballet didn’t progress into any dancing skills for me . . . or maybe just enough to pass on to my daughter Morgan, who now dances professionally and has performed at the famed Moulin Rouge in Paris. I always joke that she got her dancing skills from me but, if you ever saw me on a dance floor, you’d see why dancing, along with running, is not my cup of tea.

Mum and Dad used to go on overseas holidays, leaving us kids with relatives. In 1969, while they did a 21-day tour of East Asia, I stayed with Aunty Noela in Cairns. Aunty Noela wouldn’t let us leave the dinner table until we’d eaten all our dinner. When she wasn’t looking, I would sneak handfuls of food under my T-shirt, then tell her I was going to the bathroom, where I’d chuck the food out the bathroom window. I don’t know if she ever realised.

In 1971, Mum and Dad went overseas for a couple of months, so my brother went off to boarding school while my sister and I stayed with our nana, Hilda Dennien, and went to Murgon State School. It was fun; Nana couldn’t drive so we walked to and from school each day – which we were never allowed to do at home. I would buy lollies at the corner store, and Nana always had a delicious cake in the oven when we got home.

When Mum and Dad returned, the school wanted me to stay on for the sports carnivals, because I was showing some early talent in athletics and had competed in the sprints – 100m, 200m, relays – along with the high jump and long jump. But I wasn’t allowed to stay, and went back to Brisbane with Mum and Dad.

When I got home from Murgon, I joined the Magpies athletics club and competed in Little Athletics. I didn’t have much confidence – the first race I ever did, aged eight, was so scary I got Mum to hold my hand and walk me to the start line.

By the next year, when I’d turned ten, I’d overcome that initial fear and was fiercely competitive, winning bronze in the state high jump and a silver in the 4 x 100m relay. It was the start of 40 years of competition on land, on sea and in the pool.

Mum and Dad did a lot of entertaining and there were always people around and kids running amok outside. They hosted lunches, dinners and barbecues. Mum would wear floral dresses in bright yellow and green, and Dad loved to man the barbecue while having a beer or two. Someone would always bring firecrackers that we’d throw at each other (not big ones, just the little Tom Thumbs). We’d be swimming in the pool, or going next door or to other friends’ places; fun, fun things.

We had a privileged life, even if I didn’t realise it then. In mid-1973, when I was eleven, we all went overseas for six weeks as a family – India, Ireland, Lebanon, Denmark, Germany and Hong Kong . . . we even saw a real bullfight in Spain. When we were in Ireland, Dad showed us all the places where he lived and grew up. We met Dad’s relatives and we hung upside down to kiss the Blarney Stone in Cork, which apparently gives you good luck, and the gift of eloquence and persuasiveness.

I’ve still got a beautiful marble table that Dad bought in India, and a gold filigree bangle and ring from Beirut, which was bombed not long after we left.

We were a close family and spent a lot of weekends away together. In the early years, we went to the Gold Coast every weekend. Dad had bought two units in a complex on Trickett Street – one was the penthouse and the other was on the third floor. We’d stay in one and walk to Surfers Paradise Beach every day, a whole 50 metres away! We always went to the same beach, and the same guy was there every day, spraying coconut oil on everyone. He had a deep brown tan and would spray all the ladies in their bikinis – no sunscreen back then and apparently no skin cancer either. It was an idyllic 1970s childhood – at least on the surface. Like the ocean on a good day, our life looked bright and inviting, but underneath, there were dark undercurrents.

Growing up inland, Mum rarely saw the ocean and couldn’t swim, so she only went in ankle-deep and spent most of her time under an umbrella on the sand. Dad was a good swimmer and took us out surfing on our blow-up surf mats. We were all washed out in a rip once, on my sister’s ninth birthday, and had to be rescued by lifesavers.

We’d sometimes go to a Chinese restaurant for dinner, but I wouldn’t eat Chinese food. Instead, Mum and Dad would buy me a hotdog and we’d all sit out on the footpath while I ate it. Then we’d walk into the restaurant and everyone else would eat Chinese while I just sat there, bored. I hardly ate anything much as a kid: Rice Bubbles, hotdogs, Vegemite toast, sausages, cream slice – that’s about it. I never ate vegetables or salad. How did I ever train or race on such a diet?

CHAPTER 3

When Harry Met Lisa

With first coach, Harry Gallagher. (Sprint the Crawl, Harry Gallagher)

I was ten years old when I watched Shane Gould win Olympic gold at Munich in 1972. She was an amazing swimmer, winning three gold medals, a silver and a bronze at that Olympics. Her golds were in the 200m individual medley (IM), 400m freestyle and 200m freestyle, and she swam world records in each of them. And she was just 15 years old. Shane became my idol. I did a school project on her and clipped pictures of her from the newspapers.

I thought: She has blonde hair. I have blonde hair. She swims and I swim.

‘I’ll be just like her,’ I said to myself. But I had absolutely no idea what it took to be just like her.

There’s an iconic photo of Shane holding a plush kangaroo after one of her events and, of course, when I saw that I wanted a kangaroo, too. Mum bought me one years later, before I raced at the Commonwealth Games in Edmonton. I’ve still got that kangaroo; it’s in my gym with my goggles slung around its neck. I was so inspired by Shane and what she’d done. Many people have told me a similar story – that when they were a kid, I was the one who inspired them.

One stinking hot summer’s afternoon in late 1972, Mum said it was too hot to go to jazz ballet.

‘I’m taking you and Melanie swimming at Hibiscus Gardens instead,’ she said, referring to the Klumpp Road swimming complex close to our house in Upper Mount Gravatt.

Hibiscus Gardens was an open-air pool complex with both 50- and 25-metre pools, and the water was always warm. There was a little kiosk at the front where I loved to buy ice-blocks.

Little kids, teenagers and the local swim squad were all at the pool that day, escaping the heat. I was just swimming around, not doing anything in particular, when an old bloke, brown as a berry and wearing white sandshoes, Speedo togs, a crumpled hat and a whistle around his neck, called out to me across the water and the clamour.

‘Can you swim across the pool and back for me?’ he asked.

I guessed he was with the swim squad, but I had no idea who he was.

I swam across and back, just freestyle, and he asked me right there on the spot if I wanted to join his squad. He introduced himself to Mum as Harry Gallagher.

Harry Gallagher was an absolute legend in Australian swimming. He was best known for coaching Dawn Fraser to three consecutive gold medals in the 100m freestyle at the 1956, 1960 and 1964 Games. He’d also worked with other gold medallists and world-record holders such as John Henricks, Lorraine Crapp and Lyn McClements. He’d spotted Dawn Fraser’s talent when she was 14 and swimming at the Balmain Baths. And now, he was asking me to join his squad!

Mum and I looked at each other and agreed it would probably be fun.

‘Okay,’ I said simply.

We had no idea how pivotal that decision would be, or how it would guide the next two decades of my life.

I turned up the next day and started training straightaway in the 25-metre pool.

‘Okay, just dive in and do a thousand,’ Col Peachy, Harry’s assistant coach, said to me.

I didn’t know what he meant: a thousand what? A thousand laps? A thousand strokes? I had no idea. I was only ten.

So I just kept swimming until he told me to stop. I always did whatever my coaches asked of me and never questioned them.

Training was held three times a week, in the afternoons, with a bunch of other kids.

I never went to jazz ballet again.

It was Harry who planted the seed of me going to the Olympics one day and emulating my hero Shane Gould.

He came around to Broadwater Road in 1972 to talk to Mum and Dad about my swimming.

‘One day, Lisa is going to be Australia’s fastest freestyler,’ said Harry, as he sat at the outdoor table beside our 8-metre-long in-ground pool.

‘You’d better get her teeth straightened because she’s going to have her photo taken a lot,’ he added.

I’d never thought my teeth needed fixing until then! But they were a bit crooked, and I’d chipped one of my front teeth on the side of the pool when I was mucking around one day. I ended up having braces three times as a teenager. Harry was right: my photo ended up being taken a lot. In the pool, on the dais and, later, at the supermarket.

Harry quickly discovered that, while I had great technique in freestyle, breaststroke and backstroke, I couldn’t do butterfly. Shortly after I joined his squad, I did my first butterfly race at Weller’s Hill Pool and was disqualified because I used a breaststroke kick. He sent me off to learn butterfly from Paul Spiro’s mum, Ellie, in her backyard pool in Brisbane. Paul was a very good butterfly swimmer, who also trained with Harry.

Hibiscus Gardens was a training pool, so we almost never raced there. We shared it with the general public, so there always seemed to be someone bomb-diving in right next to us. The 50-metre pool was chaos – kids, waves and 20 swimmers in a lane all thrashing about.

I loved it. I loved swimming, I loved being at the pool, I loved my friends there – I loved every minute of it.

Withing 18 months, I went from being just a kid who swam at the pool to being one of the fastest swimmers in the world for my age. Harry knew how fast I was. In his book, Sprint the Crawl, he called me ‘Australia’s (and perhaps the world’s) fastest 12-year-old girl, Lisa Curry’.

I looked like a beanstalk; there was nothing of me. I was still living on Rice Bubbles, sausage rolls, barbecue chips, cream slice and Vegemite sandwiches for school; and that was basically it. Every morning, my breakfast at school was toast with Windsor sausage – a processed meat roll non-Queenslanders may know as ‘devon’, ‘fritz’ or ‘polony’. Mum used to cook it then put it on toast with Vegemite, wrap it in foil and give it to me in a Tupperware container. I just loved it.

When I was almost 13, Harry was offered a job in Canada. I didn’t stress too much about it, but I had to find a new coach. I was spending hours at the pool every day, even sleeping in my togs at night so I could get out the door quickly in the mornings. Swimming was my everything.

Even when I wasn’t training, I was still hanging around the pool. I always had, really. I earned my first money working for Dad, when he opened a swimming pool complex in Gumdale called The Plantation in the late 1960s. In true Dad fashion, there were a couple of pools, one in the shape of a guitar and one in the shape of a naked woman. (Can you believe it?)