I had a burgeoning consciousness - as you do at that age, you're in puberty and your body's doing all of this stuff and I was locked into this really punishing regime. I can remember being behind the blocks in some State final and thinking, my whole life is focussed on me swimming up this pool faster than her, that seems ridiculous. I have a lot of silver medals. That was my only point of resistance, to not win, but having said that I really did find something in the training. It shaped me in lots of great ways and in lots of ways that were not so great. What happened was that my formative years from late childhood to young adulthood were very narrow. Looking back now I see why I work within rites of passage because I don't think I did mine, from the end of my teens into my young adulthood, very well. I clearly didn't because I crashed and burned at a certain point. I finished swimming in my HSC year, although I didn't do my HSC because I was in the running for a particular Commonwealth Games, because I got glandular fever and lost that opportunity. So I was at this really crucial point in my life, or at least I thought it was, and suddenly there was nothing there. The world I'd operated in just melted, it just fell away. I felt like I was on the verge of my young adult life, completely ill-equipped. I could swim really fast and I was really fit, I was a maniac, but that was all I took with me, that's all I had. I hadn't even
y l n o e l p Sam e t e l p m o c n I
really had a part-time job. So I went straight from the top echelon of athletes in the country to [drug] addiction, like that [snaps fingers], straight away. Df
Oh my goodness. How old were you?
Victoria Nineteen. I'd got my HSC at Tafe and discovered that I had a brain and that I loved learning. The back story of getting up at 4:30 every morning was that I slept through my schooling. I had no idea really. I had not learnt how to apply myself to things that didn't come naturally - it was a very costly enterprise that swimming. After that I trotted off to university and through this strange set of circumstances met people that lead me to other people who were living in the inner city. It was the '80s, and Sydney in the '80s in Darlinghurst was a very particular scene, and I, who had had none of that, with all my youth and with all my strength and
with all my pent-up desire just leapt into this place that was so mysterious and so exciting.
The inner city had yet to be gentrified so there were lots of squats and there were
really interesting things happening. I was just hungry, hungry. I didn't start taking drugs because I hated myself and didn't want to live, I took them for the opposite reason ‌ As a competitive athlete you live on this intense level so I didn't know any other way to live. Df
I guess you were used to that adrenaline coursing ...
Victoria That's it, and let's just say that from 18 to 21, it got really ugly.
Only because I survived it can I say that it was probably an extraordinarily backhanded gift, but a gift nonetheless.
By 21 I was literally on the
bones of my arse. People around me were dying really ignoble deaths; young girls working on the street OD-ing, being
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