Michelle Bridges

While most people think I'm a Sydney girl (I was actually born in Newcastle) a lot of people don’t know that I lived in Alice Springs for just over four years in the early to mid nineties.

It was a very interesting time in my life as I had really just started to forge ahead in the fitness industry, devoting myself to it as a full time career. My boyfriend of the time asked me whether I would be interested in moving to Alice Springs with him as he was being transferred there with his work.

It was not anywhere that I had ever considered living, and it seemed like a very long way from the suburban streets of Newcastle where I was living at the time.

I was twenty two years of age and had already done quite a bit of travelling, having already lived in the south of France for a year and a half. It is in my nature to throw caution to the wind so I said yes and set off on what was to be a real Australian adventure. So we drove down to Melbourne to visit family and friends, then across to Mt Gambier for another family visit and finished in Adelaide before making the trip north to the red centre.

It was during this trip where I truly understood the words of Dorothy Mackellar ‘her beauty and her terror, the wide brown land for me’. Over the course of the trip I kept getting this feeling that there is so much more to life than running from one job to the next. This feeling intoxicated me as I stopped several times along the way to admire a land which speaks in a language based on time. Millions of years of time. And it spoke in a language that was loud. I was excited and nervous at what lay ahead of me and what my life would look like in Alice Springs.

The people of Alice are warm and generous, so it didn’t take long for me to slip into the central Australian way of life. What I hadn’t been prepared for though were the lives and lifestyles of our indigenous Australians, and the impact they would have on me for the rest of my life.

Let me say this - living in Alice Springs and regularly getting out into the bush over four years is a very different proposition to coming up on a five day political visit and trying to take in what is going on from an air conditioned hotel room before jumping back on a plane and heading back to Canberra. I know now that for politician to really get a handle on it they need to live there for at least a few months to get a deeper appreciation of all the perspectives, both aboriginal and non aboriginal.

I made lots of friends from all walks of life in the Alice. There's a saying in Alice Springs that everyone has an interesting story as to why they ended up there, and it’s true.

I worked at the Alice Springs YMCA which allowed me to get involved with lots of community projects. Working in the biggest health club in town meant that I got to work with people from all walks of life - children, the elderly and disabled. I remember teaching aerobics (as it was known back then) to a group of Aboriginal women who would be regularly driven into town from an out of town camp. I had just arrived in town and it was literally one of the first classes I had ever taught! None of us really understood much of what we were saying, so I just turned on the music and let it speak.

The power of the body, physical movement and music seems to cover all languages. There was lots of giggles and embarrassment, but we all had a good time and I remember feeling so lucky to have experienced that. Fortunately for me, I continued to work with these great women on a regular basis. I found out later that teaching an all Aboriginal class was simply just a fluke, but at the time I remember thinking “wow, this is amazing, I wonder if all my classes will be like this!”

Four and half years later and I can say I had some of the most beautiful and intense memories of my life in Alice Springs and the surrounding areas. From sleeping under the stars in the desert, swimming in the freezing gorges, meeting and playing with aboriginal children through the YMCA, watching aboriginal and non aboriginal people getting on with each other as mates, witnessing racism and violence first hand, seeing what alcohol and drugs can do to a community, the good the bad and the ugly, but also the beauty of the human spirit. The Australian spirit. I will honour and cherish those memories and the beautiful people who were a part of them forever.

Australia’s favourite personal trainer, Michelle Bridges is best known as the straight talking red team trainer of Channel Ten's ratings heavyweight The Biggest Loser. Michelle is an accomplished author, with her book 'Crunch Time' blasting to number one on Penguin's best seller list across all genres. She also has regular features in magazines (Women's Health, Woman's Day, Cosmopolitan, BBC Good Food) and on radio (Kyle and Jackie O, Nova, Triple M, 2WS).