How Shelley Craft is teaching her daughters to embrace ageing

Australian households feel like Shelley Craft is a part of their family, as she stars in their family television night with shows like The Block and Australia’s Funniest Home Videos back in the day.

But what about Shelley’s own family?

Shelley reportedly met her husband Christian Sergiacomi in 2007 when they worked together on Seven’s The Great Outdoors, getting married at their Byron Bay holiday home in November 2009.

One year later, Shelley Craft’s oldest daughter arrived, Milla Grace born 24 August 2010, and two years later, Eadie Rose the youngest, born 12 June 2012.

We spoke with Shelley Craft last year, at her house with its soaring cathedral ceilings sits on the road opposite Belongil Beach.

The beach on a good day is peak Byron Bay.

In the lingering golden hour in the evening there are fires, kites, waves crashing, dogs running, the mountains in the distance, the sun slowly sliding down behind the dunes.

It is where Shelley Craft takes her two dogs to run in the shallows every day.

The two gentle ridgebacks, Aldo and Rocco, greet you with mild curiosity as you come through the gate.

Aldo, says Shelley, “used to gallop like a racehorse in the water”. But now that he is older “he knows his limits. He stops where he wants to stop and sits and waits for us to come back.”

Shelley and Christian Sergiacomi were married on Belongil Beach in 2009, at Beaumonts Beach House just across the road.

This has always been their special place.

“This was our spot,” says Shelley. “We always knew we would end up here.”

After their wedding they were driving back to Melbourne, “and Christian and I looked at each other and said ‘what are we doing? Why are we going back?’.”

They already commuted between cities for work.

“We wanted to start a family. We knew this would be a wonderful place to do that. We appreciated the fact that there would be some work sacrifices, that the work might not come or that we’d have to travel more. But we thought we would just give it a shot.”

And now 13 years, two daughters, and five houses renovated and sold later they have circled back to where it all started, Belongil, and built a house on vacant land that was once a whaling station.

“I chose the sandstone floor and sort of built the house around that,” Shelley says. “I wanted it to have an industrial edge to sort of pay homage to the area. Then, obviously the materials were very important to us.”

And after 12 years of advising contestants on reality behemoth The Block as well as renovating herself, there is not much Shelley doesn’t know about houses or design.

When it came to building her own house, her “forever for now” home, she has created an epic beach house of grand proportions.

“It’s a little bit of an Italian cathedral, come ski lodge, come factory,” she has said. It had to be a house, she says, that is “flexible, two dogs, two teenagers”.

A house built of brick, wood, stone, copper, glass walls, skylights, an exposed steel framework; full of light, environmentally conscious; a sanctuary.

Shelley has been a staple on our TV screens for 20 years.

“Part of the furniture,” she admits cheerfully.

She is certainly one of the country’s sunniest television personalities and in person is a lot like she is on television – only more so.

“She is just full of vibrancy,” says her Block cohort, Scott Cam.

“She is upbeat all the time. I’ve never seen her blow up or lose her temper. She is always forward-looking and happy. If you love what you do, and she loves her work, through hard work she has made a great life.

“Shelley and her husband, Serge, are fantastic parents. Her girls are beautiful people and they are going to grow up into beautiful women. They have got Shelley.”

Certainly at our shoot today it’s evident that the girls are reaping the benefits of a close relationship with their mother. The trio laugh, hold hands, and are quick to embrace.

“I treasure my relationship with them,” Shelley says with a smile. “They are in a sweet spot age wise. I know we are on the brink of teen-hood but at the moment they are the best of friends themselves and both Christian and I adore our family life.

“My girls are incredibly headstrong; they are very independent, and they are both alpha females in their own right. They are beautiful girls.”

Shelley speaks quickly, speedily.

In a white poloneck sweater, her hair scraped back, no make-up, she literally glows with health. It comes off her skin.

“I think it’s a love of life,” she explains. “It’s being grateful for the opportunities that have come my way. Having that moment of gratitude every morning, just saying how lucky I am. Before you even get out of bed just taking a moment to go, ‘Here I am. I’m going to have a good day’. That is the best place to start, if it goes downhill from there you have already got a whole lot of good. The beautiful thing is, hopefully you get to wake up the next day, like Groundhog Day, and give it another shot.”

Being relentlessly positive, she says, when things are less than ideal, “you don’t see them as bad”.

This sounds disingenuous. It is hard to believe she looks as good as she does just from being happy.

But you believe her when she says, “I’m very much about just a good cleanser, good moisturiser, a facial maybe once a month, good food. But I don’t always eat good food. Pizza is my favourite food group of all time, and I don’t deprive myself of anything. If I want a chocolate biscuit, I’ll definitely have one.”

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She fasts in the morning, not eating until midday.

“Now I am off the caffeine. Getting older and metabolisms are slowing down. We don’t need as much food anymore.”

She is trying to “excite myself back into exercise”. But, “I’m busy. I’m on the move all day. I don’t have a set exercise program that I follow or stick to. I just can’t commit the time at the moment.”

However, she does have some handy expert advice.

We are sitting in the corner of the vast main part of the house where she does her podcast for The Aging Project.

The podcast aims to help approach aging with the best advice available, to celebrate and empower aging rather than shrinking into the shadows, with Shelley interviewing some of the world’s leading experts on topics such as genetics, alcohol, brain health, menopause, meditation, finding purpose, community and optimism.

In fact, she’s embraced Vedic meditation as a result of season one.

“Meditation was a huge one for Christian and myself. He is as ‘on’ as I am. To just calm your mind and your body has given us more hours in the day, the decisions we make are a lot more succinct. And if you can’t just give yourself 20 minutes a day, what are we doing? What are we here for?”

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The project was the brainchild of Shelley’s producer, Amanda Attwood, who lost her mother just as she was about to have her first child.

“So, for her,” says Shelley, it was “is it hereditary? Is there any way I can stop myself from following the same path?”

A sister platform to the The Aging Project is You Must Try It – a website which collates ‘must try’ products for women, with the help of its in-house wellness expert.

On the site, women can share and learn from one another, and have some fun along the way.

Now 46, Shelley believes preparing for ageing well should start when you are young.

“I really do believe our age group, a lot of the GenXers, are probably on the front foot of assuming that we’re never going to get old. So, I’m trying to nip it in the bud and get in early. It’s not all about starting at 40, you can start at any age. It’s lovely to hear that my mum’s in her 70s and she and her friends are still learning things from the conversations I’ve been having. The idea of eating well, living well, encouraging yourself to be youthful. But it is not anti-aging as such.”

The Aging Project research has shown that genes count for about 20 per cent and that most of us have more control over health outcomes than we think.

“Yes, we have expanded on that in season two with a wonderful woman who is a geneticist, and it is that you can turn on and off genes with mood, diet and exercise. So, we’re saying we can change the course of our future. And if you’re predisposed to something you can actually alter that by turning off the cancer gene, basically.”

After an episode on alcohol, Shelley gave up drinking.

“I lasted about a month. Christian laughs because every guest I speak to I’m so enthused by them, he said ‘you’ll be sucked into anything’. Each guest offers us something different, you can choose whether to take it on board and try something new. Each week is about presenting you with a new idea that we know through our research is going to be better for you.

“Really, it’s all about finding a way that your life span and your health span can run parallel to the end. How can we keep those two on an even path? And as I say, how do I leap into my grave? We have the research, we have the science, we’ve got the holistic side of medicine, the functional side, all coming together in this beautiful moment in history where we’re getting the best of all sides of it.”

Once a committed carnivore, Shelley says she eats “a lot more vegies now. The girls will attest that we went vegan for a week. And Milla said ‘but you know I love my bolognaise’. I was like, ‘right, we are swapping it out for tofu’. I set them down a whole bowl of raw broccoli the other day because that can switch off your cancer gene. And the little one said ‘so that’s it? That’s all we have to do?’ I said ‘no, but at least we’re on the right path’.”

For her part, Shelley says the inner confidence that shines out of her is something she was born with.

“I have always had a bright outlook on life,” she shrugs. “I wasn’t the most studious child, but I always had confidence. I’m the third child. My sister was a ballerina, very driven and strict. My brother was a very good sportsman, an academic as well, he was quite driven. Mum and Dad were busy managing those two so, like all third children, I was pretty much left to my own devices. But I was encouraged to give anything a go. My dad’s motto was always JDI – Just do it.”

Her dad, she says, has retired about four times.

“My mum was a stay-at-home mum with four kids. She went back to work at 55 at the Queensland Museum and has had the most amazing 20 years working and socialising. I’ve always had that sort of drive surrounding me.”

At school she told her guidance counsellor that she wanted to be an actress.

“She said, ‘Get a real job.’ So, I applied for hospitality management at uni and over the Christmas holidays I worked at Movie World on the Gold Coast and sort of thought I would be discovered for an acting role there.”

Then, a friend who had got a job in television told her to “just come up and ask for a job. So, basically, I did just go up and ask for a job. I just marched up to Channel 7, which back in the day was fine. I said, ‘I’ll work for free, I’ll sweep floors or lick envelopes’. I had no concept of what television was, even what journalism was, what presenting was.”

She would go on to host Saturday Disney and be involved in more than a dozen programs that followed, including reporting live for the 2002 Winter Olympics. That must have been a bit scary.

“I love it,” she says her eyes widening. “I loved it back in the ’90s when it was live. We did a lot of live stuff back then.” Even now, she says, “we try to treat The Block as live, even though it’s not live. If we are doing a challenge, Scotty and I will get our scripts 10 minutes before we deliver them, we thrive on that sort of challenge of learning our scripts very quickly and punching them out.”

Shelley grew up and became a celebrity in a world before social media.

She knows that it can have a crippling effect on young girls and hopes her own daughters will have the confidence and self-esteem not to be adversely affected by it.

She trusts them on social media, saying that the people they follow on their platforms are “very strong role models“.

“Look, it might be really naive of me but at the moment it is really about confidence and going ‘well, that girl is beautiful but you shouldn’t feel less than, she is just genetically blessed’,” she says of how she’s teaching her girls to see through the lens of the internet.

“You can look at different people, different women, different influences, there is such a variety of people on Instagram and socials. My girls are exposed to many different images. It’s not all about perfect. They love all kinds of different people, sizes and shapes. In the videos they show me there is a huge variety. I like to think my girls are coming into a world that is changing and socials that are evolving and can be used for good rather than evil.”

Aging in television once used to be a dirty word for women. Yet, Shelley says she has never felt pressure about the years passing as she continues to front up on screen.

“I don’t feel it,” she says. “It has never even crossed my mind. I love my job and I love the industry and I’ve never felt pressured to be one way or the other.

“You know, I do give 100 percent every time I go to work. If my time should come where they say ‘sorry, we are going in a different direction,’ I know there is nothing else I could have given or done. I don’t have anything left to give.”

Watch season 19 of The Block on Sundays 7.00pm and continues Monday to Wednesday 7.30pm on Nine and 9Now.