Despite playing the game from the minute she set foot in the house, Big Brother Australia finalist Sarah Jane Adams was able to fly under the radar of her fellow housemates.
“It really goes with the territory when you get to a certain stage in life, so I used that to my advantage,” she told POPSUGAR Australia. “I was absolutely, fully immersed from the moment I set eyes in that building. I don’t think people realised how immersed I was in the game.”
There’s an exception to every rule, of course, and the one person who saw SJ for the player she was in the game was villain and resident rat Ari Kimber, who called her the best player in the game.
“I think Ari is a very clever boy, I love him to bits and I’m very grateful to him for saying that,” she said. “I think we see the world in very similar ways some of the time, and I think Ari was absolutely onto my game. Nobody else had a clue, I don’t think they even thought I was in the game.”
SJ is a fan of Ari’s villainous game, as well. “Props to Ari,” she said, “he’s brilliant. And to have the skill to play such a hilarious, mean, entertaining, wicked, absolutely on point game, props to him.”
Now that she’s one of the season’s Final Three, SJ said that she’s proud to have shown that “against a lot of odds”, she’s “shown that strength and courage can come in very many forms”.
“I hope that I’ve shown not just older people, but all people who’ve been discriminated against in some way and who have felt that they don’t have a voice, that they can have a voice,” she said. “I have played my game with integrity, with honesty, without whinging.
“There’s a lot of people who go ‘wahh, that’s not fair’, but that’s not who I am. Nothing’s fair in life, life isn’t fair, that’s why it’s life!” she said.
Despite playing the game from the moment she set foot in the house, SJ said that she’d never had a strategy. Instead, she relied on her strengths and took each moment as it came.
“I live life very much in the present, I am brutally honest with people, I’m a wonderful observer,” she explained. “I’m very visual, I take everything in, and I can process things remarkably quickly.”
SJ says she chose to hold back in the early challenges of the season, so that she didn’t “expose [herself] as someone who was actually physically strong”.
“I’m very strong, because I do yoga and have been since I was 59, so that’s six years, five days a week,” she said. “They kind of got glimpses of it when I was standing on my head in the corner for 10 minutes, but they didn’t really show that in the program very much. So yes, I was very much able to fly under the radar.”
Having gone through the experience of living in the Big Brother house, SJ said that she’s learned to listen to people more and to not make so many assumptions about people.
Another thing she’s learned? “I’ve learnt to accept that I probably am a little bit inspiring!” she exclaimed, adding, “the youngsters kept stealing my lines!”
“I used to say to them, ‘play your own game, you must be free to play your own game, don’t be bullied, don’t be frightened, don’t be put under the thumb of somebody, you must have the strength of character to play your own game’, and I observed that it started with Katie and went through the whole cast,” she explained.
“Part of me was thinking ‘f**k! Why are they stealing my lines?’ but the more sensible, adult part of me was thinking ‘oh my God, this is such a joyful moment that these people are actually learning some of the stuff that I’ve been saying, and acting on it’,” she continued.
Calling it “a great joy”, she explained: “as an elder, you hope that if you are vaguely on the right track that young people will learn from that. So I hope that in some which way I have been the teacher.”
And it’s not just the housemates who have been inspired by her. Having been recognised by various people since the show’s airing, SJ said that the show has made her realise that her “reach is much further” than she thought it was.
“That’s a very humbling thing to have learnt, and I’m a winner already by that. You know, that to me is such a great win,” she said.
The live Big Brother Australia finale airs tonight at 7.30pm on Channel 7 and 7 Mate.
