How the hell did I (battler tradie) end up on MasterChef?

The decision for me to apply for MasterChef happened back in 2019, and for some that decision might have been super easy and one they made really fast. For me, it was more of a slow burn.

It took me years of having my family in my ear about applying for the show, before I did anything about it. 

They they could see how passionate I was about being in the kitchen. But for me, I couldn’t get my head around the fact that I was ‘Drapes, the tradie’, and it felt like that was all I’d ever be because that’s all I’d ever known.

My perspective has always been positive, i’ve always been a glass-half full kinda bloke and a big lover of life. I’ve always preached to others that life is short, and you’ve just gotta give it a crack - and I thought in some ways I was doing that.

But then when my son was born in 2018, everything really shifted for me.

I realised that I wasn’t actually practising what I was preaching myself, because I was stuck in a rut in a trade that I wasn't lit up by anymore, I was whinging to my wife about it most days, but I didn’t know how to get out of it.

Becoming a Dad made everything in life a lot clearer for me, almost like I was waking up to new possibilities of life and how it could look if I put myself out there. Looking at my little boy who was watching me and every move I was making, I kept thinking to myself “How can I tell this little human to give life a crack and follow his dreams when he gets older?”, if I wasn’t showing him that I was doing the same thing myself?

Hitting the ‘Submit’ button on my MasterChef application back in 2019 was the first step to proving to myself that I could step out into the unknown and follow my passion in this life. The push of that button gave me hope that maybe I could actually do something I loved for a living one day, and when they called to let me know i’d been successful in my application and I was through to the next round… I realised I was finally giving life a crack.