Housemates on way to being household names
HIGH school bestiesturned-housemates Sam Goodwin and Aaron Habgood are enjoying their rapid rise to fame.
Goodwin, who finished top 10 in the most recent series of MasterChef, and Habgood, co-host of radio show Reel Adventures with Patrick Dangerfield, hit it off in Year 7 at Bellarine Secondary College.
The pair, who grew up in Ocean Grove, bonded over a shared love of fishing, surfing and football.
They continued to mix in the same friendship group in their school years but Habgood, now 25, graduated a year later after missing an extended period of school for a heart transplant.
“He’d started making a surfboard in an outdoor education class at school before he left for the heart transplant and while he was away sick, I finished it for him,” Goodwin said.
A story on the heartwarming act of friendship ran in the
Geelong Advertiser in 2008 — little did the pair know that almost a decade later they would be back in the media in a big way.
Even though life took them in different directions, Habgood with Red’s Fishing Adventures, and Goodwin to university and later construction management, they always remained close.
“The thee months Sam was (filming MasterChef) I was messaging him with no response and all of a sudden I got a random message that said, ‘all good just working long hours’,” Habgood said.
“One day he rang and said, ‘I need to tell you something and you can’t tell anyone’, so here I am thinking the worst and then he said, ‘I made MasterChef top 24’ and ... he only told me because he needed to cook for the camera crew and he needed me to catch him some fish.”
After filming wrapped, the timing was right to live out their dream of sharing a house on the Bellarine Peninsula.
With their careers taking off, and their public profiles on the rise, the two have been able to lean on and learn from each other.
“We’re sort of going through the same stuff in a way ... We’ve both been thrown straight into the deep end,” Habgood said.
He has been getting professional writing and communication tips from Goodwin in exchange for sharing his successful social media strategy.
The two have been busy brainstorming projects they may collaborate on.
“It’s already started in a way, we did a ( Reel
Adventures) podcast last week and there will be more,” Goodwin said.