If you were a Wiggles child of the ‘90s there’s a strong chance you will have bopped along to Wake Up Jeff! and Big Red Car with one of Australia’s future Paralympians. Georgia Munro-Cook was a little girl when she featured in several of the band’s music videos alongside her dad Murray Cook, a founding member commonly known as the Red Wiggle.
“When I was little I was in a few different videos,” she says. “Play Your Guitar With Murray, I’m in that one. I remember being on sets and that sort of thing. It just felt pretty normal at the time though, which is kind of weird.”
Now she is in Japan, readying to contest Tokyo 2020 as part of the wheelchair basketball team. As has been the case throughout the build-up to these pandemic-affected Games, the vibe has been one of uncertainty and training a logistical struggle. But Munro-Cook has experience in adapting to unforeseen challenges.
The 27-year-old did not realise she was disabled until she was 18. Throughout her childhood and teenage years, while attending the Newtown High School of the Performing Arts, she was a representative able-bodied basketballer. Then she noticed her hips were sore. A little at first, then more severely.
“I remember I got yelled at by the coach,” she says. “He was like, ‘you have to jump to get the rebound’. And I was like ‘oh, I can’t jump’. That was a moment that hit me like, oh, something’s wrong here. I kind of hadn’t put two and two together that it was because of my hips.”
Her movement degraded to the point that running and walking became difficult, and she was finally diagnosed with a congenital hip problem. “It wasn’t until they did a surgery that was supposed to fix it that they found what was actually wrong and that they couldn’t really do anything to fix it,” she says.
“It was right when I just started university and a pretty big time in my life, and I had a lot of chronic pain as well. That’s why it took me about a year and a bit to start to play wheelchair basketball, because it was just all too much to deal with at that point.”
Eventually, Munro-Cook opened herself up to the idea, and found an outlet that offered elements of her old life and a new, surprisingly rewarding one. That is, after she mastered the art of maneuvering some pretty unfamiliar apparatus.
“The first time, I was playing in like a crappy chair and I had no idea how to use the chair or get around, and I was very slow,” she says. “The thing that was the same was that I could still shoot. I was a bit weak so I couldn’t shoot from very far out, but the way your basketball IQ and your brain works is kind of the same.”
A few months and some upper body gym work later, Australian team camps came knocking, and the Sydney local has been in the national set-up ever since. She competes in the 4.5 classification; the five players on court for each team at any one time cannot exceed 14 points.
The Gliders won three medals and one bronze between 2000 and 2012 but did not qualify for Rio 2016. The aim now is to put themselves back on the Paralympics map under coach David Gould, who won gold with the men’s team at Atlanta 1996.
Are there internal expectations? “It’s a little bit hard to tell because we haven’t really played any international games since late 2019 because of border closures,” she says. “So I think everyone’s a bit unsure about what to expect going into these Games. As a team we’ve really changed up the lifestyle and how we’ve played the game and everything. So I think we’re just kind of going out there looking to surprise a few people.”
Munro-Cook’s presence in Tokyo presumably won’t be such a big surprise to the Wiggles’ fan fraternity, who have dedicated a forum page to screengrabs of her with her dad in the band’s early singalong clips. Munro-Cook, who is midway through a PhD which couches the WNBA in gender studies and history, lives with her parents and confirms there are no red shirts visible in the house.
“Dad tends to avoid red in everyday life,” she says. “To avoid being recognised as much, I think. When I was younger, especially when he’d take me to basketball or whatever, there’d be lots of people pointing and that sort of thing.”
Did it become a family joke? “Pretty much, because people would try to be a bit surreptitious, but they were always pretty obvious. People quite often ask me what it’s like having a dad as a Wiggle, and I’m like, ‘I don’t know, he’s always been a wiggle I guess’.”
