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Julia Zemiro’s Home Delivery: June 13

Sports icon Raelene Boyle is tonight's guest on Home Delivery.

Sports icon Raelene Boyle is tonight’s guest on Julia Zemiro’s Home Delivery.

Former track and field star Raelene Boyle, officially a legend in Sport Australia Hall of Fame, meets Julia outside Pentridge Prison, which is just around the corner from her childhood home.

There they climb into a vintage Standard Vanguard station wagon which Raelene wrestles down the streets of Coburg to the house in which she grew up. She confesses that she was ashamed of the house when she was young; embarrassed about its peeling paint and disgusted by the yellow stain on all the interior walls – fallout from her parents’ nicotine habit.

Raelene’s mother suffered from chronic depression which had a deep effect on the family. Her illness was so serious that when Raelene and her brother rode their bikes across town to visit her in a psychiatric hospital, she didn’t recognise them. She was having shock treatment at the time. Sadly, Raelene herself has periods of depression, which she inherited from her mother.

Raelene’s father coached her to her first Olympic Games, but then a run-in with athletics officials led to a permanent split in the family. Raelene left home for good after a bitter fight with her father and barely saw him again before he suffered a fatal heart attack.

8pm tonight on ABC.

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