EXCLUSIVE: ‘Tegan’ tells her side of the fake reef video furore and blames the “lazy” journalists

The woman at the centre of the Tourism Queensland fake video furore says she was told to act like a would-be Big Brother applicant.

According to Rhiannon Craig, she had only been working at the Brisbane-based office of Cummins Nitro for a matter of days when they asked her to appear in a video. It was to promote entries into the “best job in the world” campaign offering someone the chance to be caretaker of the Islands of the Great Barrier Reef. She said: “They wanted to have a couple of example application videos for when the site went live, to try and set the standard of applications.

“The client wanted these videos to be crazy and really out there. It kind of sounded like the Big Brother video applications.”

Writing on her own blog, which has since been taken down, she goes on: “It got suggested that I should pretend to get a tattoo showing my dedication for the islands. Originally we wanted to get the tattoo studio to draw up the tattoo on my arm. In the end, one of the art directors drew the tattoo on with felt tip pen himself. They submitted my video as a test and used a fake name for the application.”