THEN AND NOW Keira Maguire and Alex Nation have reappeared in Double Bay, which means 2016 really is back after all
BY: David J Lawrence
PICS: MATRIX
Indigo Café is not technically a museum, but yesterday it briefly became one.
Keira Maguire and Alex Nation were photographed together out lunch in Double Bay while in Sydney for a round of The Traitors Australia promo. For some people, that sentence means nothing. For others, it is a welfare check on the Australian reality-TV timeline.
The last time Keira and Alex were properly papped together was almost ten years ago, in 2016, the same year they appeared on Richie Strahan’s season of The Bachelor Australia.
Melbourne, 2016. The uniform was ripped denim, ankle boots and plausible deniability. 
Keira has found the camera. Alex is playing it cooler. The machinery is working exactly as intended. 
Before podcasts, reality-TV fame still involved ripped jeans, ankle boots and being papped like we had a right to know.
Back then, Australian reality TV still had monoculture power. A villain edit could make you famous. A chocolate bath could ruin a nation’s dinner. And everyone watching somehow knew exactly who was “there for the right reasons”.
For anyone over 30, this is heritage media.
For anyone whose main memory of 2016 is a school blazer, an iPhone 6 and pretending to study for the HSC, some context is required.
Alex won Richie’s season. Keira did not win the Bachelor, but in some ways she won something more durable: the format itself.
Keira was the villain, but even that undersells it. She did not simply receive the villain edit. She helped reinvent it as a career path. Before Keira, the villain edit was something contestants survived. After Keira, it became something contestants quietly auditioned for.
She gave side-eye. She gave one-liners. She gave “bed, bed, bed” with the energy of a woman who understood that Australian reality television does not reward the most romantic person in the room. It rewards the person who can become a meme before the ad break.
Keira was basically a pre-TikTok clip machine. Short, repeatable, strange, slightly unwell. Perfect.
Alex, meanwhile, carries one of the great cursed artefacts in Australian television history: the chocolate bath with the Bach himself, Richie Strahan.
This was real. On national television, Alex and Richie were placed in a bathtub of chocolate for what was apparently meant to be a sensual date. It was sold as romance. It looked like two people covered in shit.
Not metaphorical shit. Not “oh, this has aged badly” shit. Actual visual shit.
The colour was suspicious. The concept was suspicious. The whole thing had the energy of a producer waking up and thinking, “Let’s see if we can convince the country this is sexy.”
And because it was 2016, everyone said yes.
That was the old Bachelor era. Cocktail parties. Champagne. Rose ceremonies. Women being edited into archetypes. Producers creating emotional warfare in evening wear before psychosocial hazards in the workplace were a thing.
A single bathtub scene could become a national meme without anyone saying “content strategy”.
Now, ten years later, Keira and Alex have reappeared together in Sydney.
Alex is now a mother of three. Keira is living back in Queensland and working in real estate. On paper, both have moved into entirely different life chapters. And yet one pap walk in Double Bay is enough to fold the timeline straight back into 2016.
That is the funny thing about Australian reality fame. It does not really end. It just goes quiet for a while.
In America, celebrities disappear to Wyoming, wellness compounds or prestige podcasts. In Sydney, they reappear outside a café in Double Bay.
And of course it was Indigo. Indigo is not just a café in this context. It is a visibility checkpoint. A place where Eastern Suburbs identity goes to be photographed while pretending not to know that being photographed is a possibility.
Keira and Alex, ten years later, conducting urgent national business over lunch 
The post-lunch pap walk begins 
Keira considers flowers 
Alex and Keira outside the florist 
Two former Bachelor contestants, one footpath, several women pretending not to notice including old mate Lisa Hyde 
Keira exits first 
Alex checks in with the nanny
Keira being back in Double Bay also feels correct. She used to live in the area, so this was not merely a return to Sydney. It was a return to old terrain. A reality-TV salmon swimming back upstream to the place where the paparazzi still know which side of the street has better light.
That is celebrity culture in this town. Which makes Keira and Alex returning under the banner of The Traitors almost too perfect.
Two women from the old Bachelor system (a show built on romance, alliances, suspicion, cocktail-party strategy and everyone pretending not to know they were being watched), are now promoting a show about loyalty, betrayal, alliances, suspicion and everyone pretending not to know they are being watched.
The cocktail party was never over. It just became a round table.
That is why the pictures work. Yes, they are just two reality stars photographed in Double Bay. But they also capture the afterlife of Australian reality TV.
Reality TV has changed. The audience has changed. The internet has changed. Gen Z has inherited the memes without necessarily knowing the lore. But the basic machinery remains the same: put watchable people in a room, add suspicion, edit carefully, wait for someone to become a national talking point.
Ten years ago, Keira and Alex belonged to a version of television where the audience watched together, tweeted together, memed together and judged contestants like it was a civic duty. Now they are returning in the algorithm era, where fame is more fragmented, more self-managed and somehow less iconic.
Back then, a chocolate bath could haunt the nation. Now, a person can go viral for three days and still be unrecognisable at Woolies.
Alex has lived several lives since The Bachelor, including her AFL era and motherhood. Keira has gone from reality-TV chaos agent to Queensland real estate agent, which, spiritually, is not as big a career change as it sounds. Both have grown up. Both have moved on. Both have, presumably, paid bills and answered emails and done normal adult things.
And still, Sydney saw them together and immediately became 2016 again. Because after all, this city loves pretending it is too cool for celebrity, then immediately loses its mind when someone recognisable appears within 40 metres of a café table.
Reality TV has changed. The audience has changed. The internet has changed. Gen Z has inherited the memes without necessarily knowing the lore. But the basic machinery remains the same: put watchable people in a room, add suspicion, edit carefully, wait for someone to become a national talking point.
Keira understood that before most people did. Alex survived a chocolate shit bath on prime-time television and somehow came out the winner. Frankly, The Traitors might be underestimating them.
We hear even the Daily Mail passed on the pics. Which is fine. Some institutions preserve oil paintings. We preserve Double Bay pap walks.
