The brick wall that was originally the back of the house is now a feature in Cosi’s new office
As the poster boy for South Australian tourism, Andrew ‘Cosi’ Costello is the gregarious larrikin we love to love. But as Sarah discovers, there’s so much more to this country boy from Kadina.
As a young man, Andrew ‘Cosi’ Costello had one single dream – to be a millionaire by the time he was 30 years of age. This single-minded goal was the driving force behind him spending his entire youth working, taking on double shifts and juggling two or three jobs at once, while his mates were out socialising.
“I worked pretty hard from when I was about 15,” said Cosi.
“I missed out on a lot of things when I was young because I worked.”
From collecting cans at 10 years of age, to lawn mowing, working on a farm and in a butcher store, and even the good old nightfill at Woolies, Cosi has always had a commitment to hard work. It was one of the strongest messages he inherited from his parents, while growing up in Kadina on the Yorke Peninsula.
“Mum and Dad were obsessive about work, purely for the reason they wanted to provide the best for us,” he said
Even when he won his coveted position on radio station SAFM, via way of an Amazing Race style competition, Cosi still kept working on the farm. Determined to earn as much money as possible, Cosi admits his priorities at the time were “money first, everything else later.”
So what was it that turned it all around for this one-time workaholic? How did he make the transition from the man who once worked 265 days straight, to a man whose whole life is now about encouraging people to take more holidays?
Ironically enough, it was his appearance on reality tv show, The Biggest Loser. For this show, whose marketing department will tell you is all about transformation, truly did change Cosi’s life. Just not in the way he was expecting.
“I had everything taken away for four and a half months,” said Cosi.
“I didn’t have a phone, I couldn’t drive a car.
“It was just like being in jail, except the inmates are fatter.”
Reflecting on his experience with the infamous weight loss show, Cosi explains his biggest and most lasting transformation had absolutely nothing to do with weight.
“Of the 52kg I lost, I’ve put 26kg back on, so certainly the weight loss was no success story,” he says, adding that anybody would be able to lose weight in such a manipulated environment.
“My whole life philosophy started to change and I swore I’d never be governed by money ever again”
Rather, it was the confinement, the social isolation, and being kept away from his family for such a long time which made him question his financially driven mindset.
“That’s where my whole life philosophy started to change and I swore I’d never be governed by money ever again,” he says of his time in the big white house.
“It reminded me of what’s truly important in life, and that’s priceless.”
What came next would be the impetus for his new career as host of local travel series South Aussie with Cosi, as he finally took time out from his gruelling work schedule to travel around Australia with his family.
“I realised in that time that I became a better father, husband and friend,” Cosi says.
Which is why he now freely admits his aim for the show is to “guilt people into taking a holiday”.
For as much as South Aussie With Cosi is about showcasing this great state of ours, it’s also about encouraging people to take time out, slow down and spend more time with their loved ones.
“It’s purely designed to encourage people to take on some of my philosophies”, he says.
“I want people to take more weekends away, I just want them to take more holidays in general. Do it now, don’t take your long service leave as a payout.”
But despite his passion for travel, the place Cosi most wants to be right now is at home. Even more so since the completion of year-long renovations on his home in one of Adelaide’s leafy inner suburbs.
“It was pretty full on,” Cosi says of the renovation, which he and wife Sam spent much time and energy planning and preparing for.
“We lost our kitchen and we lived in a very tight area. You’re just in each other’s space all the time. We couldn’t afford to move out, so we just grinned and bared it.”
True to form, Cosi made the renovations a truly South Australian affair, engaging local contractors throughout the process. He even managed to bring a little piece of Adelaide Oval into the home, with a custom built dining table made of timber reclaimed from the Sir Donald Bradman room, salvaged during the oval’s renovation.
Despite the well worn clichés about renovations and divorce rates, Cosi says he and Sam mostly took the challenge in their stride, relishing the opportunity to create the home of their dreams, complete with personal touches, such as the giant in-built fish aquarium Cosi has longed for since childhood.
“We really, really enjoyed the renovation,” he said.
“I thought it would be a lot harder, a lot more stressful. We were really surprised.”
“But you’d only want to do it once,” he adds in his trademark, off the cuff humour.
It’s also clear that Cosi’s affable personality extends to his parenting style.
“We’re pretty laid back parents,” he says of he and Sam’s relationship with their three children, Harry, 16, Matilda, 7, and Charli-Rose, 6.
“We’re a little bit old fashioned, in that Sam’s a stay at home mum. All she’s ever wanted was to be a mum, it works out well, because I friggen’ hate housework!”
All jokes aside, Cosi freely acknowledges how fortunate he is to be able to support his family on his income alone, something which is simply not the case for the majority of families today.
“I feel for those families where the mum is pushed to go back to work when their kids are really, really young. It must be heartbreaking,” he says.
“I do worry that as a society we’ve got ourselves into a position where women go back to work very, very soon.”
Admitting his comments may comes across as “incredibly sexist”, Cosi says he’s not talking about women’s right to return to work, but rather the need our modern society has created for double income families.
“I worry that we’ve got ourselves into so much debt that we’re putting kids into care young when we don’t want to,” he says.
“You speak to people who are juggling jobs, and childcare and school pick up. Family life seems so stressful.”
Not that his own marriage to Sam is without stress,
“Like any relationship we have our ups and downs as well,” he said.
“With any marriage, you’re going to have some bloody shit times in your relationship, but you just have to keep working to keep it together.
“A big thing, for me, is apologising. I like the gap between the point when you fight and the point when you apologise to be as short as humanly possible.
“We also give each other loads of space. If she wants to go away for a weekend with her girlfriends, I never have a problem with it. We both like to do whatever we can for each other.”
Further afield, Cosi has also developed a passion for his adopted home of Cambodia. A chance holiday to the country with a friend a few years ago saw him instantly fall in love with the local people.
All kids really want is your undivided attention. They just want you to put your work down, put your phone down and spend time with them.
Experiencing firsthand the poverty within the country, Cosi quickly realised his opportunity to make a real difference to the lives of Cambodian families. The first inklings of his charitable organisation, Cows for Cambodia, became a reality in 2013.
Drawing on his agricultural knowledge to help establish the bovine breeding project, Cosi has now seen more than 50 Cambodian families provided with a cow.
He’s even made certain of a South Australian link to the program, naming the first cow Adelaide, with the tag number ‘SA01’.
Though still in it’s early stages, Cows for Cambodia is already well on its way to reaching Cosi’s first goal of providing 100 cows for 100 families. In fact, he has recently increased his goal to more than 1000 cows.
“If we had 1100 cows in the program, they would produce offspring worth $1 million dollars of cattle every year,” he said. “It would mean 1100 families would be no longer poor.”
But in the sweetest of ironies, it is the juxtaposition between the Cambodian peoples’ respective levels of both poverty and happiness which most astounds the man who once drove himself into the ground in his quest to become a millionaire.
“These people have nothing – absolutely nothing, but they’re way happier than we are,” says Cosi.
“You’ll rarely hear a child cry – all the kids and families support each other. They value the time they have together, the whole village works together to raise the kids, its just amazing.”
It is this concept that keeps Cosi heading back to Cambodia, and which has made him truly realise that material possessions are not the be all and end all – particularly when it comes to family.
“All kids really want is your undivided attention,” he says.
“They just want you to put your work down, put your phone down and spend time with them.”
