The RUC Turner Bowls Club is the very reason why The Chase Australia‘s newest ‘Chaser’, Mara Lejins (aka ‘The Smiling Assassin’), became a trivia buff and TV game show sensation.

The famous ANU alumna, who graduated with honours in Laws and International Relations, cut her teeth at the North Canberra club’s weekly trivia night. Her trivia team’s name was “Mara’s angels”.

“I want to do a shout-out to the RUC Turner, when I was at uni I used to go there every week,” Mara says over the phone from Sydney.

“It had this great trivia night with buzzers and you’d buzz in the correct answer and the faster you buzzed in the higher points you got. My friends and I used to love it. I think that honestly contributed to my keenness for The Chase.”

Mara spent five years in Canberra while studying at ANU and resided at Bruce Hall. Her family comes from the Queanbeyan and Cooma/Snowy regions and she has spent many a sweltering family Christmas here and at Batemans Bay. We’ll claim her as a local because she was also a regular at Mooseheads Canberra night club. Oh, and Seiffert Oval in Queanbeyan is named after her great grandfather.

“My great great grandfather moved to Queanbeyan and started a farm off Sutton Road. Queanbeyan’s awesome!” Mara says. “You know John Seiffert Oval? It was named after my great grandfather, John Seiffert. He was a member for Monaro in the NSW Government and he used to be a jailor at Goulburn jail. My grandfather ran the family farm until my mum was 17 and they moved to Canberra and settled down to city life.”

Following in her parents’ footsteps – who both studied (and met) at ANU – Mara chose to study at ANU and her first part-time job in Canberra was not a tutor, as one might guess, but a security guard. Her diminutive stature (159cm) did not deter her.

“That was such a good job – on campus, no travelling – you just wandered around for five hours with a partner,” she says. “The only danger was that it was cold. All the uniforms were built for the average security guard, not a 159cm lady, so everything was massive on me – the uniform, a high-vis vest, it was glamorous.”

On a Thursday night, Mara would regularly head out to that Canberra institution, Mooseheads, which proved challenging for Friday morning classes.

“Sometimes I would have been out at Mooseheads till 2am so I’d be feeling very tired,” she says. “When I moved out of college, I lived in Braddon. I loved it, it’s such a great place to live. My roommate and I used to go to Grease Monkey every Tuesday night for cheap Tuesday.”

One thing that Mara can’t get out of her head is the frugal uni life living at ANU’s Bruce Hall.

“They used to get the unsold Canberra Milk, flavoured milk, so whatever didn’t sell they’d give us, it might expire the next day,” she said. “But the worst part was that it was never chocolate milk or pink milk – it was Raiders lime milk. I can’t look at Raiders green milk ever again, I was so traumatised.” Her dad’s still a loyal Raiders fan.

Twenty-eight-year-old Mara says being a trivia buff on The Chase is not just about intelligence – even though she recently added a masters degree from Columbia University in New York (Mara graduated with Highest Honours; in the top two per cent).

“I think a lot of trivia is just having a good recall, like your ability to remember things that you’ve read once or that you’ve seen or heard once,” Mara says. “I‘ve always had a good recall, I noticed I was good at trivia, I had that strength. Growing up I was always doing quizzes in the paper then when I was at uni, I was doing pub trivia and I was like, ‘oh, I’m quite good at this’. My friend suggested I go on The Chase and I was like, ‘oh, this is fun’. It kind of snowballed.”

While the trivia side of things comes easy to Mara, coming up with her “Chaser” character – the Smiling Assassin – was hard.

“I was asking around friends and families to come up with a Chaser name,” Mara says. “Someone said ‘the protegé’ but the problem with the protégé is that you’re quite young, it’s a hard one to grow into when I’m older. Same thing with ‘the prodigy’. There was also ‘pink peril’. I liked the ‘nightmare’ but that’s a bit dark.

“We brainstormed together figuring out a name and figuring out an outfit. I don’t know if you can tell on the show, but I do smile a lot and when I played tennis as a kid I was called the smiling assassin because I was always cheerful and happy but I was pretty good. So we thought that was a good trivia name.”

Her pink outfit is a tribute to Barbie – “who doesn’t want to be Barbie?”. Mara now works as a lawyer in Sydney and she still heads down the Federal Highway to Canberra regularly to visit her close uni friends and relatives – including her proud 89-year-old grandmother who still climbs Black Mountain once a week. High achieving runs in the family.

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