Well, apart from what Estelle has said on the Lil' sis and Confidential shows, and her explaining in the reveal of her 'secret' that she dropped out of school, and doesn't recommend it, I really have not heard her talking about her hard life.
The people I have heard talk about her hard life (and how it doesn't make sense that a person with two properties and a car and a stable of horses and a law degree and rich friends overseas could have come from a family with nothing and had nothing at sixteen) are mostly Bradley and Micheal. Both of them are middle class kids who have not done a lot of working for the money required to fund them to where they are today. Not saying that they are not hard-working, or ambitious, or don't have their own plans to work toward, but Bradley still lives with his parents and Micheal's life up until very recently appears to have been both expensive and heavily subsidized by loving parental cash (not that there is anything wrong with that - if their parents want to give them the best childhood and the best start in life they can, and they have the money for trips overseas, and cars and tertiary education, I say go for it. Living on struggle street is only laudable in retrospect.)
So how much do you trust Micheal and Bradley to report accurately and unbiasedly on what they know and don't know of Estelle's life? They were looking for excuses to call her fake and dismiss her experience as invalid, and explain why she was just playing the game and did not deserve to be there as much as them. Brad's (and George's) suspicions about Estelle seem to have arisen as they grew closer to Micheal. I wonder how they feel now they are out of the house and know how the nominations went.
On the face of it, she does seem very middle class and not at all street - but I think Micheal might be bitching because he had his rapper impersonator schtick all ready to entertain Australia with, only to be gazumped by a girl that claims she has ridden a skateboard and therefore has more cred than him.
Ben and Stacey bitch about her being a weirdo and being horsey and meeping and so on, but I haven't heard them talking about her mysterious wealth or her supposed poverty - there seems to be enough objections to Estelle as she is right now, and as the guidelines explicitly forbid housemates from talking about people outside the house, especially anything that might sound defamatory. Of course, rules like this don't stop Micheal from saying whatever he wants to say (hence two strikes) but if Estelle is not allowed to talk about it, it would be easy for people to hear her talk about her horses, or her properties, possibly meaning the horses she rides and the properties she manages, and mistakenly believe she was claiming ownership. Bradley, Micheal and George are bourgeois housemates - likely to measure value in terms of ownership of capital, and to assume that everyone else does too.
The mystery might just be that Estelle can't be explicit in the house. Or it might be mundane but complicated, or personal. Maybe Micheal is not the person that Estelle would like to share her horrific sexual abuse experience with, for example.
Yes, I wish we had the live stream, so I could tell how much of this 'poor little rich girl' thing is coming from Estelle, and how much is invented by Micheal. The way it has been presented on the daily show, it seems to be all Micheal - he is really good at spinning his version of reality in direct contradiction to fact (as we saw with the Oreo incident as it unfolded, and his explanations to Ben and, via the diary room to us, after the fact). On the other hand, the way Estelle laughed when Micheal referred to her saying 'Higgy-jiggy' while he was nominating her, made me think that he was referring to something she actually said to him. The other housemates talk about Estelle being a weirdo and behaving in an annoyingly silly way, and Estelle claims she sometimes behaves in a silly way, but apart from thirty seconds of galloping around the pool as if she was a horse, I haven't seen it.
The lavender makes sense as an aromatherapy technique: when she was chilling in the back yard and generally enjoying a stress-free moment breathing in the lavender, she could have take a moment to associate the feeling of relaxation with the smell. Then, when she was facing predictable stressful moments - nominations and evictions - she could take a sprig of lavender in with her, the idea being that sniffing the lavender will bring back the associated feelings of calm. Athletes use these kind of mind tricks all the time, and they believe they work, and so why not. It doesn't hurt that it is a visual point of individuation, and that it associates Estelle with all the symbolism of 'the girl with the flowers in her hair'.
The other housemates might complain when somebody else gets away with a trick like that, but they all do it- with the stuffed toys they sleep with, or their hair curlers, Ben's laughing clown face, Micheal's headband, Josh's pretend surfing, Brads endless batman quotes.
Still, without the live stream it is impossible to tell if Estelle's behaviour is being deliberately or unintentionally misinterpreted by housemates that want to get rid of her, or if it is something a reasonable person without $250,000 in their sights might do, and could tolerate witnessing. One thing - if Estelle's weirdness is being put on to entertain us, as Stacey claims it is, she is wasting her time, because Big Brother is not showing us Estelle acting or speaking like a fruit-loop.
Very much doubt that she is with the Exclusive Brethren or even the Plymouth Brethren. They keep their women (or their women keep themselves) very much in the domestic sphere and out of the public sphere/ under the thumb.
