Australia's Next Top Model - Fox 8

[alicia]

Voting closes 8.15, 5th June. THAT'S TOMORROW. Please vote and help Steph in her quest to become Australia's Next Top Model.

Thanks.

P.S After tomorrow night you wont have to see these posts. I know it annoys some of you.

[Melsy]

Steph Hart says all her fingers and toes are crossed ahead of tonight's finale for Foxtel reality show Australia's Next Top Model.

"I think it's at the point now where there's nothing else that either myself or Alice can do, so we're just not that rude or anything. We're just having fun and just, we're both in the exact same boat," she said.

She and Alice Burdeu are holed up in a serviced apartment in the tundra of Ryde's industrial estates.

Burdeu is hunched on a couch in a blanket; she looks ill. There are half-eaten plates of food beside a garbage bin and bags full of untouched potato chips behind the door. The television is on, but the room seems dark.

"When we were in LA it was extra high stress and stuff because we knew only two of us would make it through and one of us would have to go home," Steph said. "Now we're both just relaxing and very nervous."

Steph grew up in Erina on the Central Coast, an area the Herald has profiled as a hotbed of disadvantage and poor planning.

Steph, whose father works in a furniture warehouse and at a "bottle-o" for one day a week, said she grew up with a "very different experience than drinking at Erina Fair".

But she still admits to spending hours in the centre, shopping at Supre in a complex that fills a facilities void on the Central Coast.

"There are kids at my school that I knew used to go up and drink at Erina Fair, but I would never go up and drink because of, like, with security and stuff ... It can be boring, definitely, especially in winter sometimes when you know you don't have the money to go to the movies or whatever and it's raining so you can't go to the beach and there's nothing to do," she said.

Steph plans to move to Sydney after the television modelling competition finishes about 8.30pm. She is pretty without being striking, and, when the cameras are not there, she shrinks back into being a naive 16-year-old.

"Coming onto the show just opened up so many doors and, like, I learnt heaps of other things. Like living on the Central Coast, it's just like: I'm 16 years old, I go to school, I go to hang out with my friends, I go to the beach. It's a pretty sheltered life. So, like, moving to Sydney and that was a real eye-opener. I was like, wow, I really want to come out and move here; there's so much [more] here than what there is on the Central Coast."

Practising her walk in the hallways of the hotel, she giggles when she reaches the end of her imaginary runway. She has thought about what she will do once the competition ends, but she is still very much a child.

"Oh, I'll give Alice a massive, massive hug," she said of her plans, before slowly reconsidering. "Do you mean, like, after the show? I think that either way it looks like we're both going to get signed with an agency anyway."