Laura Brennan
Laura Brennan (1993)
Kris McQuade
Episodes: 1248–1285
Children: Aaron Brennan (deceased)
Occupation: Retired Professional Runner
Laura Brennan is first seen when Damian finishes his bottle of water during a run and stumbles upon a house in the middle of the woods, where he proceeds to use the outside tap. She exits the house and tells Damian to leave as he’s on private property. When he doesn’t, she chases him away with a garden fork. Damian later asks Alf about “Loony Laura” and learns that he hasn’t seen her for 16 years. She’s 40 years old and lives on a 10 acre block on the other side of Wilson’s Creek. He also tells Damian that a lot of people thought that she had murdered her boyfriend.
After doing some research, Damian later arrives at Laura’s cottage with a leg cramp and tells her he knows all about her – that she was a national champion runner who could’ve made it to the Olympics. She asks him to stay away from her and watches him as he runs off. She later arrives on the Summer Bay House doorstep with an envelope for Damian that contains her exercises to stop shin splints.
Damian runs into Laura on a run down at a creek when she’s fishing. They later go back to Laura’s cottage and Damian looks at Laura’s trophies, one of which is from the 1974 Commonwealth Games. Laura then offers to help Damian with his training until he gets a proper coach. He later turns up to training late and Laura tells him to not bother coming back. With a bit of persistence, he wins her over and she agrees to train him again.
She tells Damian that she doesn’t agree with vitamin tablets and that he needs to eat all the right fruits and vegetables, as well as run 2 kilometres every day to stay in shape. When Damian asks, Laura tells Damian that she doesn’t need electricity and she then gets very defensive when he brings up the town’s suspicion of her.
Damian attemtps to mend Laura’s ties with Summer Bay by trying to convince her to sell organic vegetables to Alf, but when he brings it up with her, she refuses. He then steals the vegetables from Laura’s kitchen, and takes them to Alf’s store. When Alf later runs into Laura and refers to her as his “business partner”, she storms over to Summer Bay House and tells Damian to keep his nose out of her affairs. Growing tired of her apparent ingratitude, Damian later retaliates by calling her weird and tells her to stick the training. She then reconsiders the proposal when Damian apologises and agrees to play delivery boy.
Laura then decides to renovate her house, with a bit of a push from Damian. He later asks Laura to come over for dinner. Pippa and Michael then agree to have Laura over for lunch and are rather excited. Michael crosses paths with her when Bill Cunningham goes missing and reminds her about lunch, but she later decides against it, claiming that she’s not ready to socialise with people. Alf asks Laura if she would like to coach the junior athletes but she refuses. When she later catches Damian poking around in one of her drawers she tells him to leave immediately.
Damian returns home with a pulled hamstring and decides to put a heat-pack on it. Laura then does a vegetable drop off and Alf tries to get Laura to reconsider coaching the athletics. He lets slip about Damian’s injury and Laura rushes over to tell him to put ice on his hamstring, not heat. While nursing Damian, Laura learns that Pippa and Michael had a baby that died. She tells Damian that she never thought about having kids and ceases the conversation.
Laura is surprised when she learns that Pippa has seemed to move on so quickly after losing Dale, and later admits to Damian that she lost a baby once. Finally opening up about her past, she informs Damian that she was having an affair with her married trainer and fell pregnant. When she refused to have an abortion, they had a fight in front of the whole of Summer Bay, with her threatening to kill him. He left and the town suspected that she murdered him. She then later gave birth to a stillborn son, due to all the stress. She named him Aaron and moved out to the cottage in the bush. She told him that her son’s death certificate is in the drawer that Damian was poking around in.
Laura tells Damian that she isn’t going to attend his race, much to his behest. She tells him that her being there will not change his performance and that she has better things to do with her time. Laura then tells Alf that she won’t be supplying the store with anymore organic vegetables. Alf, then, guilt-trips her into coming to the race and she watches Damian from the bushes. She tells Damian that she saw him come second, and that he had the potential to win.
Damian tells Laura that she can continue to coach him if she coaches the junior athletics team. When she later gives Pippa a lift home, Laura is shocked when Pippa invites her in and they discuss the loss of their two children. She tells Pippa that her family and friends didn’t want to know her and this helps Laura make the decision to reconcile with them. She later tells Damian that she’s leaving town and tells him to leave the cottage.
She later arrives at the Summer Bay House and tells Damian that she wouldn’t leave without saying goodbye. She gives him her stopwatch as a thank you and as a gift to remember her by. She kisses him on the cheek, hops in her ute, tells him to keep up the running and drives off, Damian watching her, in the hope of a reconciliation with her family.