For Mother’s Day 2025, retired Dancing With the Stars pro Kym Johnson-Herjavec posted a series of photos of her mom, Barbara, to wish her happy Mother’s Day.
Johnson-Herjavec captioned the post, “Happy Mother’s Day to my beautiful Mum 💕. BTW, Hudson said he wants to write a song like this for me next Mother’s Day 🥹,” because the post is set to Benson Boone’s “Momma Song.”
Most of the photos in the post are of her mom in the last few years, as evidenced by Barbara holding Johnson-Herjavec’s daughter, Haven, who was born in April 2018, along with her twin brother, Hudson. Johnson-Herjavec shares the twins with husband Robert Herjavec, her Dancing With the Stars partner from season 20.
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But one photo is of Barbara when she was young, and it could honestly be a photo of Johnson-Herjavec. The photo is also remarkable because it looks as though her mom was a performer in a sea life stunt show called “Jack Evans Pet Porpoise.”
A little digging helped us figure out that the show took place in Tweed Heads, Australia, which is the northernmost town in New South Wales, on the east coast of Australia. It is located about 90 minutes south of Brisbane.
The attraction was called “Jack Evans Pet Porpoise Pool” or “Dolphin Oceanarium.” It also had a shark pool, and it was kind of a big deal on the east coast of Australia. According to Gold Coast Stories, it was “one of the earliest tourist attractions on the Gold Coast.” But because of less-than-ideal weather conditions, Evans moved the show to Tweed Heads in 1961.
Barbara certainly could have been a tourist in the photo of her, but she looks so professional and stately (just like her daughter) that we wonder if she was a trainer or performer at the attraction. She is also the image of Johnson — it looks like the Dancing With the Stars pro time-traveled back to the 1960s.
Johnson-Herjavec recently had some big news to share with her mother (and also the world). The dance-themed Christmas movie script that she co-wrote with her mentor Beth Stevenson has been sold and will be made into a movie. Johnson-Herjavec teased that there are more details to come soon, but this is all that she could share at the time.
