Summer Warne has shared a touching tribute to her mother, Simone Callahan. The daughter of late cricketer Shane Warne posted an unseen image of her parents together in an Instagram Stories post on Sunday. Wishing her mum a happy Mother's Day, the 24-year-old included a moving caption along with the photo of her folks in happier days.
'Happy mummy day to this beautiful woman. I love you,' Summer wrote, tagging her mother. The throwback image showed Shane and Simone sharing a cigar and appeared to date to the 1990s. The couple, who married in 1992 and divorced in 2005, ham it up for the cameras in the photo, with Shane gazing lovingly at his then-wife.
It comes after Simone broke her silence on the devastating moment she realised cricket legend Shane had died. Speaking with raw honesty on son Jackson's podcast Warnes Way, Simone recalled the surreal horror of that night in March 2022 when Warne died suddenly of a heart attack in Thailand, aged 52.
Simone, who lives an hour outside Melbourne in the coastal town of Somers, had been on her way home to collect daughter Summer when the messages started coming through. 'It didn't feel real,' she told Jackson. 'We were just having a normal Friday night. Then that just unfolded the way it did and having to go back to Melbourne and get Summer and getting a call on the way back. Saying are you nearly home, when I got that message I thought this isn't good if they're asking me if I'm nearly home with Summer because they wanted us all together for the next phone call. Our lives were changed forever in that moment.'
In the chaotic weeks that followed, as the world mourned one of Australia's greatest sporting icons, Simone watched their children – Brooke, Jackson and Summer – thrown into the eye of the storm, tasked with organising a funeral and memorial while barely able to manage their own grief. Much of that period, she admits, remains a blur.
'I had so much going on because I was worried about you guys because you were being pulled left, right and centre to organise the funeral, the memorial,' she told Jackson. 'There was so much going on... I always felt a sense of guilt that you were having to deal with that. You guys were young, it was out of my control. It was hard for me to see all that. I was so proud of the way you guys handled yourselves and I knew you would, but it was very hard for me to watch and see you go through all that. It was really heavy and you guys had really heavy hearts and you didn't have a moment to really grieve at all during that time.'
Warne shared his three children with his ex-wife Simone Callahan: Brooke, Jackson, and Summer. Warne is considered one of the finest cricketers in history after claiming 708 Test wickets at 25.41 in 145 matches between 1992 and 2007. The megastar cricketer turned pundit and businessman was found unconscious in a villa in the resort of Koh Samui.
