It is 9.30pm in Melbourne and Junie Sng sounds a tad pooped.

Holding down a job as an IT specialist and parenting two boisterous sons, she says, is hard work.

"I'm always running after them, trying to get them to clean up their rooms, clean up after themselves," she says of her two children, Zachary, 10, and Sebastien, six.

In fact, the 49-year-old says with a laugh, parenting is a lot harder than the training she used to put in to become Singapore's Swim Queen of the 1970s and early 1980s. Her eight years in the pool reaped two Asian Games gold medals and 38 golds from four SEA Games.

"With training, it's just yourself. But bringing up little people is different, you have two personalities who will not always do what you want them to do. But they're gorgeous boys. I just hope I'm doing right by them," she adds.

She is chuffed that she, along with 107 other women, are honoured in the Singapore Women's Hall of Fame.

"A lot of hard work went into that," says Sng who ruled the pool for eight years until she retired in 1983.

She will be flying here from Melbourne - where she has lived since 1980 - with her two boys and nightclub promoter husband, Geoff Holden, 60, to attend the gala dinner on Friday.

She hopes the evening will give her sons a better idea of what Mummy achieved in her youth.

"They've seen some photographs but I don't think they really understand what I did. Hopefully, the experience will give them something to aim for should they have a sporting career," she says.

The younger of two girls (elder sister Elaine also has several Asian Games medals) of an artist and a teacher, she made a splashing debut at age 11 at the 1975 Seap Games, winning one gold and one silver.

There was no stopping her after that. In 1977, she won five gold medals and broke six meet and two Asian Games women's records at the Sea Games in Kuala Lumpur.

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