It's Beautiful Here in the
Northern Beaches

How are you travelling through lockdown?

A dance between up and down. I feel so grateful to be living so close to the beach but my stamina for positivity is really wearing thin some days. When it feels never-ending and it’s a grey cold day, it hits me the hardest. The collective darkness sometimes feels like it will never lift but when I take a step back and ground, I find it a lot easier to stay level-headed and let the feelings flow without labouring on the news. It’s an important time to continue practices of meditation, getting into nature, ocean swimming, walking with a mate, chanting, appreciating what’s around… The other thing that I’ve really noticed and taken away as one of the lessons of this strange time is the impact that creativity can have. When I’m in the flow and doing something I love, the rest of the world quickly melts away. 

What has been the biggest adjustment through this time?

It has really just been the mental challenge of the reduced freedom. I’ve always placed such a strong emphasis on being able to travel if I’ve wanted to… feeling free. We had been bunkering down for the last few years after having a baby and I was really looking forward to getting into that Mediterranean ocean sometime this year but with the hand break on any plans, cancelling holidays and continually pivoting it just feels a little claustrophobic when I think about it too deeply. The biggest adjustment is really not watching the news and pulling myself out of social media consumption cycles. Easier said than done sometimes! I think we all made travel plans that got cancelled, then made new ones which also got cancelled - so now we're all just in a waiting limbo, a holding pattern. It feels different now without those things to look forward to, but it catapults us into the ’now’ rather than just wanting to get to the other side. Another good lesson to enjoy today. 

You are such a talented creative, always with so many ideas and inspiring projects on the go… can you tell us a little bit about what you are working on at the moment?

That’s so funny because I feel like my ideas are few and far between… it must look like that from the outside but I definitely feel like I am someone who isn't abundant with ideas but the ones I get I really invest in and run with... if I really believe in them (hmmm... not mentioning the novel I started to write a few years ago ha!). I do really relish diving into a creative project. At the moment I am producing our second TV show which we will shoot at the end of the year. Finding locations and navigating the world of shooting in a lockdown and getting all of the contracts ready - lots of paperwork. I’m wrapping up my podcast as the season has come to an end. And working on an older idea that I’ve pulled out of the woodwork from a couple of years ago now that I have the time and space to get it on its feet, and I’m about to direct and produce some social commercials for brands. It’s easy for us in lockdown because Rick my husband and I can work as a Directing/Producing/Editing team. Our first show (that Rick wrote and I produced) ‘Australia’s Sexiest Tradie’ will air on 7Mate September 8th so we will have a little lockdown screening night (just Rick and I ha!). We’ve both seen it a thousand times throughout the editing process but it’s been months so hopefully will get surprised. 

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I love listening to your latest podcast - Night Light - how did the idea for this come about?

Thank you! Thank you for listening!! The concept really just came to me at the start of the pandemic when I just felt that there were so many wildly talented, incredible creatives who we are just sitting at home not able to flex their creative muscles. I love working collaboratively and I wanted to create a different medium for the actors and creatives that I know, so that we could continue to contribute to that creative landscape but in a different way.

In the past working as a health coach I’ve created personalised meditations for clients so it just became an extension of that but I set myself the task to find the world’s most beautiful stories and then match them to the voices of some of Australia’s most talented creatives. It’s a beautiful project but it is a limited run because the workload is enormous. We had funding for the first season and I added on an encore second season because there were some beautiful voices I really wanted to get up there that hadn’t fit into the first run, but now it’s almost all done and dusted.