I’ve always been interested in helping people understand what matters.

I’ve worked in journalism, education, communications and marketing.

The common thread isn’t storytelling. That’s just the vehicle. The real thread is helping people connect with something important: a news story, an idea, a piece of work, or a sense of who they are professionally.

Today I help people and organisations become more clearly understood, remembered and supported.

My career has taken me from reporting for the ABC in Alice Springs, to producing roles at Nine Sydney including the flagship news bulletin, the Today Show and A Current Affair. I’ve taught journalism, completed degrees in Sociology and Education, and worked on everything from school communications to shark documentaries for National Geographic and Disney+. 

But that’s my resume, with facts showing only where I’ve been and not what I’ve learned, or why it matters.  

Facts don’t tell you why I do this work. 

One of the first news stories I ever did still haunts me. Not because the topic was disturbing (it wasn’t) but because of how I was pressured to write the story. 

I’d lined up a real estate agent to interview about a big land sale on the coast. I was heading out when my boss said, ‘Play up the angle that it’s to Japanese developers. People here still feel strongly after the war.”  

I felt sick. I didn’t want to look weak in my first reporting job, but deceiving the real estate agent about the angle? That felt so wrong. 

After going back and forth on it all day, I went with my ambition to be a ‘real journo’. I’m ashamed to say the story that went to air definitely had racist overtones. I still squirm when I think of it.

But there was a silver lining: I started to see that facts do not determine what something means.

We do.

My news boss saw the facts as a broader story about lingering post-war resentment. The real estate agent saw them as a sign of economic growth for the area. Same facts, different narrative. 

I’ve been drawn in recent years to narrative. I see narrative as the book and each story (whether it’s a bio, a profile or a case for support) as the chapters within that book.

The book (narrative) needs to give the facts but it also has to help people understand the meaning behind them.

Good work doesn’t speak for itself. Whether it’s a professional describing their career, or an organisation describing its work, facts alone rarely explain why something matters. It takes a narrative approach to connect the facts, find the common thread and explain what it all adds up to.

Why you, not them?  Why this project, not that?  Why does it matter? 

They’re the questions at the heart of every narrative I help shape, whether through professional narrative workshops and individual sessions or strategic narrative consulting.

Want to talk? → email me here