After years of working as a journalist, covering politics, crime and most recently translating the opaque and usually dry U.S. credit markets, I’m now reporting my own adventures as an Australian transplant living in New York City. I’m a mother of two, a wife, a magazine editor and a person who doesn’t like to sit still for long. If there’s someplace new I’ve explored, a meal worth eating, or just those random, crazy things that happen in Brownstone Brooklyn, I’ll share it here. And for the seemingly growing number of fellow Aussies making their homes in New York or just visiting, I’m on the lookout for the best places to get a taste and feel of home.
When I quit “serious” journalism before the birth of my first child, I swore my next pursuit would be something I loved doing. Some years and another child later, and I’m still on the hunt. But I do know that I want to keep writing, compiling all those snippets of discovery and oddball New York moments that I usually save to tell my husband when he gets home late at night or girlfriends over morning coffee, in a kind of personal journal gone public.
Why a blog, when it seems every second person is writing about something? Well, I’ve toyed with the idea the past few years since having children and then out of nowhere discovering I had a life-threatening heart condition. Obviously I survived the health emergency, but open heart surgery at age 37 shook things up a bit and made me wonder exactly what I was waiting for. If I’m lucky enough to be alive, then I might as well enjoy it and shout about it from the rooftops, or the modern version; keep a blog.
True, food — cooking it, eating it or just trawling markets in search of it — and a love of fashion play a big part in what I do and who I am. No doubt I will be writing a lot about what I am eating, wearing or lusting after in the clothes department. Parenting a four-year old and a six-year old with a healthy dose of no-bull, Aussie-style cynicism also makes up my days, punctuated with editing a New York-based graphic design magazine.
And why G’day Bklyn? I moved to New York some 11 years ago from Sydney to continue a long career at Bloomberg News, reporting on currency, junk bonds and the fledgling credit derivatives markets. In the very first months in New York I met the American whom I would later marry. We were settled New Yorkers, eventually raising children here and moving to Brooklyn like many growing Manhattan families, but we’ve never quite put roots down. I am still Australian. I have Australian friends. I hunt down Australian foods or beg for stuff to be sent from ‘home.” And I want my children to have the sort of childhood I had; running free on uncrowded beaches, taking dips in a pool on Christmas Day instead of shivering with cold, and being consumed, for better or worse, by my enormous family. The promise of free babysitting from devoted grandparents and cousins has plenty of merit too!
So, for now, until such time we decide to say see ya’ to New York, it’s G’day Bklyn.