About Me

I was born in Aotearoa New Zealand, which is made up of three main islands in a watery sandwich between the mighty Pacific Ocean and the Tasman Sea. People often think of Aotearoa (that’s the Māori name) as a tiny country in the middle of nowhere, but actually it’s slightly bigger than the UK and of course it isn’t nowhere – it’s in the Southern Hemisphere and not so far from a couple of other A-listers: Australia and Antarctica.

Italian cities were so old. In Aotearoa we have some pretty ancient things: giant wētā insects have been around for 190 million years and some of our beautiful native trees can live for two or three thousand. If you stand quietly in nature you can feel the pull of time. But there are no gladiator stadium ruins in downtown Auckland – as far as we know, the first Polynesian navigators settled in Aotearoa just 800 years ago (for comparison, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have been in Australia for 65,000 years). In human history terms it’s still a baby.

 

 

So for me, Italy was definitely a surprise. A fascinating one! I ended up staying. Now I live in Amsterdam, but my next move will be to Sardinia in the Mediterranean (back to an island – yay!).

 

 

 

Growing up I loved horses and spent holidays on a horse farm trying to pretend I wasn’t a city girl. Big fail! But I learned a lot (with over a hundred horse teachers it was hard not to), rode a lot, read a lot of pony books and wished I had a horse friend myself. That never happened, but I did get everything I needed to invent my own dream pony years later in Ride North.

 

When I was eighteen I went on an exchange year to Italy. Talk about a learning curve. You couldn’t have found two more different countries (though funnily enough they’re both boot-shaped and if you were feeling energetic you could dig through the planet from one to the other).

Italian cities were so old. In Aotearoa we have some pretty ancient things: giant wētā insects have been around for 190 million years and some of our beautiful native trees can live for two or three thousand. If you stand quietly in nature you can feel the pull of time. But there are no gladiator stadium ruins in downtown Auckland – as far as we know, the first Polynesian navigators settled in Aotearoa about 800 years ago (for comparison, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have been in Australia for 65,000 years). In human history terms it’s still a baby.

 

 

So for me, Italy was definitely a surprise. A fascinating one! I ended up staying. Now I live in Amsterdam, but my next move will be to Sardinia in the Mediterranean (back to an island – yay!).