I grew up in a disaster prone spot in the North Island of New Zealand, as the third child of four to a Dutch couple. The commonly occurring floods and earthquakes, and even a volcanic eruption, were scored at school the next day (the most breakages usually won but were sometimes trumped by unusual and less plausible happenings like falling off the toilet!).
But it was an upheaval of a different kind that set my life on a different trajectory at the age of 16 with the death of my mother and disabling stroke of my father within a few months. Those events led me to leaving school and getting a job at the Social Welfare Department, sadly the only growth industry in my small town at that time. After 3 years the pervasive hopelessness got to me and I moved to Auckland to study and better myself.
Over the next decade I studied, worked and travelled extensively, with working holidays in London, Hawaii and Northern California, travel through Asia, the Pacific and Europe and extended stays with relatives in Holland.
After that I decided to knuckle down and build a career in marketing and business development for technology companies, including IBM, and a move to Australia where I worked for the Apple Centre in Melbourne and an innovative IT/Comms company travelling the eastern seaboard in a marketing and business development role.
Another decade later I met my husband and had two daughters. We lived in Sydney, Melbourne and Bairnsdale in country Victoria before moving to Newcastle in 2012. All the while I continued to work for the ITC company, solely from home which allowed me the perfect work/life balance while raising our children.
In 2015, I longed for a change of industry and secured a position working for a mid-sized legal firm in Newcastle. In 2018, I began working for The Law Office of Conrad Curry where I focus on marketing and business development within the firm.
I thoroughly enjoy working for such a caring and progressive law firm in which we are all aware of the very important role we have in helping people who have experienced difficult upheavals in their own lives, to seek support and recompense in order to come through their trials in a positive way.
