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 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, closely followed by my father marrying a nurse from the hospital. Those events led me to getting a job and moving out of home to the nearby town. My first job was at the Social Welfare Department where the pervasive hopelessness got to me and after three years I moved to Auckland to study and better myself.
Over the next decade I studied, worked and travelled extensively, with stints living and working in London, Hawaii, Northern California and swanning around Holland, Europe, Asia and the Pacific.
After that I decided to knuckle down and build a career which focused on 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 IT/Comms company travelling the eastern seaboard in a 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.
In 2015, I’d had enough of IT and home-based work and I secured a position working for a legal firm in Newcastle in a pure marketing role. In 2018, I began working for The Law Office of Conrad Curry where as well as marketing I took on the Practice Management role within the firm.
I thoroughly enjoy the learning journey of working for a law firm and developing a Practice, as well as knowing 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.
