My career has been in communications and destination marketing. For most of it I’ve helped hotels, retreats, destinations and cultural organisations work out what makes them worth visiting, and then told that story to the people most likely to love it.
That work has spanned more than 30 years and a wide range of places: travel and hospitality, the arts and culture, wellbeing, regional communities and government. I’ve worked inside organisations and alongside them, from teams to national bodies.
I’m an award-winning strategist known for integrating brand clarity, narrative and commercial outcomes. The work has delivered measurable growth in audience engagement, booking conversion and long-term value for place-based organisations.
Across my career, I’ve founded and led award-winning agencies, worked as Creative Director and senior advisor, and partnered with founders, executives and leadership teams through periods of growth and change. Long-term collaborations include Elements of Byron, Basq House, and leading cultural institutions and destinations.
Earlier roles included national and international media strategy, including for the Sydney 2000 Olympic Arts Festival, alongside senior positions with the Australia Council for the Arts and major performing arts organisations. This grounding continues to inform how I work today: with clarity, creativity, discernment and commercial rigour.
Alongside practice, I’ve contributed as a Masters-level university lecturer, media trainer and speaker: bridging theory, lived experience and applied outcomes.
Today, my focus is on places where culture, wellbeing and performance are mutually reinforcing: creating destinations and organisations that people value deeply, return to often, and sustain over time.
My working life began in the arts, with the Sydney Symphony, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Australian Chamber Orchestra and the Biennale of Sydney.
It was a good place to learn. In the arts you often start with an idea (or several) and a flexible plan (or maybe no plan) for how it will come together.
What you do have is a strong sense of how it should make people feel. You learn to trust that, and then you get every detail right along the way. I still work that way.
I also learned that I’m good at reading people. I can often see what a person or an organisation is capable of before they’ve quite seen it themselves. Some of my favourite work has been helping a founder, a leader or a team find the confidence to say clearly who they are.
Later I left Sydney for Byron Bay. I came for a different pace, and it ended up teaching me more than I expected. Living closer to the land and the coast teaches you about seasons, timing and patience. You can’t hurry a garden. In my experience you can’t push a place or a person into being something they’re not either.
The places and leaders people love most are the ones that feel true to where and who they are. They’re authentic.
That’s what I bring to my work now. I have an eye for what’s genuinely special about a place, and a practical sense of how to turn it into somewhere people want to visit, talk about and come back to.
A few moments I’m proud of. The teams I worked with share the credit.
Mostly destination and tourism marketing, brand and storytelling, communications and PR, and visitor experience. The common thread is helping places and the people behind them be understood well.
In the Northern Rivers of New South Wales. I’ve worked across Australia and overseas.
Yes. I speak on industry panels about visitor experience and wellness tourism, and I’m always interested in conversations about place, storytelling and the visitor economy.
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