Eleven years and one day ago...

(16th September, 2008.)

This photo was taken eleven years & one day ago,

on the 16th of September, 2008.*

An auspicious date that I'll always remember.

It was the day I packed two suitcases of my nicest clothes & a large box

(mostly filled with hats, props & my CD collection)...

And I moved from New Zealand to Australia.

For the first three years I was based in Newtown (in Sydney)

and from mid-Winter 2011 (until late 2015) I lived in Melbourne.

I made SO many wonderful friends & clients in the (nearly) eight years I lived in Oz.

And now I am living back in NZ, I miss you all (over there) very, very much!!

At the time I thought that uplifting my roots & moving to a whole new country

was the most challenging & confronting thing that I'd ever done. Now, in hindsight,

I think that returning home to Aotearoa (after nearly ten years away)

has been equally as heartbreaking, hard & challenging.

But here's what I now know: Home, it's not really about geography or a physical place.

It's people. And that is why Sydney & Melbourne are still very much my

two home(s) away from home.
Thanks for ALL the delicious, precious memories, friendships,

relationships, professional gigs & Aroha, Australia! 

“One never reaches home," she said.

"But where paths that have an affinity for each other intersect,

the whole world looks like home, for a time.”
Hermann Hesse

* My Mum looks so heartbroken in this photo. She was losing a second son to Australia.

(This blog entry originally appeared as a Facebook post on 17/9/2019.)