In my 20s, I was doing a media degree at Sydney Uni, and a couple of days a week I was a volunteer at FBi community radio. As I graduated uni, I went into full-time radio at triple j. I started DJing and I started a band, so I was very immersed in the music world.

My early 20s was the first time I ever really found my people. I had a core group of three girl friends that had been my best friends all through high school and uni. We started a band, teenagersintokyo, together, and we made this whole other community of music dork friends. We would have schedules of “we’re going to this gig and then this gig and then this DJ’s playing and this one’s playing”, and we would all end up at a friend’s house that we dubbed the ‘house of death’. We would sleep it off for a couple of hours and then we’d get up the next day and go swim in the ocean.

I was 21 when I started at triple j. When I first went on air, I remember being really nervous and talking a lot less than I probably should have. I did the lunch show for one year, and then I did Drive for a year. Doing a show where you have to talk about personal stories was a lot more challenging, because it’s really hard to talk about personal stuff on the spot and make it funny, and have a thick enough skin that you can still turn your mic on three minutes after seeing a text message from someone who doesn’t like you, or come back the next day and do it again. Being in radio that first couple of years taught me how to have a really strong work ethic – to just turn up and do it.

I moved to London in my mid-20s. I was doing the band full-time – playing bass, writing a record, touring around Europe and living in a North London sharehouse. It was the first time that I’d lived out of home – I remember my mum crying at the airport when I would come back to Australia to visit, and I remember her saying, “When you have a daughter, you will know what it’s like to say goodbye to them.”

I stayed in London for ages and lived up that heyday of indie life. We loved Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Bloc Party, Interpol, Phoenix. We were like, “Fuck it, we’re gonna do it. We’re gonna carry our own amps up and down the stairs of this shit venue for months on end.” Touring is so strenuous – you’re lugging around gear, you’ve got no sleep, you’re sleeping on some club promoter’s couch one night and then the next night in a beautiful hotel with a strange leaky bathtub. It’s not for the faint-hearted.

I was in a long-distance relationship with my boyfriend, who I had left behind in Australia to move to London. That relationship ended just after I turned 30 – I was in it for essentially the entirety of my 20s. I really fell in love properly for the first time at the start of that decade and it was a really safe, wonderful relationship, but I look back on it now and, because I’m older and I know myself so much better, I know what the signs are now when I’m unhappy, when I’m not speaking up. Back then it was easier to go with the flow, to not ruffle any feathers and not have hard conversations.

It definitely was tense when we ended the band. Half of us wanted to move back to Australia and half wanted to stay there – it was like an awful breakup conversation. I was on the fence. Deep down I actually wanted to keep going, but the good girl, good girlfriend and good daughter in me said, “You should go home.”

I ended up moving back to Sydney at the end of my 20s. As lucky timing would have it, I was offered another position at triple j to work on my dream job, which was doing the evenings show and making it a new releases show. It was so special to me because that was the sort of presenter that I wanted to be – I wanted to talk about music and interview artists.

When I was 28, I really started to hit my stride with work. I’d learnt a lot from the first time that I was at triple j. When I was first there, I wanted to be accommodating and a yes person. I was happy-go-lucky almost to the point of being a pushover. There were a number of times where my gut instinct was like, “I don’t really like this idea”, “I don’t think that that’s funny”, or “I’m uncomfortable”. I found it really hard to speak up.

It was such a fucking fun decade of travel and taking risks. But if there was anything I could change, it would be to actually listen to my own gut instincts about what was making me happy, and what was making me uncomfortable or uneasy. It was really easy to hide my own feelings from myself, being really distracted and busy all the time. I wish I’d spoken up in moments that would have saved a lot of heartache years down the line.

This interview comes straight from the pages of issue 116. To get your mitts on a copy, swing past the frankie shop, subscribe or visit one of our lovely stockists.