Alumni Profiles

By Ian Robertson Alumni Manager

Friends, Podcasters, Authors

Dinah Rowe-Roberts (Class of 1991) Mia Northrop (Class of 1991)

In a friendship forged at Korowa and continued through respective university studies, careers overseas, marriages, children and beyond, Dinah Rowe-Roberts (Jowett, Class of 1991 and Mia Northrop (Lyons, Class of 1991) launched the podcast Life Admin Life Hacks.

The podcast came about from their shared experience juggling life admin and carrying the burden of the mental load for their households, a common challenge experienced when managing family life alongside demanding careers. Dinah is currently the Director of Business Services at Philanthropy Australia and Mia is the Research Lead at the tech startup, Float. Together, it became their mission to minimise, automate and share life admin to help others free up time, save money and achieve peace of mind.

Since 2018, they have recorded six seasons, including an episode that featured fellow Korovians and professional organisers Jodie Lister (Cavanagh, Class of 1991) and Kristen Adnams (Faure, Class of 1991) on the subject of decluttering.

In January 2022, their book Life Admin Hacks was published by Harper Collins. It is described as a super-practical guide to cleaning up your admin load and freeing up head space. As the media release that accompanied the launch of their book states, ‘working parents Mia and Dinah have marshalled their professional expertise in innovation and finance, design thinking and operations to research best practices, trial the tech and craft the most efficient processes to optimise their own life admin.’

The book has met with critical acclaim with noted author and broadcaster Tracey Spicer stating “this book is life-changing. Mia and Dinah’s practical, wise and clever advice will help you to start important conversations with your partner or children around the day-to-day tasks that have shackled women for centuries.”

Life Admin Hacks is available at Amazon, Audible, BigW, Kmart, Target and all good bookstores. Get a 10 per cent discount by using promo code LIFE at checkout when you buy from Booktopia.

A career in journalism – bad mother be damned!

Kate Halfpenny (Class of 1984)

A week after receiving her HSC results in 1984, Kate was offered a journalism cadetship by Melbourne broadsheet The Herald. Lured by the weekly after-tax salary of $110, she turned down an offer from the Law Faculty at the University of Melbourne. Her life as a journalist had started.

Kate recalls 5am shifts where she monitored radio news and “bashed out” headlines for editors on a typewriter. It was a challenging, misogynistic workplace and she loved navigating its reality. “Trousers were banned for women in the office and I was sent home for writing ‘menstruation’ in a story,” she says. Hard news was not her forte but writing features clicked. By the age of 20, she was a columnist and sections editor. One of her first interviews was with Sammy Davis Jr and she eventually sat down with almost every big star who hit town.

Restless in 1990, she left The Herald and wangled a sub-editor’s job on Rupert Murdoch’s The Sun in London. Piers Morgan sat a couple of desks over. A year of tabloids was enough, and back home in Melbourne Kate worked as a feature writer on The Sunday Age then was offered a writer’s job on newlylaunched Who magazine, six days before she had her first of three children. As a new mother, she worked remotely in a home office — unheard of in 1993.

Kate’s work style was revolutionised by the rigorous US reporting and fact checking systems of Who, which was then owned by Time. Between cover stories on royal weddings and Hollywood divorces, she won a national magazine editor’s award for a cover story on the Port Arthur massacre. Kate stayed at Who for 24 years, the last 10 as executive editor.

In 2021, she and her husband had a sea-change and she founded Bad Mother Media. The name is a nod to what Kate was sometimes called as a mother who did paid work. She is a weekly columnist for The Age and Sydney Morning Herald, talks current affairs on ABC Radio Sydney and works with businesswomen on their personal brands including biographies for social media and sites.

Kate can be contacted at badmothermedia.com