I
am a huge fan of both Zoe Daniel and Sheryle Bagewell. Zoe’s reports for
Foreign Correspondent, Lateline, 7.30 Report and the ABC news as the South East
Asia Correspondent were always so engaging and lively. However, what I really
took away from this, as I do with everything I read in this memoir project, is
the tiny glimpses of real life. I might not aspire to duck bombs from a mob in
Bangkok, but I love that she describes one fleeting time, her disagreement with
her mother in law over her career choices “journalism is not a profession that she particularly respects, and only recently has she taken an interest in my work... I accept that it's somewhere around the level of used-car salesman in her eyes”. You might be a Walkley Award
winning journalist with a honourable and powerful position at the top of your
field, but you’ll still have a mother in law. 
I also love hearing Sheryle as the
financial correspondent for RN Breakfast, which as I described on Twitter some
weeks ago as my AM Franphetamine. Radio is the best medium. I will say that
Sheyrle’s book about France was not much more illuminating that others in the
same genre I have read, including the Secret
Life of France by Lucy Wadham, which is probably my favourite of that
expansive collection, and which sent me down a Google-spiral for the French
argot Verlan, which I find fascinating. Sheyrle doesn’t talk about linguistics
or mothers-in-law enough for my liking.
Both Zoe and Sheyrle, interestingly, seem to regard being in one’s early thirties as young. Young enough to pack up and move to a foreign land, or consider and then accept (Zoe) or reject (Sheyrle) the idea of having children. I suppose it’s my own way of justifying my life choice, but I just don’t think of early thirties as being that young. I was kind of done with both children (at least birthing them) and travel by that age. Is that wrong? I did all that stuff in my twenties. Maybe I should have done more? Can I still do more?
