I’m Catherine McMaster, an Australian journalist, editor and writer based in Milan.

I write about motherhood, identity, travel, birth culture and the emotional geography of life between countries. My work often begins in personal experience — giving birth abroad, becoming a mother far from home, moving between Australia, Italy and the UK — but opens into broader questions about culture, belonging, womanhood and the systems that shape modern family life.

Before moving more deeply into personal essays and narrative non-fiction, I spent more than a decade working across lifestyle, travel and luxury publishing. My work has appeared in The Times, The Australian, The Telegraph, News.com.au, VICE, The Sun and Ramona Magazine, to name a few. I have also held senior editorial roles across luxury travel and branded publishing, including work on Sunseeker Magazine and Gaggenau Magazine during my time at FMS Global Media.

These days, much of my writing explores the messy, beautiful and often brutal realities of motherhood: birth, postpartum identity, maternal mental health, cultural difference and the quiet ways women are reshaped by becoming mothers. Based in Milan, I often write from the perspective of an insider-outsider: close enough to understand the rhythms of Italian life, foreign enough to notice what others might take for granted.

I am particularly interested in stories that sit between the intimate and the political — the private moments that reveal something larger about how we live.