Adelaide television personality Kate Freebairn is beaming as she cuddles 12-month-old baby daughter Airlie, watched on by partner Nick Fahey.

The family is relaxing at their just-finished Aldinga Beach holiday home, enjoying a break from life in Sydney where they have been based for the past 18 months.

Life has been a bit of a whirlwind for Kate in that time, on both the personal and work fronts: not only is she revelling in the joys of first-time motherhood, but she’s celebrating having earned a prestigious new role as the anchor of South Australia’s Ten News First, while also moving into a new home in Sydney’s eastern suburbs.

“New jobs, new cities, new house and now a baby, there has been a lot of change,” Kate says.

Motherhood, of course, has brought with it the most significant of changes, but the 37-year-old is embracing it all.

“From day one we have been so lucky, Airlie is such a happy baby and a joy to be around,” she says.

“Becoming a mother is something that is such a special thing, but you can’t anticipate that until you actually have a baby of your own. I was never greatly maternal. I was never that person who always had to hold a friend’s baby, but as soon as I had my own, I just couldn’t put her down.”

The juggle of becoming a working mum – she headed back to the Ten newsroom from maternity leave in February – has taken some getting used to. And while Kate has huge respect for full-time, stay-at-home mothers, she is enjoying the balance of motherhood and work. She spends the mornings with Airlie, then heads into the studio for hair and make up by 2.30pm, before presenting the nightly bulletin from 5pm.

Kate, Nick and Airlie in their Aldinga Beach holiday home.

“It’s the perfect blend for me as a mum going back to work, just with the hours,” Kate says. “I’m still having family time, making sure I’m spending most of my day with Airlie, but then also having ‘me’ time where I can get out and achieve something for myself.

“I absolutely love spending time with Airlie, but I also felt like a part of me was missing and that was the part where for years I’ve gotten up every day and I’ve gone to work and I’ve really loved it.

“So, I felt as if I needed that back, I needed something for myself … I feel like a whole person and I still feel like I’m being a great mum and I’m spending a lot of time with Airlie.”

Journalism is another great love in Kate’s life and a career in the media was always on the cards for her and she admits that despite being a shy child, when she was given a microphone she was completely transformed.

The high-achieving youngster could read before she started school, thanks to her mother Jenny, a school teacher, who later encouraged her to read series such as the Sweet Valley books, which had a female journalist as a main character.

Kate was president of the SRC in primary school as well as a leader at Aberfoyle Park High School, where she was valedictorian in Year 12. She says she studied hard “partially because I enjoyed it and partially because I knew I wanted to be a journalist, so I was dedicated”.

The family, including Kate’s father Jim who worked for the Correctional Services department and sister Emma, would discuss the day’s news around the dining table, igniting a love of news and current affairs in young Kate.

Sporty and active, she also enjoyed netball, tennis, athletics and diving as a youngster and summer holidays were spent skiing on the River Murray at Morgan; Kate was aquaplaning at three years of age and got her boat licence at age 12.

Kate was always into reading as a young girl.

As a teenager, Kate was eager to step into the world of journalism and organised work experience at all the commercial television stations, as well as The Advertiser.

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In Year 12, the ambitious student sent an audition tape to Channel Seven when the network ran a competition looking for a junior journalist to cover the Royal Adelaide Show.

While she didn’t get the gig, Kate says the experience made her even more determined to work towards her journalistic dream.

She completed a journalism degree at the University of South Australia and originally had her sights set on becoming a print journalist until she was offered casual reporting shifts at Seven News during her final year at university.

Kate says she can still clearly recall filing her first story, a fatal car crash at Lower Light north of the city.

“I remember the TV stations had their helicopters in the sky getting aerial shots and they had really experienced reporters on the job,” she says.

“I was standing up getting ready to do my first piece-to-camera and I had no idea what I was doing. But as they say ‘fake it ‘til you make it’, and that’s what I did.

“I guess it was a sink or swim environment and it still is. You just get chucked in and you have to give it a crack and see how you go. They asked me to come back so I thought it couldn’t have been that bad.”

Out on location as Ten’s weather presenter.

Kate’s first full-time journalism job was with Southern Cross News in Broken Hill, a regional rite of passage for many young aspiring TV journalists in South Australia.

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She says the television reporting job gave her a great grounding in news gathering and working under pressure. As a video journalist, she had to come up with two stories a day, do the camera work, write and edit the stories and then send it all off to head office in Port Pirie.

After that, a gap year travelling around Europe followed before Kate returned to Adelaide in 2008 and was offered a reporting role with Ten. She has been with the network ever since.

Early reporting rounds for the young journalist included general news, the environment and health, but it was while doing a live cross one night that Kate realised her skill set lay in live television.

“I remember it was on Christmas Eve at the Adelaide Central Market,” she says. “It was a quick one, just about grocery shopping at the last minute before Christmas Day. I remember at the time Daniela Ritorto was working for Channel Ten as a political reporter. She’s now a great friend of mine, but at the time I just looked up to her and she was a mentor and she gave me some advice and explained how it works and she was just the number one live crosser. I thought if I could do anything like her, then I’ll be okay.

“I was so nervous but I nailed it and I felt amazing afterwards and I was keen to do my next one.”

The aspiring young reporter was eventually asked to fill in as a weather presenter when Jane Reilly took leave at various times. Kate then stepped into the weather gig full time when Jane moved over into radio in 2013.

“It wasn’t anything that I had ever been striving for, it was just sort of something that came together,” Kate says. “But that was a huge career moment for me. When I was given that job, I was very excited and happy, I absolutely loved being a weather presenter. It was the best job in the world, being out on location across Adelaide and mixing with the community and showcasing events and local brands and venues. It was something that I saw myself doing for a very long time.”

Family photo with Kate, her younger sister Emma and her parents Jenny and Jim.

While she tried her best to avoid them, Kate was often required to be on location to cover extreme weather events, including being at the beach for Adelaide’s hottest day, “melting in about 46 degrees”, and being drenched as the waves came crashing over the rocks at Glenelg North during a storm.

But being on-the-road, talking to people and covering events such as the SA Variety Bash were the highlights of the weather role, Kate says.

“I think that it’s an unusual job in that you go to work and generally you don’t know what you’ll be doing that day,” she says. “So, I’ll come home at the end of the day and could say, ‘I actually went to Kangaroo Island today in a helicopter’ or ‘I got to go to the Barossa and interview this person or this celebrity who flew down for a TV ad campaign’. It was just fun.

“I also think it’s a great team at Ten particularly, everyone has been so supportive since day one. Maybe that stems from us being on at five rather than six. It wasn’t quite as cutthroat as what it was when I was working for Channel Seven. I think that’s because they were going head-to-head with Nine. There was almost a sense of fighting for the top story, whereas when you came to Ten, if you got an opportunity, then your teammates would be really happy for you and would do anything to help.”

Her high-profile role also saw Kate out and about on Adelaide’s social scene, where her sense of style quickly made a mark – she cites Adelaide fashion brand Acler as her favourite go-to.

In 2021, Kate co-hosted Ten’s Melbourne Cup carnival fashion and entertainment coverage alongside actor and singer Rob Mills.

“To sit on the couch next to Rob was such a big moment for me,” she says. “We chatted live with celebs over Cup week and I was in my element. I was actually 20 weeks pregnant with Airlie, so my bump was just starting to show. I had to skip the Champagnes but still absolutely loved it!”

The downside to Kate’s high profile means her private life can also make the news occasionally, including when she split from her first husband several years ago.

Kate with younger sister Emma. The two both live in Sydney now and are mothers to young children.

Since then, however, her star has been on the rise, including meeting Nick, who is the co-founder of the hugely successful online betting company PointsBet, at an AFL Grand Final corporate event in Melbourne in 2019. She says she was drawn to the businessman’s “quiet confidence”.

“I noticed him looking at me and he approached me and just struck up a conversation and I really liked that he was confident enough to be able to do that,” she says. “He was just so friendly and we chatted for 15 minutes and that was it. Then he actually asked if he could find me on Instagram which was funny. The next day I woke up and I had a message from Nick Fahey on Instagram. So that was what started it all.

“Neither of us knew who each other was or what we did for a living, so we just started from scratch.”

Nick then invited Kate as his guest to Derby Day a couple of weeks later and the two have been together ever since.

But it was actually COVID that really cemented the couple’s relationship. They had been commuting between Melbourne, where Nick was based, and Adelaide, but had organised a weekend away in Sydney.

Unexpected South Australian border closures and Victorian COVID lockdowns saw Kate and Nick rush from Sydney to Kate’s Adelaide home, where a two-week stay turned into a seven-month stay for Nick.

“Why would you go back to Melbourne where they were having lockdown after lockdown, when you could be in Adelaide and relatively COVID free?” Kate says.

“That’s when I actually did the weather, live from my front porch!”

Kate says Airlie has been an easy, happy baby since day one.

The experience brought the couple closer together, and then the timing was perfect when Nick moved back to Melbourne and Kate was offered the weather presenting gig based there. Then, in 2022, the couple made the move to Sydney where Airlie was born on March 22.

Kate says she and Nick share a love of travel and they took Airlie to Europe when she was just three months old.

“Some people said you’re crazy for taking a three-month-old to Europe and I remember before she was born my mum asking if our trip was refundable,” Kate laughs. “But she was the perfect age to take because she just slept the whole way on the plane and the whole way back. I think she cried once on the way back.”

Kate was enjoying maternity leave last year when she got a call out of the blue from Ten’s head of broadcast news about taking on the anchor role of the network’s news.

“I was surprised because it was so early … Airlie was only a couple of months,” Kate says. “I hadn’t thought that I would be thinking about going back to work until she was closer to a year old. I wasn’t sure what life would look like for me after having a baby and I was very open to just seeing how it went.”

Kate remained on maternity leave until Airlie was 10 months old, and then presented her first bulletin as anchor on February 6 this year.

The high-profile role allows her to stay based in Sydney, but is broadcast in Adelaide as part of a new-look line-up of local talent for Ten that includes Max Burford on the sports desk and Tiffany Warne presenting weather.

However, the excitement of stepping into such a coveted role must have been somewhat bittersweet given Kate’s former on-air Adelaide colleagues at Ten were axed in 2020 when the network opted for a Melbourne-based bulletin.

Kate on set at Ten News First where she is now solo anchor, based in Sydney.

Kate’s close friend Rebecca Morse had been the face of Ten’s news bulletin for 14 years in Adelaide before falling victim to the sweeping cuts, along with then-sports presenter Will Goodings.

Kate survived those cuts and was offered a role presenting weather for both Melbourne and Adelaide bulletins, based in Melbourne, before moving to Sydney last year and being offered the newsreading role.

So, was it difficult to break the news of her anchor role to her good friend Rebecca?

“Bec is a great supporter of mine and she’s been really happy for me to take on what was her old role,” Kate says, explaining that the 2020 changes were a difficult time for everyone in the industry.

“We are a really close team, everyone supported each other, but it was tough at the time. In the end somehow it all worked out for the best. Now Will has got a great job at another network and Bec’s on radio and she’s absolutely killing it. So, I think for Bec it was actually a blessing in disguise because at that point she was working both ends of the day, getting up at four o’clock in the morning to do her radio job and being on air until 6.30pm. And I think that now she’s got a bit of a work-life balance.

“Then I ended up staying at Ten, moving to Melbourne and having a great opportunity, that then led me to this job. So, everything works out in the end.”

Kate says she is enjoying the Sydney life, living just a couple of suburbs away from her sister Emma, a fashion editor at Vogue, who also has a young child.

Nick has been busy setting up a Sydney office and the couple has settled into their multimillion-dollar beachfront home in the prestigious suburb of Tamarama Beach.

Nick, co-founder of PointsBet, met Kate at an AFL corporate event in 2019 and the two hit it off immediately.

Perhaps the only downside could be that Kate’s new high-profile role comes with a degree of ratings pressure in the competitive world of TV news, but she says that isn’t the case.

“There hasn’t been any great pressure put on me personally or our team,” she says. “In terms of the ratings, I think that for us it was just really that we had a local presenting team because we know how important that is for South Australia.

“We’re confident that over time once people realise that we’re on and that we’ve got a new team, they’ll give us a chance … we’re confident that our ratings will slowly build.

“For us, we were never expecting for it to be ‘bang’, here you go, your ratings are through the roof. It was more of a long game, and just building that trust and using our exposure just to hopefully show people that we have a really fun, engaging, informative product. And we love it.”

Nick and Kate visit Adelaide regularly and have recently put the finishing touches on the Aldinga Beach property “Reef House”, which they rent out on Airbnb.

“We’ve got lots of plans to be back in Adelaide and Ten has plans as well for me to split my time between Sydney and Adelaide,” Kate says. “They’ve set up the studio in Adelaide so that I can read the news from here, too. And hopefully, you’ll see me out on location as well across Adelaide, doing an outside broadcast where I can be at an event and I can be presenting, like things have come full circle.”

Kate muses that sometimes those full circles take you exactly where you need to go.

“I’m really happy where I am right now and I feel lucky to be able to say that,” she says.

Kate, Nick and Airlie in their Aldinga Beach holiday home.

“I think that sometimes people can get caught up in the question around what’s next and forget to enjoy and appreciate what’s happening right now. And for me, that’s the realisation that I’ve come to in the last couple of years.

“I feel so blessed to be in a position that I am now with a beautiful family and a great job. So, I just want to enjoy what I’m doing, the here and now.”

This article first appeared in the April 2023 issue of SALIFE magazine.