The gift of love NARELDA JACOBS

For the first time since their wedding, Narelda Jacobs and Karina Natt share their love story and heartfelt journey to motherhood.

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The week that baby Sanna was conceived, Karina Natt remembers drinking “the best glass of red wine I’d ever have - and the last one for a very long time,” seeing a perfect moonrise, celebrating Pride Month and being “obsessed” - on the lookout for even the tiniest sign of pregnancy.

“It was a natural conception,” she says with a grin, in that IVF was not involved, though that was their Plan B. Ovulation cycles were calculated, a dear friend, Mitch Swanson, donated sperm, an old-fashioned turkey baster was employed, “and I became a citizen scientist,” Karina adds, and can’t help giggling.

Karina was also in a slightly frantic, if joyful, spin because in just nine weeks she would marry the love of her life, Whadjuk Noongar woman, newsreader and journalist, Narelda Jacobs.

They’d met in an ABC green room three years earlier, and fallen into an easy friendship, but romance hadn’t worked her wily ways for almost two years. When she did, she gathered them up in a whirlwind.

Their first date was in February 2023. That year, they spun through the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras and the Adelaide Festival together, and in June, Karina packed her car full to overflowing with boxes, bags, pot plants - her life - and the couple headed west from Adelaide, across the Hay Plains to Sydney, Narelda’s adopted home.

“I didn’t make the decision to move, love did that,” Karina tells The Weekly.

Narelda jokes that “lesbians nest after a week” and the pair did settle into life together easily. Karina, who had been Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young’s chief of staff, felt she could work as a political adviser as easily from Sydney as Adelaide, and she did. She also helped manage Narelda’s increasingly hectic career as she took on extra commitments with SBS and Network 10.

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