Less Toxic Living

Kate Hennessy is a Sydney-based journalist specialising in music, travel, arts and health and wellbeing. She has written for many major papers and publishers, including ABC online, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the Guardian UK, the Guardian Australia, The Daily Telegraph and the Australian Financial Review as well as magazines such as WellBeing, Get Lost Adventure Travel, Family Health and Green Lifestyle.

Kate is a weekly music critic for The Sydney Morning Herald, teaches writing at The Australian Writers’ Centre, is editing an illustrated children’s book and regularly pens scripts for the Channel 7 kids’ game show, It’s Academic.

She has particularly enjoyed some fascinating commissions from WellBeing Magazine over the years on topics including the symbolism of water across cultures and times, her hunt for an authentic whirling dervish performance in Turkey, the benefits of families taking ‘digital detoxes’, an investigation into yoga for men and profiles of inspiring people like slow food chef Sherry Strong and astronomical artist Jon Lomberg.

Her best two commissions yet have been her journey into Peru’s Sacred Valley to undertake a shamanic healing using the hallucinogenic healing medicine, Ayahuasca, for Wellbeing Magazine, and a trip to the aboriginal community of Barunga in the top end for Australia’s largest remote community festival, which she wrote about for a Guardian UK cover feature.

Her article on nanoparticles in sunscreen, included in Less Toxic Living, saw a strong reaction among her social networks, some of whom suggested it would cause greater harm than good to raise any doubt at all about sunscreen and drew parallels with the fraught immunisation debate. However, Kate believes the best way to resolve the issue, for both sides, is proper safety testing and labelling and that history has taught us that informed choices are always a good thing.

Connect with Kate at www.katehennessy.com.au or @smallestroom.