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.
How did Narelda Jacobs and Karina Natt meet?
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.
Is Narelda Jacobs married?
As the months passed, they began “calling each other ‘wifey’ as little funny nicknames,” Narelda says, but before long she realised that “it wasn’t just a funny nickname anymore. I wanted to be able to introduce Karina as my wife.”
Unbeknownst to Narelda, Karina had been planning a proposal for a month or two.
“I knew Narelda wouldn’t propose,” she says, but she was also pretty certain she’d say yes. So, early in 2024, she’d had a ring made by their friend Tegan Murdock from Ngumpie Weaving.
“Then, we were just at home on an ordinary Friday afternoon,” Karina remembers. “We were talking about spending our life together and I thought: Alright, I’m going to do it now!” And she ran to fetch the ring from the cupboard.
“It was the best,” says Narelda, with that sunburst of a smile. “We’d talked about it, but I wasn’t expecting it when it happened, so it did come as a surprise. We were alone, in the privacy of our own home, and no one was watching, so it wasn’t performative. It was heartfelt and genuine. We could feel all the emotions, and it was perfect.
“There were big feelings – big feelings – and this seemed to be the best way to express them. I wanted to make a lifetime commitment – a declaration that I will be with you forever, and I will do everything with you, because that’s how I felt. Life was better together, so I wanted to make it permanent.”
Planning the perfect day
Neither being women to do things by halves, the decision to start a family seemed the natural next step. Confirmation that their moonshot to motherhood had been successful came in July, in the form of two lines on a little plastic stick, just as wedding plans were in full, glorious swing.
They wanted a wedding that would express just how true this union felt, and the night was glamorous and heartfelt in equal measure. They both wore floor-length white gowns by Aussie label-to-the-stars, Zhivago. Pop musician Gordi sang them down the aisle. Narelda’s daughter, Jade, a mural artist, created a sand painting in shades of ochre, deep red, black and tan onto which the pair stepped barefoot to share their vows.
Jade, who is 30 and lives in Narelda’s home state of Western Australia, “had almost needed to speed date Karina because they hadn’t met many times before the wedding, but she was so happy,” says her mother.
“She’s got an enormous heart and a beautiful way of expressing her feelings. In her creative, artistic mind, she wanted to make a mandala, a sand sculpture. It was really beautiful. It was the best way that Noongar culture could be represented on the day – through her art – and it was a little piece of home as well.”
“I invited the whole family
When Narelda last spoke with The Weekly, back in 2023, she told us that “the test” of her mother Margaret’s deep-felt conservative Christian values would come “if I was ever to get married. Would she come to the wedding? I don’t think she’d come.”
Did she surprise Narelda?
“No,” she says philosophically. “She didn’t come. I knew she wouldn’t. I invited her – I invited the whole family – and she basically said, ‘Well, love, you know how I stand’. I can’t remember the exact words but it was confirming the understanding we had that she would never come. But we have been to her house a few times, and how would you say the reception has been?”
Narelda looks across to Karina, sitting, holding Sanna, on a blanket in the late afternoon sun.
“She’s a very warm, loving person,” Karina replies. “You wouldn’t know how she felt about it.”
“The complicated relationship continues,” Narelda adds, “but the love is still there.”
A day of love and tears
When they were first engaged, there was the temptation, Narelda admits, “to run away together, to elope. But we wanted to do it in front of the people who were closest and most important to us – our blood family and our chosen family. And in the end, we only had good energy in the room, and there wasn’t a dry eye.”
“Even my dad was teary,” Karina says. “My dad’s come a long way. He’s just a fella from country South Peninsula – and when there was the marriage equality postal survey, he voted no. But there he was at our wedding, tearing up … My German oma [grandma], who is 93, flew over from Adelaide too. I have a very small family, and they were all there – my mum, my dad, my brother, my aunty on my mum’s side and my oma.”
Another blessing on the day was that Karina’s morning sickness abated. She was nine weeks’ pregnant and had been feeling hideously nauseous, but she woke on the morning of the wedding and it had lifted.
“Perhaps it was the adrenaline,” she ponders. “I don’t know how it works, but I didn’t start feeling really sick again until halfway through our honeymoon. We were in New Zealand, and when it came back, it came back with a vengeance. I didn’t get out of bed for the whole day.”
When was Narelda Jacob’s daughter Sanna born?
Sanna was born on the morning of March 9, 2025. She was 10 days early. They’d been lucky enough to be accepted into an Aboriginal midwifery program at Sydney’s Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, which had given them unwavering support.
“Even though I’m the only parent who’s Aboriginal, our family unit benefited from having that cultural safety,” Narelda explains. “They went into bat for us in a number of different circumstances, so it was a godsend.”
Karina had no concrete birth plan. “When people asked me what my hopes were, I was like, ‘to get out a healthy baby without too much pain’. That’s all I went in thinking.”
It was a 29-hour labour. “Not 29 hours of ‘active labour’ but we count it all,” Narelda insists.
And in the end, Karina says, “I didn’t have any pain relief, so I just had to hold on. It got too late.”
Mitch arrived around 2am, and Karina says, “Narelda and Mitch took turns being an anchor for me to hold onto while the contractions roared through my body.”
Afterwards, Karina required surgery for a severe perineal tear and Sanna was whisked off to neonatal intensive care for some oxygen, but she was back in her mothers’ arms by day’s end.
There is a conspicuous amount of love in this little family, and eight months after her birth, baby Sanna is flourishing in its glow. She is joyful and chatty and thoroughly engaged with everyone who crosses her path – including The Weekly’s adoring crew, when we meet for an interview and photo shoot in the rambling gardens of Vaucluse House.
What is Narelda Jacobs doing now?
Since her birth, Sanna has had two mothers by her side full-time. Both Narelda and Karina are on extended parental leave. The trio travelled through Europe for three months – Narelda and Karina learning to live life slowly and savour every moment of this precious time, while Sanna tasted her first gelato, dipped in the Tyrrhenian Sea and rolled with life’s adventures.
Just before they left, they bumped into parenting expert Maggie Dent, and her advice was: “Don’t be in a rush”. Narelda and Karina took that lesson on the road and they’re still living by it now. “We have time to do it slowly,” Narelda says.
A regular presence
Sanna’s dad is also a regular presence in her life. “Mitch,” Karina says, “was just a really obvious choice to make a family with. He’s our best friend. He has the same values as us. He’s got a lovely, big family and they’re all really supportive. We’re just so lucky he said yes.”
They spoke at length about how much involvement Mitch would have, and while respecting that Narelda and Karina are Sanna’s parents, “his heart is in it – all in,” says Narelda. “He wants to be called Dadda, he loves her.
“We have group chats with both our families, and one with his family as well,” she adds. “Sanna’s got four aunties and six cousins on his side, and every day, there are videos of Sanna going up on their family chat.”
Narelda’s family chat recently featured a video of Sanna’s first lamb chop.
“Oh my God, stop saying lamb chop!” Karina, who is vegan, cries out in mock horror, and they both fall about laughing before Narelda explains that she had to cook the chop on the barbecue outside.
And Karina adds that Sanna can make her own dietary choices when she’s old enough to know that “chops come from little, woolly lambs”. Then there’s more laughter.
Keeping up family traditions
Karina also posts all the milestones to her family chat and says her mum and dad are adoring grandparents.
“My parents probably thought they weren’t getting any grandchildren and they never asked,” she explains. “They were not the kind of parents who put any pressure on me about having kids. So, it was a big surprise when I told them, and they love her so much.”
“It’s like they’ve dreamt their whole lives of this,” Narelda adds. “But we’re not in Adelaide very often, so it’s mostly phone calls and FaceTimes and photos. Oma sings her German lullabies when we FaceTime her. It’s so precious.”
Sanna is blessed to be growing up with songs and stories, recipes and rich cultural histories from all across her extended family.
On a recent trip to Perth, she watched rapt as Narelda and her mum whipped up a generations-old family scone recipe.
“And every time we go to Perth, she’ll know she’s on Noongar boodja, which means Noongar Country,” Narelda explains. “She’ll be surrounded by people who are strong in their culture, which is what I would hope for her, being a Wadjela [non-Indigenous] baby. To be able to go home to her mum’s Country and have family there who will be able to share and teach culture is really beautiful.”
Narelda also hopes to pass along the sense of family and community that she grew up with.
“We always had a sense of extended family,” she says. “In Noongar ways, you would call everyone aunty and uncle, and in our chosen family, that’s what Sanna is going to do too.”
Planning for the future
The gift Karina would like to pass on from her childhood is a sense of limitless possibility.
“We didn’t have much growing up,” she explains. “I grew up in Edithburgh – a very small country town of about 500 people. Neither of my parents had been to university or even finished high school. But Mum always said, ‘you can be anything you want to be’.”
Karina went on to study law and work in the Federal Parliament. “And that,” she says, “is what I would hope to pass on.”
Sanna chews on a cloth book as her parents dream about her future. She was named after Sanna Marin, the inspiring young prime minister of Finland from 2019 to ’23, in the hope some of her resilience and idealism will leave its mark.
Karina says she’s surprised by just how little she misses her former busy political life and how much she’s loving being a mother. To some extent, she puts that down to her stage of life. Not long after Sanna was born, she turned 40. Narelda has just turned 50.
“We’re at a good place in life, and we chose to have this baby,” she says. “We planned for it, we worked for it. It wasn’t a surprise that had to fit in around other things. We knew we could do this and we could give this time to Sanna. I love this time, and I didn’t expect to love it as much.”
Though seeing her little one’s face look up at her does galvanise her commitment to make the world a better place.
“I guess it’s even more motivating now, knowing that it’s about her future,” she says.
When is Narelda back at work?
Narelda will be back at work in March, chasing the daily news and enjoying every minute, though she hopes to bring a little of Maggie Dent’s slow-living wisdom with her – and the joy of this year spent with the women she loves.
“What Sanna brings is joy,” says Karina, “a beautiful, innocent joy.”
And this family is sharing its joy. First, through the adult picture book that Narelda and Karina have written, If Queers Weren’t Meant to Have Kids…, a funny, persuasive take on LGBTQIA+ parenting. And also through their connection to communities all over this land.
“Friends and family cried at our wedding,” says Narelda, “and when we told people we were pregnant, the tears started flowing again. I didn’t realise how much joy that would bring.
“Now, when people meet Sanna, it’s like being sprinkled with joy again. Sanna is our baby, but she also belongs to a village. This feels almost like a gift.”
If Queers Weren’t Meant to Have Kids… by Narelda Jacobs and Karina Natt, illustrated by Molly Hunt, UQP, is available now.
This article originally appeared in the January 2026 issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly. Subscribe so you never miss an issue.
