As a stay-at-home mother to two children under the age of five, Zoe Daniel was not an obvious foreign correspondent in waiting. And when the South East Asia correspondent post came up, even she had to wonder whether the timing was right. “When told I had the job I had an instant surge of adrenaline: fantastic, I got the job! Then I felt sick: oh God, I got the job!” But as Zoe told a lunchtime session at ABC Ultimo in Sydney last month, these highly sought after posts come up rarely in a journalist’s career – you had to seize them when they did.