Sunrise host Natalie Barr loved Christmas mornings when her sons Lachlan and Hunter were young children. She and her husband Andrew Thompson would work together to make it a magical time.
“We’d always have a stocking full of all sorts of bits and pieces and then one present that Mum and Dad had given them,” Nat, the co-host of Sunrise and The Salvation Army’s Carols In The Domain, reminisces to TV WEEK.
“Of course, we took all the credit for the big present and then Santa had brought all the little crappy stuff in the stocking!”
Nat’s sons are now 24 and 20, with one having just got his first job and the other having finished his second year of uni in Canberra.
“You can now sit around with your kids and have a champagne and have a beer with Dad and have some great conversations about what they’ve been doing all year,” she says. “So it definitely changes.”
But some things don’t change. Nat, 57, has been with Sunrise for 23 years. Having her sons grown up and living away from home means she can now go to bed early enough to deal with the 2.30am starts that come with working on a breakfast show.
“I’d be the parent at footy training tapping my watch towards the coach who still had them at training at 7.30,” she remembers with a laugh. “There was a lot less sleep when the kids were little. But now that they’ve moved out, you miss that. You miss Saturday morning sport and all the stuff that is part of family life. When you’re in the trenches, it’s hard, but then they go and you miss it.”
Without any kids to look after, Nat now has more time to spend with her husband Andrew. The couple are celebrating their 30th wedding anniversary this month.
“We talk a lot, and we’re best friends,” Nat says.
“And we share everything. We don’t keep anything from each other. We give each other space and we respect each other. I just feel really lucky that I married him all those years ago. I feel extremely lucky.”
Nat also now has time to go to the gym several times a week, something she started doing about a year ago. She has a trainer and she can feel herself getting stronger.
“Everyone will tell you that middle-aged women need to be lifting weights,” she says. “So I actually listened to all the advice. It’s something I didn’t think I’d enjoy as much as I’m enjoying it. I don’t feel as weak. I was getting neck and shoulder aches and everything, and now I’m not getting that anymore. It’s probably the strongest I’ve been for a long while.”
Nat’s also happy to have more time to commit to her job. She feels she can be “much more prepared” than she was when her sons were young.
“I think I was winging it a lot more in years gone by, let’s put it that way!” she admits.
Ratings for Sunrise, which Nat co-hosts with Matt “Shirvo” Shirvington, have been strong this year. Nat is “thrilled” the show has so many viewers – and she says they really do listen to what the viewers have to say.
“I think, for instance, people get sick of having politicians on,” she explains. “And so we have one from either side on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. That’s a specific slot. We don’t usually have them on every time they want to come on and just announce something and spruik something.”
For Nat, the fun part of the show is that she and Shirvo can “just think of something and make it happen”, like when Shirvo ran a race against a V8 supercar at Mount Panorama ahead of the Bathurst 1000.
“It was definitely man – Olympian – versus machine, and we just laughed all morning because it was such a buildup,” she says. “Viewers loved it. We loved it.”
Former sprinting champion Shirvo has been Nat’s co-host since 2023, and she says their relationship has “just got stronger”.
“You get to know someone so well when you’re sitting next to them, about five centimetres apart, for four hours. It’s a long time to sit there! But he’s just a great guy. We know how to push each other’s buttons now and that always makes it fun.”
After a year of getting up at 2.30am, Nat says she and Shirvo both feel ready for a holiday – but she doesn’t want a really long one.
“I don’t take any longer than a month off now. One year I took five weeks off and by the fifth week I was cleaning out cupboards. I was actually bored. I don’t think I could take any longer than a month now. I still love it after all these years.”
Nat’s holiday is all planned out. She’s heading to her home state of Western Australia to spend a couple of weeks at her family’s beach house in Dunsborough, “barefoot and having lots of barbecues like the old-fashioned Aussie summer that we grew up with”. But before she leaves, she’s got one last TV appearance: hosting Carols In The Domain alongside Shirvo.
“It marks the end of the serious year,” she says. “We can sit back and relax and have a night full of joy, which I think is so rare. It’s a beautiful, beautiful night. And it doesn’t matter how many years I do it, I just absolutely love every time.
“To walk out on a massive stage in front of all those people and all those candles and all those happy faces… it’s the most joyful night of the year. It’s something else.”
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