Journey to the Land Down Under

Hello listeners of Eastside FM!

My name is Eva Herinkova and I’m excited to be one of the new interns here. I’m from Knoxville, Tennessee, a state that is known by many people I’ve met here in Sydney as the land of Dolly Parton, Elvis Presley, and, most importantly, Jack Daniel’s whiskey.

I’ve lived in the southeast United States my entire life and am currently in Sydney through a program with my school at home, the University of Tennessee, where I study journalism/media and Spanish. Unlike most of the journalism students I know, I have almost zero interest in hard news and have only stuck with the program because of the radio/broadcasting track.

At home, I work with my local college radio station, WUTK, as the co-host of the morning show. Our show, the Marble City Radio Company, specializes in playing weird, nerdy, and sometimes just plain bad songs. We’ve played everything from bluegrass covers of Michael Jackson to Sixpence None the Richer’s “Kiss Me” in Klingon to a mashup of Green Day’s “Wake Me Up When September Ends” and Smash Mouth’s “All Star.”

When I’m not working, you can catch me playing my Nintendo Switch, watching Star Wars, wandering around the city listening to Harry Styles’ solo album or The Ramones’s Rocket to Russia (a little genre whiplash never hurt anybody), or, when I’m back home in Tennessee, I can usually be found in a basement somewhere playing drums to a pop-punk album everybody else forgot about in 2011.

My main genre of preference used to be strictly punk, specifically stuff from New York in the 70s and California in the late 80s and 90s. Some of my favorite bands are, of course, the Ramones, Blondie, the Sex Pistols, Patti Smith, Operation Ivy, Green Day, Blink-182, Bouncing Souls, and the Descendants.

Lately, however, I’ve been getting more into the indie/synth pop side of things too and Harry Styles, The Wombats, Betty Who, St. Vincent, The 1975, and Walk the Moon have been racking up the plays on my Spotify account as well.

Even though the three months I’m spending here in Sydney is the longest time I’ve been away from home, I’m no stranger to traveling. My dad and his family are from the Czech Republic, so I’ve spent a good chunk of my summers in Prague and Pilsen with my family, as well as making my way through a few other countries in Europe. I’m excited to be here in Australia though and, like a majority of American tourists, I have already made multiple attempts to see kangaroos, wallabies, emus, and all the strange lizards this place has wandering around the country.

If you’re a social media kind of person and interested in following my antics across Australia, you can follow me on Instagram @evaherinkova where you’ll mostly find memes and pictures of me posing with statues of Shrek or attempting to pet wallabies.

Thanks for reading a little bit about me! I’m so excited to join the team here at Eastside FM and to keep exploring Australia over the next couple of months.

Me with R4-P17 when I went to see the Sydney Symphony perform the soundtrack to Star Wars: A New Hope