The cute-as-a-button Kitty happily gurgles in the background and later sucks on a Milk Arrowroot, as her mother answers questions in a thoughtful and considered way, brushing the biscuit crumbs off her dress as she goes.

There is much to this small, energetic woman.

Gorman, 37, has earned a reputation for producing brave and inventive radio and has plenty of awards to prove it.

She looks the picture of a modern mum, with her striped shirt and navy pinafore accentuated by slashes of red in her lipstick, broach and shoes. She is also honest enough to share the fact she suffered postnatal depression after the birth of her first daughter, Elsa, now 3, and to wish that women were as honest about the sheer drudgery of motherhood as well as its joys.

And Gorman, in the most graphic way, has endured more than her fair share of challenges. She has looked both death and pure evil in the eye - and come out the other side. Those experiences have inevitably changed her. She is not bowed. She has a ''richer perspective''.

Right from the beginning, Gorman had a road-less-travelled start to life.

Her mother was born in England to Slovakian Jews who had fled the Holocaust. Her father was from a poor Catholic family in Melbourne. Her parents met in Vancouver, her mother working as a physiotherapist and her father as a teacher.

He later joined the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and, as a diplomat, took his family around the world. Gorman was born in New Zealand. When she was six weeks old, the family started their next posting in Pakistan. Gorman, the middle of three girls, would also live in England and Thailand due to her father's work. She went to Narrabundah College and completed both the HSC and the International Baccalaureate, started at the International School of Bangkok.

''So there was a lot of travelling and a lot of moving but always coming back to Canberra,'' she says. ''So I do feel Canberra is my home, even though I spent more than half of my life living away.''

But Canberra was simply ''dull and daggy'' to a ''know-it-all 18-year-old'' in the mid-1990s when Gorman left for Melbourne to study journalism at RMIT. Her father, who died last year from prostate cancer, liked to remind her she was always destined for journalism, telling her that her favourite playthings as a child were an old German typewriter and a Fisher Price toy tape recorder. She believes she applied to RMIT only to prove she could get into the course. Once there, however, she found she loved journalism. Or more, specifically, telling people's stories.

After a brief spell in newspapers, Gorman has been with the ABC for the past 12 years, mostly in Canberra but with secondments to Cairns and Mount Isa, where she presented daily news programs, and Melbourne, where she worked on the Triple J youth current-affairs program, Hack. She also worked in the Netherlands in 2008.

In Canberra, she has avoided running with the story of the day and instead taken the time to delve into unexpected topics with zeal. She recorded live plastic surgery. She let listeners hear herself being chased by a police dog. She did an award-winning series on death that included seeing a body being prepared in a mortuary and another being burnt in a crematorium. She spoke to an inmate upon his imminent release from Canberra's jail after serving a 12-year sentence for his part in another man's death. More often than not, there is a social justice element to her work.

''I like to present stories that people are not expecting and I also like to make people think,'' she says.

''The story that somehow says something about who we are as human beings and how we relate to each other and says something about our community - that's the story I want.''

Gorman started her stint with 666 in Canberra four days before the January 2003 firestorm, which killed four people and destroyed 500 homes. She was in the control room answering calls from distressed people who couldn't get information anywhere else. She remembers two phone calls vividly. One was from a woman who had lost her autistic son on a burning street and couldn't get through to triple 0. She could only direct the woman back to the emergency services (''I never felt so helpless'').

''I also got a call from this old man and he said, 'They were wrong about Canberra weren't they, love? They said we didn't have a soul'. And I said, 'Yes, they were wrong,''' she says. ''I realise this is a place with a very strong sense of community, and it's also a very beautiful place and it's a place with a lot of hidden secrets and as I get older, I understand that more.''

In 2006, Gorman became the first ABC employee to win a World Press Institute fellowship, offered each year to 10 journalists around the globe to study and enhance their craft in an intensive program in the United States (ABC Canberra TV reporter Siobhan Heanue has also since won a fellowship). She was also fiercely in love with radio.

''For me personally, it's an incredibly powerful and ethereal medium because you're essentially creating a picture in listeners' minds with words and sounds. It gives you this incredible opportunity for creativity and I have tried over the years to find the limits of that creativity and I never have,'' she says.

''You can also take a microphone into lots of situations you can't take a camera, it's very intimate. And I also love how domestic it is. You are inside people's homes with them, you are in people's cars with them. They might be fighting with their partners or chasing the kids around but if the radio is on, you're there with them.''

When Gorman returned to Canberra from the US in 2006, she was footloose and fancy-free, without ties or responsibilities.

Then aged 30, she was living in a friend's converted shed, driving her brother-in-law's car, dating ''emotionally unavailable'' men and ready to take off again overseas to work. She was in the 666 studios, preparing to leave the ABC, and talking to her friend and colleague Jo Laverty when life, as she knew it, started to change forever.

''Jo walked away from my desk and I strained my neck on a very strange angle and she said, 'What the hell is that on your neck?' And I put my hand on my neck and there was a huge lump there and that turned out to by thyroid cancer,'' Gorman says.

''Essentially, Jo saved my life because it's not something you would see looking in the mirror straight on and you normally don't go around feeling your neck.''

Doctors told her without surgery, she could have just 18 months to live.

She had her thyroid removed and undertook radioactive iodine treatment. While in hospital she suffered a dramatic drop in calcium and was, once again, at death's door.

''I was a couple of hours off dying in Calvary Hospital and I'm very, very lucky to be here,'' she says.

In the week after she was diagnosed with the cancer, Gorman bought an apartment and a car. She started questioning what she wanted from life. Stability and certainty seemed to be at least some of what she was after. She moved into the apartment a few months later when it was finished and advertised for a flatmate.

''One bloke replied to my ad and he was a Dr Don Gomez, and I think in my head I imagined this tall, Spanish man, but, in fact, the person who came to my door was a fellow who was about my height, which is not that tall, he was Filipino-Australian and he had quite a lot of facial hair and he was slightly rotund, shall we say,'' she says, with a laugh.

''I just thought he was a lovely guy. He loved his family, he loved to cook, he was very easy to talk to. I thought, 'Fantastic, he's a lovely bloke but he's not my type. I'll never fall in love with him' - in you come. And the rest is history.''

They were married on September 12, 2009. Don is a public servant with a PhD in population genetics and microbiology and a background as a science researcher. He was there for Gorman from the start and it wasn't something she was used to.

''I don't know if I ever would have fallen in love before I had cancer,'' she says.

''I don't think you can really look death in the eye and come out the other side as the same person. You're forced to ask yourself some pretty painful questions about who you are and where you're going and you may not always like the answers to those questions.

''I spent 10 years dating unsuitable men and once I had cancer I really changed my ideas on what was important. So someone who was kind and generous and compassionate like Don became very attractive to me.

''I have always dated emotionally unavailable men and he wasn't. He wasn't playing any games. He asked me to marry him really within a few months. He knew straight away.''

The couple have their two gorgeous girls and a happy home life, one in which they love to entertain. (Gorman's nickname Ginger dates back to her student days when a housemate noticed she liked to put a lot of ginger in her curries. ''These days I never use 'Claire' at all, except when I'm doing my tax.'' ) But they both struggled as Gorman suffered post-natal depression after the birth of Elsa.

''Before I had my first child, I travelled the world, I threw great parties. I laugh now, but I spent a lot on clothes. I had a big and exciting life,'' she says.

''I found it greatly shocking to be at home with this tiny creature who was totally dependent on you and knee-deep in the drudgery, all the washing and the cleaning. I had a lot of trouble feeding her and had a lot of bad advice from health professionals.''

That advice led her to expressing milk almost all night, exacerbating the usual sleep deprivation that comes with a newborn.

''That essentially led to a very dark depression and it took my husband and I quite a long time to work through that,'' she says.

''I just became very dark and very negative and very angry and it took quite a while to emerge from that and get better, I suppose. Part of that was I hired a lactation expert and once we worked the feeding out, it started to get better.''

With Kitty, she was careful to step back and understand what she had been through. Her husband believed, first time around, she had set unrealistic expectations about what she could achieve as a mother.

''I wanted to do all these ridiculous things like make all the food by hand and use cloth nappies and make my own washing powder. I put all that aside and thought, 'Ok, you know what? The way that I need to parent is the way that gets us from A to B quickest. I need a happy, healthy child and I need to be happy and healthy, too.' So I made things a lot easier for myself. Consequently, I've enjoyed it a lot more and been much more relaxed.''

Gorman says motherhood is a profound joy and privilege, but it isn't easy. Yet nobody seems to want to let on.

''I do often feel as if there's no place in public discussion to simultaneously say motherhood is a wonderful, profound experience and at the same time, a tremendous slog,'' she says.

''Many women are doing most of the boring and endless domestic work associated with children as well as trying to hold down their job. It's not an easy road. Especially if you are ambitious.''

It is with the perspective of both a mother and a journalist that Gorman recently faced one of her most difficult challenges. For once, she was the story, caught in the maelstrom of one of the most hideous cases of child sex abuse.

While working in Cairns in 2010, a heavily pregnant Gorman had interviewed gay couple Peter Truong and Mark Newton about their struggle to have a child via surrogacy. She met their then five-year-old son, a gentle little boy with ''sweet shining eyes'' and a ''cheeky smile''. She visited their home. Everything seemed normal. Nothing untoward. Ordinary.

Eighteen months later, in February 2012, the two men were arrested in California. It was revealed they had bought the boy from his Russian mother for $US8000, and from when he was aged less than two weeks, had subjected him to terrible sexual abuse and later shared him with other paedophiles around the world. Newton has since been jailed for 40 years in the US; Truong is awaiting sentencing.

The revelations sent Gorman reeling. Media hounded her for comment at the time of Newton's sentencing because she had been face-to-face with these monsters and they had deceived her, just one among many. But worst of all, she had been in the presence of a child, known, for legal reasons, only as Boy 1, who had endured the most horrific of crimes. Yet, for all that, she still found a sweet and innocent child. The photograph Gorman had taken in 2010 of the men with their ''son'' was used by media outlets around the world as their true natures were revealed. Gorman wrote movingly of her grief for the boy and rage for the men in an article for ABC website The Drum and also spoke to 7.30 in July . This is the first time she has spoken about the tragic case since.

''Perhaps the hardest thing of all is that I spent a lot of time with that little boy in 2010 and I'm really haunted by what has happened to him,'' she says.

''The difficulty is no matter how you toss things over in your brain, there is no way to reconcile the crimes that have been perpetrated against him by those two criminals.

''And even though Mark Newton and Peter Truong are facing the full force of the law, as they well should, I actually think it's Boy 1 who faces a life sentence. He has had to endure the most horrendous of circumstances and the question I keep asking myself is, 'How will the rest of his life pan out?'''

Added to the pain was that Gorman was subjected to a social media campaign led by people identifying themselves as conservatives in the US who believed she should have known back in 2010 that something was up, even though the men were not known to police, that they presented themselves as loving fathers and that their broader community had raised no alarms. It also brought into play wider issues about the media and about how the simple reality is that so many day-to-day interactions require a journalist to take a subject at face value. But as soon as Gorman wrote her piece for The Drum, detailing the sequence of events, outlining that she had met the men long before they were identified as paedophiles, the critics fell silent.

''The campaign was very hurtful and very hateful but also very irrational. It's hard to see how a journalist who interviewed two people in 2010, two people who were unknown to police at that time, could possibly have anything to do with the crimes they'd committed or had any responsibility for them,'' she says.

Gorman says US authorities are now keeping the whereabouts of Boy 1 a secret and she has had no further contact with him, nor would she expect to.

''I have been told he is safe and I have been told he is receiving counselling from people who specialise in victims of ongoing child abuse. But essentially, he is parentless now,'' she says.

''He was sold by his biological mother and these two criminals are sadly the only parents he has known, so he's got nobody now.

''Before you have children, you would look at a story like that and feel sad but as a mother, I think it just cuts so close to the bone. I look at my own children and I just feel this immense sense of grief and I just cannot comprehend how you could perpetrate crimes like that against a child.

''It's always going to stay with me and I'm always going to wonder how he's doing.''

So, like the many subjects she has interviewed, there is more to Gorman than meets the eye. She is the mum, the wife, the ''crazy-keen op shopper'', ''the fabric hoarder''. The cancer survivor. The journalist who has seen the best and worst. The woman who says she could have done none of it without her family and friends. The thinker you can see tossing over in her mind the question of where someone gets their strength.

''Maybe you're only as strong as the people around you,'' she says, finally.