If you’re on TikTok you’ve most likely heard, “Charlotte, darling” scroll onto your For You page more than once. But, little-known fact: the creator behind ‘Rich Aussie Mum’ is a Canberran.

Dressed in casual attire on a chilly morning, Finn Burton meets me for a coffee in Ainslie, and there’s not an ounce of egotism as the TikTok star walks to the table with a friendly smile.

As Finn orders her iced latte, she reveals she’s only 21 years old.

“I feel like the mum character ages me,” laughs Finn.

The mum character she’s referring to is the reason she became ‘TikTok famous’.

Finn’s ‘Rich Aussie Mum’ skits blew up in 2022, leading her to gain 620k followers to date. She has more people following her TikTok account than the entire population of Canberra.

She’s arguably the Territory’s biggest TikTok celebrity and says she has no plans to leave her hometown.

“I love Canberra. I know lots of people like to make fun of it, but there’s nowhere else that I would want to live in Australia,” Finn says.  

The term ‘influencer’ has attracted some negative connotations since the rise of social media, and although Finn doesn’t necessarily like the word, she admits, “I mean, I am. So actually, fair enough”.

She downloaded TikTok at the end of 2019, went through a break-up in 2020, and then the first Covid-19 lockdown hit.

Questioning what to do with her time before she began a creative writing degree at the University of Canberra, Finn picked up her phone and began making her own videos, simply for the fun of it.

The TikTok clip that launched her into the social media stratosphere was posted in November 2021 – a skit describing going to the doctors when you’re mentally ill.

“I just had like a really bad doctor’s appointment … and I was like, ‘oh my God, I’m making a TikTok about this’. And then people really liked it and then it all kind of snowballed from there,” says Finn.

Known for her comedic skits, Finn has no issues being recognised as ‘Rich Aussie Mum’ and describes the character as “very Inner North Canberra”.

“I’ve always been a little bit quirky and a little bit extravagant. When I was younger, for example, I begged my parents to sit through my plays and then when I was in high school, I would just talk about how I wanted to be a famous actress,” Finn smiles.

Blowing up online so quickly has left little room for error, and Finn doesn’t take her position of influence lightly.

“When I first started my character of the ‘Rich Aussie Mum’, I felt like she was really mean … and she still is to a point,” she says.

“But after I realised that there were lots of young girls listening, I was like, ‘I don’t know if I have it in my heart anymore to always be so mean’.

“I wanted to post more encouraging content as well and I talk about things that I struggled with when I was like a young girl, like a teenager.”

Her internet fame has integrated its way into the real world and she does get recognised when out in public.  

Finn laughs and says she vividly remembers the first time she was recognised – while ordering chicken nuggets in a McDonald’s drive-through.

“It’s really nice that people that come up to me are always so nice, because I feel like it’s quite lonely doing it, because you just do it by yourself in your room and sometimes it doesn’t always seem real, because it’s just comments and words on a page,” she says.

“So, when people come up to me in public it makes it real and it’s like, ‘oh, there are actually people, these nice people are watching my videos’ and so that makes it really nice.”

While she receives an overwhelming number of positive comments from her hundreds of thousands of viewers, she is sent some hate, which she finds difficult to ignore.

Finn shares she struggles with depression, anxiety, and ADHD, so navigating the social media world has been “tricky”.

“Sometimes it can be hard when people … you do have strangers leaving you really nasty comments and sending you really nasty messages every day,” she says.

“Sometimes the hate comments are fine because they’re just like, I don’t know, a little bit annoying. They’re not too bad. But then sometimes people are like, ‘I’m gonna punch you in the throat, I hope you die’ and you’re like, ‘oh, thank you so much’.”

Despite the handful of internet trolls, her career has taken off and she’s been strutting down some major red carpets recently.

“I mean, it’s amazing. I’ve had some incredible opportunities happen. I went to Thailand recently with Netflix. So that was pretty amazing,” Finn smiles.

Her hit song Closer was released in 2021 and she’s looking forward to establishing herself in the entertainment scene and branching out into other mediums. This year, she will work with a Canberra filmmaker to produce a comedic documentary.

If this whole social media gig doesn’t pan out, her plan is to go back to her teenage career aspiration of becoming an astronaut with NASA.

But at the rate Finn’s going, it looks like she won’t be needing her plan B.

Get all the latest Canberra news, sport, entertainment, lifestyle, competitions and more delivered straight to your inbox with the Canberra Daily Daily Newsletter. Sign up here.