Everything to Live For: The Inspirational Story of Turia Pitt (2 page)

We had such a good time down there, no one ever wanted to go back to Sydney when the holiday ended. One day Dad said to Mum that we didn’t actually have to go back. With the arrival of the internet, Dad’s business had become portable and he thought bringing us up in a small community would be good for the family.

On the way to and from Tabourie, we would drive through Ulladulla, which was only a few kilometres away. Mum and Dad liked Ulladulla and so they decided to move there when I was eight. At first I wasn’t very happy about the idea of leaving everything I knew in Sydney, especially the library. But we had a family vote and I was outvoted. Once we moved there I loved it and started making really good and lifelong friends.

Ulladulla is well known for its protected harbour, which is where the largest fishing fleet on the South Coast moors. It is a major tourist town and full of holiday homes. One of its annual attractions is the ‘Blessing of the Fleet’ ceremony on Easter Sunday, with a parade and fireworks, and it’s very exciting. Everyone takes part in the parade, especially the kids, who dress up and ride through the town on the floats. The floats have princesses, and I was a princess on one of the floats once. Part of the festivities over the Easter weekend is the Blessing of the Fleet Ball; I wore a pale green long gown and I was partnered by a friend, Nathan Carlson. It was the first time I started to feel more like a young woman and less like a girl. Genji was there and so was his friend Michael Hoskin, who was the partner of another girl; even then I had my eye on him.

But the best thing about Ulladulla is its beautiful beaches and great surf. Growing up, I was athletic and a bit of a tomboy and lived outdoors; we were encouraged to be active – swimming, surfing, bike-riding, running. Genji and I were both in the school swimming squad.

Mum and Dad bought a great house on a cliff overlooking the ocean. Dad, Genji and I would get up early and go down to the beach below and check the surf; if it was good, we’d be out there. When the surf wasn’t up, we’d go for a run then go back to bed before school. Sometimes, if the surf was really good, we’d be late for school. I have long legs and especially loved running; Dad, who was seriously into keeping fit, would encourage my running and if he didn’t think I was trying hard enough he’d push me to do better. Sometimes I’d be stung to tears but I was always determined and I never gave up trying to improve whatever I was doing.

When we first moved to Ulladulla it was just Mum, Dad, Genji and me. When I was nine, Mum had my younger brother Heimanu and then two years after that she had my brother Toriki. They were such cute babies and I loved them – I was their big ‘Sissy’.

Mum started writing seriously in Ulladulla. She writes under her maiden name, Célestine Hitiura Vaite, and when she wrote her first book,
Breadfruit
, I was twelve; she used to give me chapters to read as she did them because she wanted to make sure her English was correct. When she wrote her second book,
Frangipani
, she didn’t give me chapters to read. That book won a lot of literary awards and I was very proud of her. She also dedicated that book to me (
I’m returning the favour, Mum!
).

Genji and I started high school at Ulladulla High. Back then, there were probably about 800 students at the school and they came from all the surrounding directions. I hadn’t been there long when decided that I wanted to go St John’s Catholic School in Nowra; I have no idea now what instigated this idea but Mum and Dad agreed and enrolled me there. Genji followed and, being Genji, was popular straight away.

Going to St John’s meant we had to make an hour’s journey by school bus. When I was fifteen, the bus was involved in a serious accident on our way home. We were near the town of Sussex Inlet when a car crashed into the side of the bus, flipping it over onto its side. The bus driver kicked out the front window and we climbed out, but one boy was trapped and killed; he was the sixteen-year-old brother of one of my best friends and in Genji’s year. It was awfully sad. Genji and I got out with just a few bumps and bruises but a lot of the other kids were injured and were taken to hospital.

Genji and I had a lucky escape but Mum and Dad freaked out and took us out of St John’s. The accident happened on a notorious stretch of road – windy and hilly, with cars doing 100 kilometres an hour – and they believed it was too dangerous for us to be making the journey twice a day five days a week. I thought it was a stupid decision because how likely was it to happen a second time?

I was extremely pissed off about having to leave St John’s; I loved the school and had lots of friends there. Genji went back to Ulladulla High and my parents put me into the local Shoalhaven Anglican School, but I didn’t adjust at all so I also ended up back at Ulladulla High.

I always loved school, especially maths and science, as they appealed to my logical way of looking at things. One teacher who stands out when I look back on my years at Ulladulla High was my physics teacher, Mr Christiansen. I loved his classes – he was so enthusiastic and passionate about science. I think he was pretty proud of me being the first girl from the school to get over ninety per cent in physics. One teacher I often clashed with was Mr Torney, my maths teacher. I was very stubborn and impatient in his classes. Nonetheless, I still managed to get the Noether Mathematics Medal (awarded to the top performing maths student at Ulladulla High) as well as come first in mathematics and mathematics extension. In retrospect, I can see that a large part of my success in maths was due to Mr Torney’s influence.

I guess I always wanted to make a difference in the world, though I didn’t know how. Once in class the teacher asked us, if we could choose any magazine we would like to be on the cover of, what would it be; and while a lot of my classmates said
Cleo
or
Cosmo
, I said I wanted to be on the cover of
New Scientist
for discovering something that was going to be meaningful to society. Mum tells people I wanted to be prime minister; I dispute this.

I met Kristen Briggs, whom we all now call just ‘Briggs’ and Nicola Tucker at high school. We became close in our later years of school. Although we are all very different, we share the same attributes – drive, determination and ambition.

In my younger years at high school I wanted to be a doctor. I’m not sure what changed my mind – possibly knowing that it was what Mum wanted, and when you’re young you have a tendency to rebel.

I studied really hard for my Higher School Certificate (HSC) and got a score of 93, which was enough to get me into engineering at university. Choosing engineering was the logical conclusion after my logical selection process. I wrote down the things I was good at and what I wanted from a job, such as career prospects and the opportunity to travel. I was a bit naïve I think. Mining sounded cool – huge trucks and big explosions; of course I was to find out it wasn’t like that at all!

I had aspirations about doing something that involved mining’s impact on the environment. I talked it over with Dad and we came to the conclusion that I’d be able to do more about the environment by working in mining rather than becoming a protester on the outside. I believe that mining could coexist with good environmental outcomes.

My eighteenth year was pretty big in more ways than one. Apart from sitting my HSC, it was the year Mum and Dad separated; at first I was angry with Dad, blaming him. But eventually I realised they were probably just not compatible, and they’d married when they were very young anyway. He stayed in our house, and Mum moved out but remained in Ulladulla, and my little brothers divided their time between them.

Because I started school at four, I was only seventeen when I left so I decided to do a gap year in New Zealand before going to university. I went to Queenstown in the South Island to work in the snowfields. I was sharing a flat with a Canadian girl called Nicole, who also worked on the snow fields. I liked snowboarding so it was a good way to earn some money and snowboard. I loved the lifestyle and seriously considered staying as I was having such a great time.

I had my eighteenth birthday in New Zealand. I arrived back at the flat where I was staying with my New Zealand flatmate to the biggest surprise – Briggs and Nicola! They had secretly flown over from Australia to surprise me, and when they jumped out – ‘Ta da! Happy birthday!’ – I was so happy I burst into tears. Mum had apparently planned to come too, but they persuaded her to let them come first. Mum got the message that it would be best if it was just us girls together and bowed out. Briggs and Nicola stayed for a week and we had the best time.

Mum did fly over later in the year to encourage me to go home. Mum, who hates the cold, stood with me on the side of a mountain and agreed it was very beautiful but pointed out how hard I’d worked to get into university; why would I want to give it all away? So I came back and enrolled in the University of New South Wales.

I did a double degree – mining engineering and environmental science (out of my interest in the environment). I loved university life and I was there for five years. It was tough but I went all out for it. I don’t believe in doing things half-heartedly; you either do something or you don’t. I got my degrees with first-class honours.

For the first two years I lived on campus but there were too many distractions for serious study so I moved out to share a flat with two friends near the university. But after a while I found flatting too expensive and I eventually moved in with my grandma, my father’s mother, at her house in Maroubra. This was cool because I would travel down to Ulladulla at weekends to see my family and catch up with my old school friends. And Dad’s family lived in Sydney and they would all come over for a mid-week dinner at Grandma’s. Later I moved out of Grandma’s and into a flat in Bondi with a group of Tahitians who were in Australia studying English. I felt ready to know more about my Tahitian heritage and I jumped at the chance to move in with them.

I really loved my Tahitian friends – there were nine of them. We would make
poisson cru
(raw fish), play the ukulele and go surfing. I even invited them to stay with me in Ulladulla. Mum was so excited to meet them all and I was particularly happy when they told me how ‘Tahitian’ my mum was; she still wears sarongs twenty-five years after leaving Tahiti. I became prouder of my Tahitian heritage after living with the Tahitians.

I also started doing some work in my uncle’s business at weekends to get some extra cash. He was in the stamp and coin business and we would travel to various stamp and collectors’ fairs all over the place, sometimes even interstate. He sold the accessories that go with collecting – albums, tweezers and so on – which everyone needs, and we didn’t have much competition.

I started modelling at uni to make some extra money. I needed to find a way to fund my planned travels. One job required the girls to wear swimsuits and high heels and as I walked out, I stumbled into the girl in front of me causing both of us to nearly fall over. It wasn’t a good look and I knew there and then I wasn’t cut out to be a model. Besides, I found it boring; it was also tiresome to travel to a casting only to be told you weren’t pretty enough, tall enough, skinny enough. I thought I was just right.

While I was at uni I tried to go home at weekends as much as I could to see family and friends; Briggs and Nicola were still there and we’d party with local friends. And of course I’d surf. I got my driver’s licence but I didn’t have a car. Once, when I was about eighteen, I borrowed Mum’s car without telling her and crashed it into the local Kentucky Fried Chicken shop. When Mum saw the car outside in the morning with its front crunched in she was not too impressed. Sorry, Mum! I was still a P-plater and I lost my licence for six months, which I wasn’t happy about.

I did some more meaningful things while I was at uni. I had always been interested in doing something to help children in Third World countries because no matter where children are from, they’re still children and need to have food and be educated. My first participation in a fundraiser for children was doing the annual 40-Hour Famine when I was ten. I was tall for my age, though fairly slim, and probably because I was so active I was quite strongly affected by hunger pains and felt a bit weak by the second day; Mum said it was okay to stop but I wouldn’t give in. She says it’s my Leo stubbornness – I was born with a small bump on my head and she calls it the ‘stubborn bump’.

A friend who knew I was into projects to help children sent me an email about ChildFund International, a not-for-profit charity which at the time was raising money to help build primary schools in the Svay Chrum district of Cambodia. I called Briggs about it and she was up for it; ‘Let’s do it,’ she said. Our aim was to raise $15,000 between us – $7500 each.

We found the fundraising hard going. A lot of people have no idea what goes on in Cambodia so it’s not unreasonable that they ask why they should donate money; we had to stay motivated and motivate others. I was fitting in uni studies and Briggs now had a job in Sydney but we worked well as a team. We held discos and surfing competitions at weekends, and the money came in slowly. We would put our heart and soul into organising an event and would think it must have raised at least $4000 to find we’d only made $800! Our best event did actually raise nearly $4000, which we were naturally excited about. It was a surfing event called the Ocean and Earth Teenage Rampage. We managed to organise a deal where every dollar that was donated from the crowd, Coastal Watch would match. So the $2000 we raised was matched by Coastal Watch. Our slogan for the day was ‘Help Phil Macdonald raise money for a school in Cambodia’. Phil Macdonald is a pro surfer and is sponsored by Ocean and Earth.

Also, we had a lot of local support: we got some corporate sponsors, several Rotary Clubs (Ulladulla, St Leonards, Neutral Bay, North Sydney and Randwick) agreed to back us and we had a donor’s page through ChildFund.

When we got to Cambodia, as part of the fundraising awareness for the school we joined a group of fifteen riders cycling around the country, which was organised by ChildFund. It was only 350 kilometres, which doesn’t sound like much, but it was hot and the start of the monsoon season and the terrain was difficult – roads were muddy and full of potholes. On the first day we cycled 100 kilometres and that nearly killed us all. But we did it proudly wearing our ChildFund T-shirts. Briggs and I paid for our fares to Cambodia out of our own pockets so all of the $15,000 we’d raised went to the school.