Everything to Live For: The Inspirational Story of Turia Pitt (3 page)

We actually visited the school, which was a real eye- opener. Classes were held in two shifts because of the number of students. The kids were all so cute and shy. Briggs sat at a table with what we thought were five- and six-year-old girls. The interpreter explained that most of the children in the class were ten to fourteen years of age! We later discovered that the kids were so small as a result of malnutrition.

I was so excited about our ability to raise this money for a good cause I wanted to do more. I said to Briggs, enthusiastically, ‘Let’s set up our own charity.’ Briggs was more circumspect. ‘Let’s wait.’ That’s quite funny now, considering she went on to become a professional fundraiser.

I was always compelled to make a physical contribution rather than just donating money and in my third year of uni I got involved with an organisation called Habitat for Humanity. It works in Third-World countries on community-based projects to help reduce poverty. At the time, Habitat was working on housing projects in Mongolia. Volunteers had to pay their own way and I joined a team of about fifteen volunteers who travelled to a small village near a town called Erdenet in Mongolia to build cement-block houses. We were there for three weeks, and it was cold and our accommodation a bit basic, but I loved it. We stayed in tents called
gers
and I was shocked when I found out how much a
ger
cost – US$5000! I guess that explained why there would sometimes be up to twenty people in a five-metre diameter tent. I loved the Mongolian people – they liked playing games, although they never quite got the hang of rugby league and preferred soccer.

Part of gaining an engineering degree is doing work experience over the three-month summer break. My first job was at an open-cut coal mine in Singleton in New South Wales as a surveyor’s assistant, where I had to do pretty basic stuff like hammering in the pegs and measuring windrows. I liked it but in reality I was too caught up with partying with the other vacation students to get really involved. The following year I was at another open-cut coal mine – at Hail Creek near Mackay in Queensland. That was better as another work experience student and I actually got to do some engineering work such as drill and blast designs. The third work experience was with a mine consultancy in Sydney; I chose this as I knew it would be my last summer in Sydney and I could be near my family and go home for weekends.

By this stage Michael and I were together.

M
ICHAEL
H
OSKIN, KNOWN AS
‘H
OSKO
’
TO HIS FRIENDS, WAS
Genji’s best friend and three years older than me. He was a year ahead of Genji at school but they both lived for surfing and were always in the water. He’d come to the house with Genji and we were just mates; I knew he thought of me as ‘Genji’s little sister’. But I always thought he was hot, really sexy-looking – he is fair-haired, very fit and has a great body. I had a crush on him from the time I was about fifteen. I used to fantasise about us getting married and having kids together.

We’d be at the same parties but nothing ever happened. One night, after a party at my place when I was in Year 12, Michael had too much to drink and someone put him to bed in my bed. ‘Oh goodie,’ I thought when I saw him and hopped in beside him but I must have passed out too because when I woke up he was gone. This also happened on another occasion when I invited him to a party at my place. Once again he ended up asleep on my bed and once again nothing happened. At my twenty-first we got around to telling each other how much we liked each other but it didn’t go further.

Michael grew up a few kilometres from Ulladulla in a place called Narrawallee. His parents, Gary and Julie, are really cool and he has a younger brother, Aaron, and sister, Shae. After he left school he went overseas for a while and when he came back he joined the New South Wales Police Force. He was stationed at Maroubra, where I was living with my grandma, and I’d sometimes inadvertently run into him. We never dated then but I always had Michael at the back of my mind.

In 2009 Mum got married again – to a local guy, John Macguire, a former New South Wales representative rugby league player. He was a widower whose wife had died of cancer when they were living in France, where he was playing rugby league for different clubs. He had a daughter, Victoria, who was in the same year as Genji at school. John worked as a carer at a nursing home in nearby Milton, which is probably a good indicator of his nature. They had a big, traditional Tahitian wedding and I was very happy for Mum. They had bought a cottage overlooking Lake Burrill, which is five minutes from Ulladulla. The following year Dad also remarried. Dad and Karen had an intimate and lovely wedding at McKell Park, at Sydney’s Darling Point.

After uni finished at the end of 2009, I went home to Ulladulla for a few weeks’ break before starting my work placement in the New Year. I met up with Briggs and some other friends and they told me there was a party on. I will never forget the date: Friday 11 December. When I came out of my bedroom wearing a white skirt over a blue leotard and with my long hair out, Mum said, ‘Woo hoo, you look hot tonight. Are you going to kiss anyone?’

‘Only if Michael Hoskin is there,’ I said. I’d had enough of something almost happening so I thought, ‘Tonight I’m going to kiss him.’

He was there. I told Briggs that ‘tonight was the night’. And it was. I kissed him and told him I wanted to have his children. He laughed but in a nice way. One of the things I liked about him was that he was so low key and casual. It was a great night and I ended up going back to his place on the proviso that there was no funny business. I remember waking up in the morning feeling just so happy that we’d finally got together. When he dropped me off at Mum’s later, he said he would phone me from Sydney on Tuesday. I waited all day on Tuesday, my heart sinking as the day went on, thinking he was not going to call. He finally phoned at 8 o’clock that night. And that was the beginning.

The next year was extra busy but great. Michael was living in Cronulla with a couple of flatmates. I was again finding flatting too expensive and I moved from Bondi back to Grandma’s in March. I get on quite well with my grandma – she is an intelligent old duck with impeccable taste. I also found her house to be a good break from flatting with friends. Furthermore, it was only a couple of blocks away from Maroubra Beach.

I had some bad luck with cars that year. I’d bought a Holden Commodore but it got written off when a woman crashed into me. I then got a little blue Mazda 121 and that got written off when I ran up the back of someone when they stopped suddenly at traffic lights. I replaced it with another Mazda 121, a white one.

Michael and I didn’t surf in Sydney because we didn’t like it – the surf was better and less crowded down the coast. When Michael got his days off, we’d do the three-hour drive down to Ulladulla and go surfing or diving off his boat. He had an 18-foot cabin boat and we’d go out and free-dive for lobsters or abalone. We’d stay at Michael’s place, which was just south of Ulladulla, but we didn’t see much of anyone because we were so active. We’d come home and have something to eat and go for a surf; come home and have something to eat and go for a dive; come home have something to eat and go for a run. After dinner we’d be so exhausted we’d just go to bed.

It was a great year for travel. At the beginning of 2010 I went to Tahiti for a month to stay with my Tahitian flatmates, who had gone back for the summer break, and I spent some time staying with the family of one at a place called Huahine, which had some world-class surfing breaks. I also went surfing in Indonesia with my dad and my brothers that year. And I went snowboarding in Perisher with my little brothers.

Michael and I had our first holiday together in October. We went to Vietnam for two weeks during uni term break and we loved it. I was a bit worried before we went because it was going to be the longest time we had ever spent together. But we had the best time and being together seemed natural. When we got back I dropped Michael off at his place in Cronulla and he was going down the coast for a few days with his family; when he hopped out of the car he just gave me a quick kiss and said, ‘See ya!’ and I started crying. I was being silly but we’d had such a good time and I didn’t want him to go.

In July I applied for a job as a graduate mining engineer with the Argyle Diamond Mine in Far North Western Australia. Argyle was an open-pit mine and is one of the world’s largest producers of diamonds and the world’s largest producer of natural coloured diamonds. It is one hundred per cent owned and managed by mining giant Rio Tinto.

Argyle was my first job preference, a decision motivated by a lecture I’d heard by someone from Rio Tinto in my first year at uni. I was impressed by how well the company worked with the traditional owners of the land and its environmental management program, which included a range of projects to prevent, minimise or remediate environmental impacts. Besides, mining diamonds was a bit different from mining coal, the only type of mining I had experienced and the mine was located in one of the most beautiful parts of the world – the Kimberley. I had never been there but I’d seen photos and thought, how good would it be to have a job there?

I flew up to the company’s office in Kununurra for an interview, flying first to Darwin in the Northern Territory and then down to Kununurra – a forty-five-minute flight. The mine itself is about a three-hour drive from Kununurra. Argyle had a total workforce of around 500 people.

I was told I would have to get my Quarry Manager’s Certificate so I could drive the big trucks. That sounded so good. I would work two weeks on and two weeks off. During the on weeks, I would live in accommodation Rio Tinto supplied at the site and during the weeks off I would live in a company house with two other girls who worked at the mine. The job ticked all the right boxes and I was pumped when I got it; I was due to start in January 2011.

When I got the job Michael had been in the Police Force for about four years; he’d been happy for the first two years but by now no longer liked it. He had joined the force for a job, not a career; he had in his mind that he’d have four days on and five days off – that was half a year when he could be down the coast or in Bali surfing. But Michael became complacent at work and didn’t seem passionate or interested in being in the Police Force anymore – he came to loathe the night shift plus he felt his work had become a numbers game, where the only thing his superiors were interested in was statistics.

I got an indication of how much he disliked the work he was doing when I took some lunch in for him one day. Someone came into the station and I thought Michael was quite rude to that person. It was then I knew he really couldn’t be a policeman anymore because this was not the calm and nice guy I knew who was never rude to anyone.

When I told Michael’s parents that I’d got the job at Argyle, his mother asked Michael if he was going to Kununurra with me. He said no, which really hurt. Michael had enrolled in a Bachelor of Education for primary school teaching, which was to commence the following term at Wollongong University. His idea was that we could see each other during my off weeks, and we could travel overseas during his ten weeks’ holiday a year. However, by the time I started at Argyle, management had changed and so had my job; they were short-staffed and I was not driving trucks as I was needed for other work in the office. That also meant my roster would not be two weeks on and two weeks off. I had normal weeks, with a three-day weekend every second week. That put paid to Michael’s plan for us to see each other during my off weeks.

In the end he decided he didn’t want to teach kids; again he was choosing time off over a career. He resigned from the Police Force and made a snap decision to join me in Kununurra, go to the mines and see what happened. I was pretty happy with that decision. So the day after he left the force he flew to Kununurra.

By the time Michael left Sydney to join me, I had been in Kununurra for three months and I was loving the lifestyle. Kununurra is located at the eastern extremity of the Kimberley region, about 37 kilometres from the Northern Territory border. It’s quite a new town, initially established to service the Ord River Irrigation Scheme in the late 1960s, and its population is still only about 7000. Today, the locals work mainly in the mines or in various government departments.

Rio Tinto had shipped all my things to Kununurra, including my car, but the little Mazda was not really suitable for the outback. I sold it soon after I arrived and bought a Holden Rodeo four-wheel drive to get me to and from Kununurra and the mine.

I was finding the work stimulating; my first task at the mine was a million-dollar project to come up with a way to house the mining waste – waste rock is rock that is not ore. I really liked the people I worked with. I was in the technical services division and I was the only girl on the team but the ratio of men and women overall was pretty even. There were a lot of girls in the environmental department and also occupational health and safety (OH&S). The accommodation was flash – not new but I had my own room with kitchen and bathroom. There was also a gym and a pool.

I couldn’t wait for Michael to get there so I could show him around and introduce him to the life too, so I was very excited as I waited for his plane to land at the tiny Kununurra Airport.

There is only one daily regional flight from Darwin and it arrives late morning. When Michael stepped out onto the tarmac, the temperature was already about 37 degrees: talk about a warm welcome! Personally, I thrived in the hot temperatures. I ended up buying an inflatable kiddies pool to cool off in, and I would sit in it on really hot days reading
National Geographic
magazine. Michael would stay indoors with the air-conditioning on. But the majority of the time we would be out camping so we would normally have a nice waterhole to cool off in.

My two housemates in Kununurra were Mary Kavanagh and Elle MacNamara. Mary worked in OH&S and Elle was in human resources. Michael moved in with us. It only took Michael about three weeks to get a job as a technician at a local mine about half an hour from Argyle. There was a bit of computer work but the job mainly involved grading different types of iron ore and working outside and he loved it.