Turia Pitt: ‘I’m scared of fires... so I felt useless’
As this summer’s bushfires threatened her home, a heavily pregnant Turia Pitt had a dreadful feeling of déjà vu. Now she opens up about how she channelled her fear into good deeds.
Stellar
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Turia Pitt felt frightened and useless. Eight months pregnant and with bushfires raging around her home, she watched as two dark plumes of smoke joined above the beloved beach at Mollymook, near her home at Ulladulla on the NSW South Coast.
When the power went out, she tried to stifle her panic by reading books to her two-year-old son as her partner, Michael Hoskin, cooked bacon and eggs on the barbecue.
Friends were encouraging her to leave, Hoskin was reassuring her they were safe. And Pitt was terrified. Even her sleep was broken with recurring nightmares of running through flames with her son in her arms.
As she pointed out to her Instagram followers, she knows about fire. She knows the flames “sound like a thousand road trains coming toward you” and if they catch you “your skin will bubble before your very eyes”.
When you’re facing a fire, she told them, it’s only in those last few seconds, when the flames are almost upon you, that you realise you could die.
It’s a sobering and lived perspective. But just as she has fought hard to broaden her identity beyond that of the woman who was horrifically burned in a grass fire while competing in an ultramarathon back in 2011, Pitt refused to give in to her fears.
Her life has been a triumph of grit and gratitude over pain and terror. And so, nearly a decade on, as this summer’s bushfire crisis overwhelmed much of the country, Pitt was determined not to let what she calls the “panic genie” out of the bottle.
“I didn’t want to flip out completely so I had to focus on keeping my sh*t together, being a mum to Hakavai and trying my best to remain calm and level-headed,” she tells Stellar.
But she also wanted to feel useful, and to give practical support to the community that had rallied to support her after she was so badly injured herself.
“I’m scared of fires so I didn’t want to go fighting a fire, I didn’t want to go with Michael in the boat and evacuate people from fire-affected areas and I wasn’t going to use a chainsaw to cut down trees,” she says.
“I had a toddler and I was eight months pregnant, so I felt useless. But I knew I wanted to be of service.”
As she tried to keep a lid on her anxiety, a brainstorming session with her friend Grace McBride prompted an initiative that has not just given her a sense of purpose, but become a lifeline to those who have seen their businesses and incomes stalled.
The pair set up the @spendwiththem Instagram page, which encourages people to buy from businesses that have been impacted by the bushfires. As with the #GoWithEmptyEskys and @buyfromthebush campaigns, Pitt was keen to get the public helping communities rebuild by putting money in their pockets.
Her message got through – within an hour the page had 10,000 followers; a week later, it had grown to nearly 200,000. People weren’t just liking the posts, but also buying products from the businesses featured.
“I wanted these people to feel heard,” explains Pitt after Stellar’s photo shoot at her South Coast home. “They may not have lost homes or property, but so many of them lost their income at the busiest time of the year. Where I live, tourists were evacuated and the place was like a ghost town, so people were worrying about lost income and being able to make their mortgage repayments.”
Pitt and her team were run off their feet answering emails and direct messages, but the impact was immediate. One business that hadn’t been able to sell at the local markets said it made a month’s income in two hours, while another made a year’s worth of sales in 10 hours.
As one woman wrote: “I have sat on my floor sobbing in happiness for the last hour. You have lifted a weight off my shoulders. Ninety per cent of the orders have beautiful words of encouragement in the delivery notes.”
If @spendwiththem brought relief and a morale booster to fire-affected businesses, it also helped Pitt focus on something beyond her fear.
“That day Grace came over I felt at my worst, but now I feel a lot better,” she tells Stellar. “It’s how I’ve dealt with a lot of stuff in my life – giving back and helping others makes me feel good, too. All of us like to feel we’re making a difference, and giving back forces you to look outside yourself. People forget how powerful we all are as consumers. When we really need each other, we’re able to galvanise ourselves and step up.”
The 32-year-old’s efforts are all the more remarkable because she was essentially in the final months of her maternity leave, awaiting the birth of her and Hoskin’s second child. Like the first time with son Hakavai, who celebrated his second birthday in December last year, it’s been an uncomplicated pregnancy, but she’s under no illusions about what life with two children will be like.
For a start, she’s got to work out sleeping arrangements since Hakavai still sleeps in the same bed as her and Hoskin. “He was getting up so many times in the night, so we now all sleep well. But I don’t know what we’ll do with a newborn,” she says with a knowing grimace.
One thing she’s not worried about this time around is her parenting technique. “When I was pregnant with Hakavai, I wondered whether I would be a good mum because I’ve got such an awesome mum. She’s so selfless, thoughtful, caring and compassionate and I thought, ‘I’m not like that at all.’
“But since being a mum, those qualities have come out in me. Now I know I’m a great mum, so I’m not worried about bringing up another kid. I’ve got it.”
She’s also noted how parenting has made her more selfless. It’s not that she was ever selfish, she says, but her upbringing and goal-driven personality, combined with a real need to concentrate on her own recovery for many years, meant her efforts were directed at what she wanted and needed to achieve.
“Now I’ve got this little person that I’m trying to raise so he grows into a good human, so it’s made me a lot softer and more maternal. I’m gentler, more compassionate and more nurturing with everyone in my life and I feel it suits me.” She laughs: “Michael likes me more now, too, so it’s a win-win.”
The couple have now been together for more than a decade and as they embark on being a family of four, Pitt relishes how life keeps throwing up opportunities for each of them to appreciate the other.
There’s no question that Hoskin, whose devotion and strength is part of Pitt’s story of survival, would offer practical help to others during the fires, but it was his sanguine attitude that most helped his partner.
“When the two fires joined up on New Year’s Eve, it was so weird and eerie,” she recalls. “I’d packed a go bag and filled the bath with water and was feeling really panicked and flustered. But Michael just said, ‘Darl, we’ll be fine.’
“Sometimes I get annoyed at my partner because he’s so calm, but when the sh*t does hit the fan, he’s the best person to have around because he’s so unruffled. Because he was calm, I trusted him.”
Although she was terrified for those who were choosing to stay and defend their properties, Pitt knew she couldn’t judge.
“Having survived [a fire] myself, I feel in those last moments you would regret staying, but I didn’t feel it was my place to go around shaking everyone, saying, ‘You are an idiot,’ because that would be projecting my own experiences onto them.”
Instead, she wrote down what she was feeling and kept the television off. “It was self-preservation – I wanted to keep the panic genie firmly inside.”
She also worked on her new book, simply titled Happy, due out later this year. Through research she’s concluded that happiness is attainable, but seeking it out doesn’t make us happy. Instead she believes the key is finding joy in small moments and being grateful about what you have right now, rather than thinking about what will happen in the future.
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She’s also become an affiliate of thought leader and entrepreneur Marie Forleo, and has written a course teaching people how to get on top of their inner critic.
But for the next few months it’s all about the baby. She’s set up an out-of-office message and though she’ll continue to amuse Instagram followers with her witty and sharply observed insights, she’s going to enjoy the laughs and challenges that come with raising children.
As she says, she embraces the difficult moments because, without them, it’s harder to appreciate when life is easy.
“When my son challenges me or he’s being particularly stubborn, I almost admire it because that’s his personality blossoming – I’m a bit like that as well,” she says with a laugh.
As for baby number two, she can see the benefits if the child is more like her partner. “Michael would have been a great kid as he’s such a nice adult.”
Having been brought up with a strict “no whingeing” policy herself, she has no trouble setting boundaries, but also wants her children’s personalities to flourish.
“They are who they are and that’s exciting,” she enthuses, before pausing. “Having said that, Hakavai’s not 16, on his L plates and getting all his mates round drinking beer. Maybe when he’s that age, I might wish I had firmer boundaries!”