Turia Pitt “In times of crisis, shine a light”
The last weeks of 2019 were a challenge unlike anything Turia Pitt had faced for a very long time. Bushfires raged through forests surrounding her home town on the south coast of NSW, the sky was alternately black and angry red, houses were evacuated and thousands of people were trapped on the roads heading north. On New Year’s Eve, the fires roared into the outskirts of Milton, just five kilometres away. Turia stood on her balcony and watched “as two angry plumes from the fires north and south joined over Mollymook Beach.
“And then, the power went out. Mobile reception became spotty. Internet was down. Rumours swirled around town like the ashes that rained down on us. Embers in our backyards. Homes had been lost. Whole streets obliterated. A girlfriend’s panicked text about her dad being trapped,” she wrote on Instagram.
Turia packed her bag to leave and filled the bath with water, but she didn’t leave. Eight months pregnant and struggling with anxiety – because of course these fires triggered traumatic memories of the 2011 bushfire in which she so nearly lost her life – Turia, her fiancé, Michael Hoskin, and two-year-old Hakavai stayed.
“I was just trying to keep a lid on my emotions,” Turia tells six months later, sitting safely on the very same veranda from which she watched those plumes of suffocating smoke. “People said, ‘Why don’t you leave?’ and I was like, ‘How?’ People were sleeping on the highway, the road was blocked. Every time I’d go on social media I’d see terrifying footage of 30-metre-high flames on either side of the road. The highway opened sporadically, but what if I got trapped there? Do I take my toddler? I’m eight months
