Drifting off to sleep each night, a young Turia Pitt found comfort in the sound of her mother Célestine Vaite’s evening ritual. The French-speaking Tahitian native longed to tell the stories of her homeland. And so she had begun to write, in English; slaving away at what would be her debut novel, Breadfruit, after putting the kids to bed.
“I remember falling to sleep every night and I could hear the sound of her typewriter just tapping away,” Turia says now, turning to smile at the woman who she credits with giving her the strength to come through the hardest of times.
“I think that was a great lesson for me to learn as a kid. That if you work hard, if you are consistent and persistent then you will get results. That was definitely a lesson I used in my rehabilitation and in other things as well. I got my confidence from my mum. That sense of self-worth. And that sense of you can do things that are hard, you just need to keep going.”
As they arrive on ’s set, it’s clear that the bond between mother and daughter is a special one. The duo have converged here in Sydney – Turia from her new base in Far North Queensland’s Port Douglas and Célestine from her Mollymook home on the NSW South Coast –
