Elisabeth Easther talks to Sonja Batt about her life in fashion and travel.
I grew up in Croatia, in a little village on the island of Hvar. When I was young, Yugoslavia was still communist, and we didn't really have holidays. We just went to school and helped around the house. We had no electricity, no running water, no toys, life was incredibly basic. There were no shops, so we made our own bread and lived off the land. We grew grapes and almonds and fished for food. We had three sheep we'd take out to feed, a goat and chickens. We had a pig in the backyard which we'd feed all year then make prosciutto. Things were preserved, or shared with the other villagers and not everyone killed their pig at the same time.
We came to New Zealand in 1962, when I was 11. We left our village and took a boat to Split, then a bus to Rijeka, where we stayed with family friends. The ship left from Trieste in Italy and took six weeks to get to New Zealand. We went through the Suez Canal, I'd love to do that again. We stopped in Port Said, and Aden and took a bus to Cairo. We stopped in Perth, Melbourne and Sydney, then changed ships for New Zealand. It was a long, slow journey and we didn't speak a word of English. I think we went to classes on the ship. As a child you just accept change.
![Sonja Batt operates Villa Adasa, Bali. Photo / Supplied](https://www.nzherald.co.nz/resizer/v2/ACINAZZ47HXJHOP274HKW6LNP4.jpg?auth=c1476820816cdc8e63127ea7fb59c0f06e33b335877975f01681155b22a00b06&width=16&height=21&quality=70&smart=true)
When I met my husband he was living in London, so we lived there in the 70s. I worked in a boutique called Fiorucci. They were the first to stock Valentino and Issey Miyake - those kinds of labels. Rod Stewart would come in, sometimes royalty and after I returned to New Zealand, Marilyn Sainty and I opened Scottie's in 1979.