One morning when she was in her 20s working as a goat herder in return for food and board, the author Heather Rose found herself on the Greek island of Sifnos straddling a pig.
Her host had asked her to follow him to the pig shed. “And he whipped out a knife,” she recalls, making a slashing motion, “and cut the pig’s throat. And then hung [the carcass] on a hook right outside the onion shed and it dripped all afternoon.”
Rose, now 55, has myriad stories from a life well travelled. On Sifnos she lived in the onion shed (with the onions and the dead pig). On the Isle of Skye she worked as a hostel manager for a summer (it rained every day). In Surrey, England, she became a paid companion for an elderly lord and lady.
“He taught me about wine and opera,” she says, sipping sparkling water in a smart French restaurant in Sydney, where she is visiting to promote her latest book. “I felt like Pygmalion, quite honestly. I think he was determined that this young woman from the end of the world could be cultivated.”
And yet in her writing Rose finds herself returning again and again to Tasmania, the place her family has called home for seven generations. She insists: “There are so many stories in your local environment that matter and can be told.”
For her new novel, Bruny, Rose turns her attention to the Tasmanian island of the same name where she holidayed growing up and where she took her children camping and to the beach, just a short ferry ride from her home in Hobart.
“As a child it was always so captivating: you drive on, then you cross the channel and it always felt like going to another world,” she says. “And it was even more remote and even less populated. I think the silence down there really gets to me: there’s no traffic. You can almost hear the stars it’s so quiet.”
Bruny, however, is not a quiet novel; it is about explosions and warring political families and conflict. In it, America has an isolationist president; China has become a formidable world power; and Islamic State rules an expanding caliphate. What’s more, the Chinese and Tasmanian governments have invested in a new project, a $2bn bridge connecting Bruny Island to the mainland. The novel opens with a terrorist attack: the bridge has been blown up.
Rose designed the plot “as a way to play with an alternative reality. I had no idea that now, in 2019, it would be so very relevant.” She’s talking, of course, about Trump, who might yet see a second term. Then there are the fears over Beijing’s interference in Australia, from data breaches to attempts to influence universities. Not to mention the degradation of nature and the environment for money.
“There’s no doubt that Tasmania is a prized jewel in the world these days because of its isolation, because of its natural resources, because it is a place to escape the craziness of the world,” she says. “There’s no doubt more and more people have discovered it since Mona opened up and we get a million tourists a year now. It’s becoming a bit like a Greek island. Many more visitors than locals.”
For this reason, Rose believes Tasmania’s future “needs to be very carefully considered”, from “a cap on visitor numbers” in certain areas to a plan for a changing climate.
Rose was born in Hobart, and had her first experience of paid writing in the Mercury newspaper when she was just 17. She went on to train as a copywriter – in the “days when copywriting was actually a craft” – and worked for the advertising agency Mattingly & Partners. In 1999 she co-founded an advertising agency, Coo’ee Tasmania, and stepped down as chairman in 2012.
The discipline of producing copy for demanding clients taught her a critical lesson: always consider her audience. “The hardest thing with young writers is that they don’t think about their audience. You can write for yourself but you might have a very limited appeal,” says Rose, who teaches part time at the University of Tasmania.
As the author of eight books, Rose might be someone her students want to listen to. In 2017 her novel The Museum of Modern Love – the only one of her five adult novels to be set outside Tasmania – won the prestigious Stella prize and was a bestseller in Australia. It was also the first novel to be launched at Moma in New York, where it is set.
The Museum of Modern Love took 11 years to create as Rose juggled writing between running her advertising agency and her three children. Hardest still was her subject matter: the maverick artist Marina Abramović.
“The pressure, the pressure!” she exclaims. “I had a fictional version of her for the first five years of writing the book. And then I sat with her during The Artist is Present [a performance work at Moma] four times. And on about the third time I thought, ‘I could never ever fictionalise you. It would do you a disservice. You are far more magnetic and charismatic than I could ever convey.’ ”
Rose asked Abramović for permission to write a novel about her. To her shock and surprise, the artist said yes. Yet while Rose researched her life meticulously, she made a conscious decision never to interview her. As she reasoned, it was similar to actors who, “when they have to play a real person, often don’t meet that person because they don’t want to make a caricature”.
Still Rose, who suffers from an often-debilitating progressive rheumatic disease diagnosed when she was 21, feels an affinity with Abramović. “Marina has chosen pain as a vehicle for her creativity. I didn’t choose pain but I’m sure it’s been a vehicle for my creativity. While it’s painful – there have been severe moments where I can’t walk for weeks on end – when I get lost in my imagination I don’t feel the pain.”
Rose isn’t sure what comes after Bruny. She has written 90,000 words of a memoir (the slaughtered pig makes an appearance) but she “hasn’t felt quite ready” to share it yet.
For now, she’s happy living in Hobart (“I’m a writer, I’m a recluse by nature – I can live very, very quietly in Tasmania”) and trying her hand at something new: oil painting, a discipline that provides relief from the ideas swirling in her head: “The best thing about painting for me is that all the words stop: my mind goes completely blank.”
