The old wooden house looks out over the sea. Standing on the upstairs balcony of Heather Rose’s house is like being on the prow of a becalmed ship.
At the far end of the gently curving Tasmanian beach, forest runs to the sea. Rose swims across this bay at sunrise every morning, even through the frosty months when there is snow on the mountain, in only a bathing suit. Electricity shoots up her arms when she first goes in; her breathing is ragged, but when the shock subsides it is an “elixir of sea and sky”. The cold water leaves her radiant, her face shining with health. It has taught her “a certain fearlessness”.
One morning, back when the author used to wear a wetsuit, a huge fish slid in beside her. It was a dolphin, she writes in her memoir Nothing Bad Ever Happens Here, “regarding me with its huge dark eye”. Then she was in the middle of six dolphins slowing their pace to swim with her. “They are choosing to accompany me.” In the luminous early morning sea the air is filled with rainbows in the spray as the dolphins leap and dive. She thinks this might be death. “I was quite surprised,” she says now, “to see the shore was still there.”
Another day she was on the beach and saw a cloud bank that looked like a bridge to nearby Bruny Island. It would become an actual bridge in her bestselling, sometimes satirical political thriller Bruny, and she would blow it up in the first chapter. That was an idea that came to her at three in the morning and gave her such a fright that she shot straight up in bed.
As a child Rose had spent holidays on Bruny Island. “It was wild and wonderful. It was rare to find another set of footprints on the beach. I remember having to put shoes on again at the beginning of the school year and my feet were so leathery that it would be painful for days trying to squish my feet in.”
To meet Rose is to be enveloped in warmth and joy. “I’m in love with this planet and the people who inhabit it,” she writes in her memoir. But it is not until you come to the last chapters of the memoir that you understand how hard won this has been. Rose has chosen to live with joy.
Rose is a sixth generation Tasmanian. The island and its natural world is in every fibre of her being. She needs this weather to write: “I love weather that glitters off the river as it ambles past.” All of her life she has had visions. When she was 12 she dreamed of a drowning. That same day, her 15-year-old brother Byron and her grandfather drowned in Saltwater River. The tragedy fractured her family; her mother did not come back from her grief, and left the family for another man. Rose says Byron would appear to her and tell her not to be afraid of death: “Maybe that was also part of my commitment to a passionate life. I think I was always searching.”
Much later in her life, Rose would swim in the river where her brother and grandfather died. “Then it occurs to me,” she writes, “that nothing bad happens here. Every human life is perfect in its own way.”
When she was a young mother working as a freelance copywriter in advertising, she kept dreaming of two wolves with red-gold eyes. She was told by a spiritual person that she was being called by the spirit to a Native American sun dance. For four years she travelled to North America to go through sacred ceremonies that involved food and water deprivation, and dancing from sunrise to dark for days in the heat until “I lost my sense of a limited world”.
Back in Australia she put her pipe, feathers, herbs and beads away and hoped that normality would return. But it didn’t. “I felt like a wind vane attuned to a weather system of energy,” she writes. “I could feel the pain and suffering in people I passed in the street.” Then a man she had met at a sun dance invited her to the Central Desert to dance, insisting the experience would ground her.
It was there that one day, sitting in the shade after a midday meal, Rose looked up and saw two rainbows “in a perfect circle” around the sun. She recalls seeing a figure emerge within the orb of the sun: “When it reaches me, a blast of electricity fells me. I drop into nothingness.” The people who experienced it lost their faculties for hours, days or months, she says. Rose lost her vocabulary and had to learn how to do the most basic things again. She still doesn’t know what happened: “We just know that something way outside the normal human experience happened to us all.”
It was months before she could go back to work. When she came home to a house full of books, she could see, she says, that this was “something very important”. But she says she “literally had to learn to read again”. “It was very strange to not have vocabulary, especially because I could see that was something you really needed in life.” But she felt blissful: “I was never scared but it was sometimes very difficult to simply operate in the world. I remember going to a supermarket for the first time and being completely overwhelmed, all those experiences were heightened to such an extent that I lived very very quietly. It was very strange.”
Ultimately, as a mother of three, running a successful advertising agency, shefound the sacred in everyday life. And she will write her books at night. “The world settles down, the phone is not going to ring. The night is very protective.”Still it must have been exhausting. “I’ve always had a lot of energy. That’s been very helpful. Also my children were very energising to me.”
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“Every book demands more than I think I can give,” Rose writes. “Every novel, every book, takes everything.”
Rose has written three children’s books and five novels. Her seventh book, The Museum of Modern Love, which reimagines Marina Abramovic’s 2010 performance of The Artist is Present at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, won the 2017 Stella prize. It was written over 12 years, while Rose was working on other books and projects. “It took so long because I had so much else going on. I remember thinking, how many drafts have I done? I could see about 72 in my records. Those characters seemed to demand a certain precision in themselves as well. So sitting with each of them and sharing their lives and listening to what they had to say, it was a really soothing novel and a lesson in craft.”
The Stella prize was a “beautiful gift” because the wider readership it brought her meant she could write full-time; before her win, she once got a royalty cheque for 57 cents.
Her latest book, Nothing Bad Ever Happens Here, was originally written as a way of collecting her stories for her children. “Travel stories, stories about food, their favourite recipes, from time to time my explorations into the mysterious nature of the world.” A private person, she went through “quite a bit of anguish” before sharing her stories with the world.
It is devastating to find out, in the last chapters, that Rose has done all of this while living with chronic pain and ankylosing spondylitis, an arthritis that inflames ligaments, muscles and joints, which can immobilise her for months and weeks. At its worst, she writes, “there is red pain and yellow pain, purple pain and blue pain, and there is the white pain of complete and utter surrender”.
But she says the illness has “heightened the magic of life”. She takes nothing for granted: “Not the act of walking, or my heart beating quietly in my body.” Joy, she says, “is my daily practice”. It is as essential as food and water. It is an act of will. It is full of love, it is shared and it is irresistible.
“It’s good here,” she writes, “It’s good it’s now. I’m so glad it’s now.”
Nothing Bad Ever Happens Here by Heather Rose is out on 1 November through Allen & Unwin ($32.99)
