Nothing Bad Ever Happens Here
Heather Rose
Allen & Unwin, $32.99
“Having a chronic condition is not akin to death,” writes Heather Rose in her new memoir in essays Nothing Bad Ever Happens Here. “It’s like living with a house guest who never leaves. Sometimes they mess the place up big time.”
Rose, the award-winning author of The Museum of Modern Love and Bruny, has ankylosing spondylitis, which is both painful and debilitating when it flares. The source of her emotional pain precedes it.
She was just 12 when her brother and grandad died in a boating accident in Tasmania – fissuring the family. It could have crushed her. Instead, she set off on a quest for clarity guided by dreams and the paranormal, finding some of her truths as part of “sun dance” in the US, which over four years, involved her in sweat lodges, meditation and painful rituals.
There is no doubt Rose has had a full and fascinating life and she starts her story at the age of six when she stood under a eucalyptus tree and pledged herself to a higher power: “I’m ready. Tell me what to do.” That there is another layer to life humans can’t see is a belief she carries across the decades and across the world to Malaysia, Bangkok, Bali, New Mexico, Hong Kong and parts of Australia.
In the Central Desert, where the heat “ripples” and “stretches” she embarks on a spiritual quest, which includes being led into a circle “in an impromptu rainbow dance”. She sees a figure walk towards her – and when it reaches her she blacks out. Later she learns that others in the group have also been felled by the experience. The leaders say “cosmic consciousness” has entered the participants and so they need quiet and rest to help “reconstitute” their identities. Rose feels blissful, in love with everything, and immersed in the immensity of existence.
On the bus back to Alice Springs, she sees a butterfly flying across the desert. It flies through the glass, enters her ear and says, “You are going to have a baby.” (And yes, her second son Byron was conceived in the desert.)
For Rose and several other rainbow dance participants their shared desert experience has a lasting impact.
It is because of her commitment as a sun dancer that Rose feels drawn to involvement in anti-forestry activism to save Tasmania’s forests from loggers – and I found her essay about this time in her life both inspiring and sobering.
Rose knows that too many trees on the island, even those that are seven or eight hundred years old, are being sent off to be woodchipped. “When I see the giant tree [on the back of a logging truck], it breaks my heart. I know its habitat. I know the entire ecosystem surrounding it has also been destroyed. Dry forests regenerate through fire, but Tasmania’s wet forests do not. Once they are cleared and burned they are gone.”
Ten thousand people march in Hobart to protest Tasmania’s forestry practices – numbers not seen since the Save the Franklin rally back in 1982. The year after this protest, Rose smells a rat when the Tasmania Government uses a new arts festival to (as she puts it), “launder the image of Forestry Tasmania”. She mounts a campaign which enables Tasmanians to pledge funds to replace the money that Forestry Tasmania is offering as a key sponsor of the festival.
In 20 days, she and her allies have raised $75,000 and more than 80 artists across Australia have added their voice to the protest. She tries to talk with festival organisers – but they are unyielding. The festival director is vitriolic – labelling the campaigners as ratbag greenies. But, as Rose explains in her essay, most Tasmanians opposed to clear-felling were not aligned with green politics but worried about the effect plantations and their attendant chemicals were having on rivers and coastal regions.
Pledges rose to over $100,000.
Ultimately, the new arts festival goes ahead with Forestry Tasmania sponsorship in place and the protest unheeded. The advertising agency Rose owns loses its government contracts and she has to retrench staff, which is devastating.
There’s a brief period of accord when the Tasmanian Forests Agreement is reached in 2013. But then in 2014 the agreement is torn up, harsher laws against protesting are mooted, and native forests continued to be destroyed.
Rose remains vexed about whether her campaigning made a difference. “It’s hard to fight for species that have no voice other than how they speak to our hearts,” she writes.
Rose is eloquent about her love of nature and writes beautifully about Tasmania where she was born and now lives beside the sea. In my favourite essay, she describes a walk she does with her 14-year-old son Chris on the Overland Track in Tasmania’s Central Highlands. The walk starts badly with Chris forgetting his book and mother and son struggling to carry their packs for long distances. Initially, Chris is every bit the surly teenager but he eventually softens up and the pair settle into a delightful camaraderie with a candour that is touching. Rose reads to Chris at night from Love in the Time of Cholera and fellow campers, nestled in their nearby tents, beg her to continue. Nearing the end of their walk, she is ready to let her first-born son pass into his next stage of development and independence.
I am not surprised to learn that Rose is a cold water swimmer nor that later in life she is courageous enough to visit the spot where her brother and grandfather drowned. With hindsight, she can see how their deaths have shaped her life; haunting her “as trauma does”, but also galvanising her.
“I learned from Pa’s death, and then Byron’s and Grandad’s that death could happen at the most unlikely, unexpected moments. It could wreak havoc on everything that appeared stable and certain. I had set about making sure I lived. I chose life over and over again. I chose to live with my heart open, my eyes open, my mind open to all the beauty, the possibilities, knowing the risks and fears, not always understanding, but following the calls that came and the mysteries that unfolded.”
I’m glad Rose chose to live and to write openly – to unfurl the lotus of her life in memoir form in front of us. It’s quite a gift.
