‘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” and later feeling blissful, in love with everything, and immersed in the immensity of existence.

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 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.

Later in life, she is courageous enough to visit the spot where her brother and grandfather drowned and she can see how their deaths have shaped her life; haunting 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.’

__________

Nothing Bad Ever Happens Here
Heather Rose
Allen & Unwin, $32.99

This review was first published in the South Sydney Herald in December 2022