Heather Rose is leading me to a very specific tree. We’re walking single file on a winding bit of bush track at the start of the Alum Cliffs walk, just south of Hobart. I’m huffing and Rose is puffing as we ascend through acacias and young gums, attempting to identify the sweet-smelling creeper in flower all around us. We settle on it likely being a very pretty weed.
It’s release day for Rose’s 10th book, A Great Act of Love, an epic novel crossing generations, continents and colonies from the French Revolution to Van Diemen’s Land. Rose explores local truth-telling and loss while fictionalising her own wild family stories.
Our walk started at Kingston Beach, where Rose has spent years swimming, paddling and walking. With gorgeous views over Timtumili Minanya (the River Derwent), it’s a place of solace in nature so close to town.
We met minutes earlier with a warm hug: despite having just endured emergency dental work, Rose plays down her discomfort and is chatty and engaging as we weave past teenage boys fishing off a narrow pedestrian bridge, their lines dipping into tepid waters.
Rose calls our destination “The Grateful Tree”. “I’d walk up here and just take a moment to be grateful for everything,” she says as we quickly gain height over the beach. “It became a little walk of purpose that allowed me to have a little bit of downtime and reflect on how lucky I was.”
Rose grew up in Blackmans Bay, the next beach suburb south, and her family have lived in this area for four generations. They’ve been in Tasmania for seven.
A young Rose did what so many young Tasmanians do: she left. Years spent overseas and in Melbourne eventually led her to return home. It was at that point, about 15 years ago, she started her regular pilgrimages to The Grateful Tree.
“It was a very, very big time in my life at that point,” she says. She was writing her Stella award-winning novel The Museum of Modern Love, plus her Tuesday McGillycuddy series for kids (written with Danielle Wood under the pen name Angelica Banks), and running a business and raising her children.
“There was a lot going on in my personal life and business life as well,” she adds, carefully. “You know, we’ve all been through those times … and this became part of my morning’s meditation, to walk the cliffs and go to The Grateful Tree and have a moment to reflect on all the good things.”
As we continue along the track, formally developed in 1988 as part of Australia’s bicentennial celebrations, we catch regular views of the Derwent, blue-grey today, and the denuded hills across the river. We’re not far from the tip of Bruny Island and the wide mouth of the river that would have first led Europeans to the area that became greater Hobart.
I ask Rose whether she can do this walk without thinking about what has happened here since.
“I have never, ever been separate from that story, because our grandfather would always tell us,” she says. “We spent a lot of time as children on the Tasman peninsula, and there are a lot of middens in the banks around there. He would point at them and say, ‘Other people lived here, other people loved it here.’ And we’d say, ‘Where are they now?’ And he’d say, ‘They’re gone. They all died.’
“And at school, we were always taught that. It wasn’t until the 80s that it became abundantly clear that that was very untrue, because nobody wanted to face the truth of the Black War and the attempted genocide and the fact that there was still this extraordinary lineage of people who’d lived here for tens and tens and tens of thousands of years.
“So I can never, ever see this landscape without thinking of the thousands and thousands of lifetimes lived here.”
We’ve emerged from the scrub into a sloping, open field. We leave the track and walk up to a lone medium-sized eucalypt. The Grateful Tree.
“Hello,” Rose says softly and fondly to the tree. “I haven’t seen you for a little while!”
She embraces a low, smooth branch and tells me it has been about six months since she has been to this spot. She lives in northern Tasmania these days but finds the tree anytime she is down south.
We take a seat on a makeshift bench beneath the tree and catch our breath.
“It’s just special,” Rose exhales. “And you’ll notice that when you sit under it, it’s got a really nice feeling … oh look, there’s a Pacific gull, doing exactly what they do at the start of Bruny!”
We watch the gull gliding over the nearby treetops until Rose changes her mind. “In fact … I don’t think it is, that could actually be a sea eagle, or is the wingspan quite big enough? No, that’s definitely a sea eagle, the way it’s riding those thermals!”
We sit in silent awe for a little while as other walkers continue on the track below, oblivious to us.
Rose tells me she has developed many characters and story ideas sitting right here. I think about the depth of research required for A Great Act of Love, inspired by the story of Rose’s ancestors, and ask how much of her family history she knew.
“We knew two stories,” she says. “We knew that we were descended from people who had escaped the French Revolution. There was a story that the father and mother had been beheaded during the revolution and the children had escaped to Scotland then moved to London.
“And we were told that our first ancestor who came here, Caroline, arrived as a young widow. Her husband had apparently fallen over Niagara Falls on their honeymoon. And that really got me, even as a child, because that’s so dramatic!”
Her sister began researching the tale “and found a much darker story – some of which is shared in the book, of course. I never thought I would write about that.”
A chance chat at a party changed things. The award-winning winemaker Andrew Pirie told Rose about a vineyard in early colonial Tasmania that had made such excellent sparkling wine in the champagne method that it had won a prize at the Paris wine awards. She filed the story away until she had finished writing her 2019 novel Bruny, when she discovered that the vineyard had been close to where her ancestor Caroline had lived.
“And I thought, ‘That’s serendipity, that’s extraordinary.’ And so I started to think about winding those stories together.”
Rose read more than 160 books to prepare for this one. I ask how that deep dive into history has changed how she looks at things now.
“The past is more redolent than ever, and sadly I’m acutely aware now of how depleted all the bird life is, the insect life … this place was teeming with life,” she says, gesturing over the field to the river.
She recalls shucking oysters and mussels for breakfast straight off the rocks around here as a child, before a sewage plant, zinc works, fish farms and other industries all changed the landscape. She remembers swimming in Browns River, where our walk began.
“Now you can’t eat anything [from it],” she says. “My dad remembers that river as exquisitely beautiful. I remember playing in it. Not now.”
We both think of the boys fishing off the bridge.
“I’ve talked to them over the years,” Rose says. “I’ve said, ‘So … do you eat that?’ Sometimes they say, ‘yes’!” she says, incredulous.
Despite all the loss, it’s clear Rose still gets a great deal of goodness from time spent in Tasmania’s nature.
“Being out in nature is my happy place,” she beams. “It settles me and revives me. It renews me.”
A Great Act of Love by Heather Rose is out now in Australia ($34.99, Allen & Unwin) and on 15 January in the UK (£20, John Murray)
