At Last! The launch video is here. Please enjoy. It’s been such a busy year so apologies for the long delay in posting this.
Also because you may not have an hour, I’ve created 4 short ‘chapters’ with The Speeches, The Interview, The Thank Yous and The People – so you can choose the section of the event you’d like to watch.
My huge thanks to Michael Gissing who created these films. And to my brilliant publishers Allen & Unwin.
Complete launch event in full …
Or in sections…
Part 1 – The Speeches
Part 2 – The Interview
Part 3 – The Thank Yous
Part 4 – The People
Thank you Byron Bay for the most wonderful festival. Beautiful accomodation at Elements of Byron. Brilliant festival team and festival venue. Awesome audiences! It was my first time at Byron Bay Writer’s Festival and it was the final in the book tour for Nothing Bad Ever Happens Here that began in December 2022! It’s been a huge year and I am so grateful for everyone I met along the way. It’s been wonderful to connect, to share events, to meet other authors and hear so many extraordinary stories from the lives of readers.
I was delighted to be in conversation with Jill Eddington, to share a panel with Marele Day and Briohny Doyle talking memoir and auto-fiction, to discuss memoir with Kerry Sunderland and to interview Gail Jones. Gail’s new novel Salonika Burning is highly recommended. I also had the pleasure of teaching a workshop on Imagination to a group of wonderful students. Thank you everyone at Byron Bay Writers Festival for a warm, delicious, generous and utterly memorable time. I even got to turn 59! 
I am delighted to be attending Bellingen Readers & Writers Festival in June. I’ll be in conversation about Nothing Bad Ever Happens Here with the wonderful Mel Kembrey on Saturday June 10th and I’ll be interviewing the extraordinary Heather Mitchell and Akuch Kuol Anyieth about Life and Words on Sunday June 11th. Plus a surprise session to come. The Festival program in online here. Book quickly!
I’ll be in conversation with Jacinta Parsons talking about Nothing Bad Ever Happens Here and the writing life with fellow author Kate Legge (Infidelity and Other Affairs) on Sunday, May 7th at the State Library of Victoria. Come along!
Update: So sorry to be unable to attend this one due to unforseen circumstances. Thank you Kate Legge and Jacinta Parsons for creating a wonderful one-on-one conversation!
At Adelaide Writers Festival this year, I was privileged to be interviewed by Guardian Editor, Lenore Taylor. Here’s the interview via Spotify.
Readers have flooded me with their reviews of Nothing Bad Ever Happens Here. Thank you to everyone who has written. It has been an immense experience to read your stories, share your emotions, and glimpse your lives. To receive such exquisitely personal accounts and stories has been humbling and beautiful. Thank you all.
Here are a few extracts …
I found it a hugely comforting and inspiring read, Heather. Thank you for writing the things that are scary to write. L
I’ve now read it twice as it moved me so much. I am in awe of not only your writing but your strength and wisdom. T
I read your book in about an afternoon, tears streaming down my face like the rain outside. It has touched me in a way you wouldn’t ever believe, given me hope for my future. In you I saw myself and the beautiful life we live. So delicately connected and intelligent beyond our comprehension. I just wanted to reach out and thank you for this, from the bottom of my heart. T
Your memoir – which I just finished reading – won’t let me go. K
‘I have work to do in the world. Something is calling me.’ These are the words of yours I just read and burst into tears… your words penetrate so deeply through hardened skin. Your story is a balm. Your writing is bringing healing and direction and peace… J
I loved and appreciated your book…I feel that just reading this book has changed my life. I feel humbled in every way… T
Such a beautiful read … thank you for sharing your experiences with us. J
Your description of chronic pain has me undone. I have never read anything so searingly accurate to describe how we live this secret life of pain. You made me cry but somehow I am less alone. M
I read it in 3 days. Your writing is beautiful. C
I just can’t put it down! I just wanted to say thank you for sharing this memoir with us. It’s an amazing journey. D
Such a beautiful read and oh what an amazing journey; I couldn’t put it down! L
I swallowed your book in one beautiful gulp – reading it on a rainy afternoon and evening … I loved it. I cried. I contemplated. Thank you for your vulnerable and enlightening sharing. S
Thank you for writing the best memoir I’ve read. Your writing is always a joy! M
I also have AS and your words and wisdom have helped me so much. I cried and laughed throughout and you have inspired and changed something in my focus for the time ahead. Thank you for sharing your story. H
I just want you to know that I absolutely adored your book. It was such a joy to read. It was like reading a piece of art. Thank you thank you thank you. E
Thank you for sharing your story with us mere mortals. Thank you for having the strength to endure all you have and for embracing and sharing your choice for JOY with us all. E
I just wanted to say how beautiful your (memoir) is… As a painter of the landscape I feel you have done a poetic justice to its omnipotent nature as our backdrop. It was heartbreaking in its quiet beauty but joyous in its adventure. A real hit to the chest. J
This is not your average memoir. Magic. K
I just wanted to say how much I loved Nothing Bad Ever Happens here. It has helped me navigate a challenging time in life. Definitely a read that will stay with me! Thank you. R
Such a wonderful book – deserves every accolade. How hard it must have been to write – let alone live. Sending love. S
I listened to you on audio. I cried, laughed, took notes! A truly transformative memoir which rekindled many memories of my own life. Thank you for writing so truthfully and bravely. S
It’s a beautiful and powerful read. Thank YOU! C
Just finished your memoir. Love the way you seen the world. You’re a gem. R
Just finished your memoir. Oh my – it was authentic, beautiful, vulnerable and raw and I LOVED it. N
I’ve just finished reading your latest book which I found very moving. As an avid reader from an early age, I’ve always felt we should be grateful to people who write books. C
I listened to Nothing Bad Ever Happens Here on Audible over Easter. Wow. So many moments rang true. Your description of spiritual encounters gave words to some of my own encounters. The search, your commitment, your persistence and belief. All inspiring and fitting for me traversing through my Easter break. Thank you. V
I have just finished your memoir and feel moved by your words and the experience of reading it. It was challenging at times …and opened up a wound that I have been desperately band-aiding – and very much need to address. Thank you for giving so much of yourself to us. T
Thank you for Nothing Bad Ever Happens Here. It drew my breath away. C
Just finished reading your memoir – wonderful – thank you for sharing. R
Thank you for the beautiful read. Your words have made such an impact. I’m pondering and reflecting on my own life as I feel them settle in me. K
I have had AS since I was 11 and have never had the words to describe how I feel so people would understand. Reading your memoir made me uncontrollably weep as my feelings were finally validated. I was given your book by a friend who thought it might help me and I don’t think she will ever realise how right she was … so just a huge thank you. E
I just finished your book. How did you know??? So many stories that relate to me and my life!!! I had tears reading it. An amazing book. D
photo – Peter Mathew
Born on the island of Tasmania, Heather Rose falls in love with nature, but a family tragedy at age twelve sets her on a course to explore life and all its mysteries.
Here is a wild barefoot girl keen for adventure, a seeker of truth initiated in ancient rituals, a fledgling writer who becomes one of Australia’s most acclaimed authors, a fierce mother whose body may falter at any moment.
Nothing Bad Ever Happens Here is a luminous, compelling and utterly surprising memoir by the Stella Prize-winning author of The Museum of Modern Love and Bruny. Heartbreaking and beautiful, this is a love story brimming with courage and joy against all odds, one that will bring wonder, light and comfort to all who read it.
After writing eight works of fiction, award-winning author Heather Rose has taken a surprising U-turn and written a memoir. The result is sensational. Nothing Bad Ever Happens Here is a deeply personal collection filled with reflections on love, death, creativity and healing.
When Rose was twelve, her grandfather and brother drowned. The title, Nothing Bad Ever Happens Here, refers to the place where it happened – a place Rose returns to as an adult, a place she finds peace with. This is a memoir about life, death and everything in-between. It’s achingly beautiful and wise. With each chapter, Rose guides us into her life, revealing herself in a way that is both vulnerable and courageous. From premonitions and psychic insight to drug use and exploration of alternative practices, she embraces the great mystery of life – even her own suffering. And in spite of all the struggles she’s encountered, she turns to the light, embracing gratitude and choosing joy.
Beautifully written, as we’ve come to expect from Rose, and truly inspiring, Nothing Bad Ever Happens Here is an absolute must-read.
Author photo – Peter Mathew
The ninth book from Heather Rose, Nothing Bad Ever Happens Here, begins with childhood memories, dark matter musings and Tasmanian bushfires. After learning how quickly death can come, she acquaints herself with the permanent wound of grief, observing the differing means by which human beings deal with loss. Rose, who sees prose as a pathway into the unknown, writes her readers into the darkest crevices of experiential memory – from the deaths of her brother and grandad (and the dream that foretold them) to the guilt of not somehow preventing them.
A childhood of occult curiosity melds into an adventurous adolescence. Rose moves to Asia, travels around Bali, and uses heroin in Koh Samui where drug use is a capital offence. At 19, she moves to a Bangkok monastery, where she studies Buddhism with a monk named Chai. This taste of Buddhist life brings silence, meditation and an awakening awareness to Rose’s quest for meaning. Eventually, she is called back into the mainstream world and experiences the inevitable overwhelm of sudden freedom. She journeys with fellow travellers, herds goats, falls in love and meets royalty. Eventually, a return to Australia brings burgeoning pregnancy, reassuring apparitions and the magic of modern motherhood.
A few years after the birth of her child, Rose visits a sweat lodge where she discovers the power of sun dancing. Dispersing energy between her growing family, a career in advertising and annual trips overseas, she successfully pursues the connection she craves while spending time in the US’s national parks, reservations and motels. Rose’s pipe-carrying proclivities precipitate a series of visions and signs, leading to a loss-and-reclamation of self. The disembodiment, dislocation and disorientation of this period is written with an intense sense of being, and undertones of profound vulnerability.
In her 20s, 30s and beyond, Rose experiences the physical and emotional extremes of human life, variously taking shape in the form of chronic pain, glacial seawater and 70-kilometre treks through the Tasmanian forest with a newly-teenaged son. Rose reframes suffering by removing value judgements – except where she must, in which case the gift must swim into focus. The unearthly lived experience of this fascinating mother/writer/person extends beyond the memoir paradigm, crossing a figurative border between resisting and conducting the forces of life.
In a memoir that is part travelogue, part spiritual awakening, the ripples of Rose’s words flow across each page like rings of hard-won wisdom. More than just a series of musings on chronic pain and prophetic dreams, this book is a meditative doorway towards acceptance. It will resonate with truth-seekers, life-livers and insatiable makers-of-meaning.
Arts Hub
Author photo – Peter Mathew
When a book has the title Nothing Bad Ever Happens Here, you know that something bad is about to happen. Foreboding builds as the first chapters of Heather Rose’s memoir set up an idyllic life in 1960s Tasmania: “Childhood is kelp and sand, birds and sky, and boats pulled up with the tide … Roses of every scent and colour line our front boundary, as if our surname requires it.”
When she is 12, tragedy tears the Rose family apart. Her maternal grandfather and teenage brother, Byron, drown when their fishing dinghy overturns. “Grief turned us into wounded animals,” Rose writes. Her parents divorce and her once-sunny mother withdraws, permanently alienating her elder daughter.
Those losses have shaped Rose’s life and writing, though readers of her diverse novels for adults and children will only understand this now. No wonder the brilliant novel The Museum of Modern Love took its grieving, lonely characters to share silent eye contact with the artist Marina Abramović in her real-life performance at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Yet, as she writes here, the lyrical childhood was not illusory: nurtured by the Tasmanian environment, family and solitude, reading and writing – “all this lies at the heart of who I will become”.
From the beginning Rose is sensitive to both the natural and paranormal. On page one, she pictures herself at six gazing up at a eucalyptus tree and declaring: “I’m ready. Tell me what to do. Make use of me.” Before the boat accident, she dreams of drowning; afterwards, she has visions of her dead brother.
Rather than collapsing under grief, she begins a restless quest that left me feeling both admiring and perplexed. Superficial comparisons with the bestsellers Wild by Cheryl Strayed and Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert come to mind, and many other books whose troubled authors find both escape and themselves through travel.
Rose contracts malaria in Bali and seeks oblivion in heroin in Thailand, before settling into a long stay at a monastery. She’s an observant travel writer, evoking the vivid shock of Asian cities and the disciplined routine of meditation that swings from deprivation to bliss.
Back home she is diagnosed with the arthritic condition ankylosing spondylitis, which brings disabling flares of pain. But she refuses to be disabled. She has the first of three children, begins a career in advertising and starts to write fiction: “My writing is terrible.”
After a workshop in a sweat lodge, Rose is told she is “being called to a sun dance”. Knowing nothing about this Native American ceremony, she leaves for New Mexico. Thirty pages describing the sun dance are at the physical and transformative centre of the book. Until now, she has been a spiritual tourist on a sincere but naive search. Here she submits to painful rituals – “the sun dance chief pierces each of my arms four times, then he ties a feather into each wound” – and commits to return for four years.
Her commitment is instinctive rather than intellectual or religious, but it changes her, “honing a sense in me for the unseen, the surreal, the subtle and the intrinsic”. Some readers will find aspects of her exploration bizarre, her adoption of Indigenous practices discomfiting, her acceptance of strange phenomena unexplained. Her endurance can seem like self-punishment.
However, Rose presents her experiences of the “Great Mystery” from the inside, with as much clarity as words can convey. She asks more questions than she answers and does not prescribe her path for everyone. I trusted her as a guide through extreme states for which I have neither desire nor courage.
Nothing Bad Ever Happens Here is a memoir in essays, forming a chronological narrative of personal growth examined from different angles. There are chapters on the end of relationships with her children’s fathers, how she turned her self-healing outwards into anti-forestry activism, how she became an accomplished writer, and how she manages her arthritic pain. Her writing has a vibrant energy, which intensifies and then calms like the widening flow of a river. One of the loveliest if most conventional chapters follows a walk Rose did with her teenage son on the Overland Track in Tasmania’s Central Highlands. The walk is hard, Chris is cranky, but they find a rhythm together and he emerges as a thoughtful young man, immersed in nature.
By the end of her gracefully circular story, Rose has returned to the site of the drownings and learns without irony that “nothing bad ever happens here”. If her final list of advice to readers is simplistic, it is also hard-won. (“Love who you want to be.” “Choose joy.”) Many of us would do well to put aside scepticism and absorb some of her curiosity and gratitude.
November 10, 2022
‘Joy is my daily practice’: Heather Rose on overcoming tragedy and choosing to live a happy life
From dancing into other worlds in North America to losing her vocabulary in the Australian desert, the Stella prize-winning author is taking nothing for granted
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.
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, she found 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.”
“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.”
By Susan Chenery, Oct 28, 2022
Nothing Bad Ever Happens Here by Heather Rose is out on 1 November through Allen & Unwin ($32.99)
Shortlisted – 2020 ABIA Fiction Book of the Year
Bruny is shortlisted for Fiction Book of the Year in the 2020 Australian Book Industry Awards. It’s in excellent company. A shortlist will be announced on April 28th. The winners will be announced on Wednesday 13 May in a virtual event. More details to come here.
Bruny – Heather Rose (Allen & Unwin, Allen & Unwin)
Silver – Chris Hammer (Allen & Unwin, Allen & Unwin)
Cilka’s Journey – Heather Morris (Echo Publishing, Echo Publishing)
Good Girl, Bad Girl – Michael Robotham (Hachette Australia, Hachette Australia)
The Scholar – Dervla McTiernan (HarperCollins Publishers, HarperCollins Publishers)
Check out all shortlisted books and authors and booksellers here.
Shortlisted – 2020 INDIES Book of The Year
Bruny was shortlisted for Book of the Year in the 2020 Independent Booksellers Awards. These awards recognise our wonderful independent booksellers across Australia.
There Was Still Love by Favel Parrett (Hachette Australia) (WINNER!)
Bruny by Heather Rose (Allen and Unwin)
The Wife and the Widow by Christian White (Affirm Press)
The Weekend by Charlotte Wood (Allen and Unwin)
The 2020 INDIE Fiction Award winner is There Was Still Love by Favel Parrett – an exquisite book and highly deserving. More here.
