Heather Rose - Nothing Bad Ever Happens Here

May I speak to you

Like we are close

And locked away together?

HAFIZ

Here she is, standing in the schoolyard. She is six years old, dressed in a crisp green uniform. Other children are on the swings and seesaw, but she has taken herself off to stand alone under the eucalyptus at the edge of the playground. She gazes up through its broad branches to the sky above.

Hello, she says. Im ready. Tell me what to do. Make use of me.

She might have chosen to do this at the small church where she attends Sunday school, but instead she does it here, because it feels as if this big tree must have a direct connection to whoever is in charge.

Does anyone answer back? They do not. Yet she feels better for having declared herself willing to be of service. She has reported for duty.

Physicists now know that 70 per cent of the known universe is dark energy. Dark matter is another 25 per cent. Once we thought we knew all about life, but it turns out everything we think of as reality is less than 5 per cent.

Crumpets and honey, hockey sticks, sailing boats, temples, shopping centres, literature, the pharmaceutical industry, mathematics, every scientific discovery, every plant, animal or virus below the sea and above, the planets and the stars we can name and all those we cant, this galaxy and the 200 billion other galaxies that comprise the known universe, everything that has been created, constructed, calculated, measured or observed by humans amounts to a mere fragment of existence. Ninety-five per cent is hidden from us, invisible, unknown, only to be imagined or sensed. Yet its present everywhere, in every moment, in everything around us, and everything that is us.

Believing and belonging occupy a great deal of human life. What to believe? How to belong? All of it is a mystery that we fill with stories.

Standing under that tree in my primary school playground is not my first memory, yet it remains vivid. I will grow up and travel the world, and I will travel the inner places of heart and mind, always curious. What is this thing called life? Why am I here?

For decades now, Ive asked strangers if something ever happened that they couldnt explain. Something outside the normal. To my surprise, I discovered that everyone had a story of a guiding hand, a strange connection, a reassuring presence, something life-saving or life-affirming, something more than a coincidence. Everyone had experienced something that gave them a sense that there was more to life than could be seen, touched or verified.

I could write a memoir about travelling, the writing life, or my love of baking cakes. But Im still that girl under the tree who wants to get to the big conversation, to the heart of things. So here are some stories about life and death. About experiences that have no easy explanation, but which happened, nevertheless. The unknown, that 95 per cent maybe its an invitation for compassion. Life is a process of forgiveness for the choices we make in order to be ourselves.

We do not come into this world; we come out of it

ALAN WATTS

Here is where memories begin.

My mother is on a ladder watering the roof of our orange-brick house with a hose. The house is newly built and overlooks a wide blue river. I live on an island at the end of the world, just a weeks sailing from Antarctica, though I do not know this because I am only two and a half years old. I do know, however, that my mother standing on a ladder and watering the roof is not a normal thing.

I hear her gasp. The forested hill behind us has become a wall of flames, a ridge of leaping red and amber spiralling up into billowing clouds. It is 7 February 1967. The wind blowing across Tasmania, birthed in the lizard heat of Central Australia, has become a firestorm travelling at more than 130 kilometres an hour, dropping millions of sparks. There is no rural fire service in 1967, nor a volunteer service. There is a small fire station over the hill but it has only limited equipment.

I am delivered to the home of our neighbours down the street while my mother retrieves my two older brothers from school. A goat, a sheep and chickens are in the neighbours laundry. In their lounge room, I sit beneath a clothes horse and breathe in the scent of drying linen as I eat a delicious oatmeal biscuit.

By 3 pm the sky is black and the city of Hobart has emptied. The temperature is 40 degrees. Across our sylvan state there are flames hundreds of feet high, fireballs, exploding gum trees, roaring wind, melting roads. The power is out and communications are down. My dad is home early from work. He and a friend go to fight a fire nearby, using sacks to beat back the flames. Mum and my brothers return and soon everyone in our small community gathers on the beach to stand in the sea. Huge particles of ash fall about us.

In one day, fires burn through some 652,000 hectares of land; 1300 homes are incinerated, and 7000 people become homeless; 64 people die and more than 900 are injured. It takes three months for the power to be reconnected across suburbs and rural areas.

Our house does not burn down, nor do those of our friends and neighbours on the perimeter of the forest. Six months after the fire, I turn three, and six weeks after that, my mother gives birth to my sister. Now we are four children: two boys and two girls. My mother reads aloud to me as she breastfeeds my baby sister, turning page after page of Little Golden Books and Mother Goose until, one day, the words from her voice match the words on the page, and I am reading too.

At age four I am at the kitchen table scrawling squiggly line after squiggly line across a page with a crayon. My mother asks me why I am ruining the butchers paper shes given me to draw on.

Im writing, I reply brusquely.

It is lucky that I begin writing early because I have a long way to go. Ive done many jobs in my life, but writing has always been my favourite thing to do. Its also been the hardest. Its required the greatest discipline, the longest hours and the deepest commitment. Writing has said: Look more closely, go this way, dig deeper, learn this, know yourself better. It has been a pathway into the unknown, the fascinating, the heartbreaking and the wonderful. I give myself to writing and it bends me, sharpens me, whittles me and sculpts me.

But first I am very young. My mothers voice is high and musical. She recites limericks, smokes cigars at parties and has an extensive repertoire of rude jokes. She loves The Goons, Monty Python and Walter Mitty. She makes her clothes from French Vogue patterns. She makes our clothes, too even our school uniforms. Her sense of the ridiculous, her delight in the silly, is infectious. I am often in paroxysms of laughter. She can draw anything and make it look real. As a teenager she wanted to become a graphic artist, but there was no money for further study. When my younger sister begins kindergarten, my mother returns to work as a secretary. Along with a career, four children and a husband, she bakes and cooks, sews, preserves, sings, embroiders, gardens, arranges flowers, decorates cakes, and makes kayaks and pottery. Only on Sunday night does she forsake her culinary wizardry and feed us cheese on toast or Heinz tomato soup. (Anything from a packet or a tin is a treat in our house.) She is slender, elegant, dark-haired and beautiful. She gets chest infections and her back is often sore.