On Home Tasmanian author Heather Rose.
“My children are the fourth generation of my family to live in this area.” For Heather Rose, the local landscape is a life force that inhabits her novels, lives in her memories and shapes the meaning of ‘home’.
To live in Tasmania is to live with the sea. Since my early 20s, I’ve dreamed of living in a house close to the beach. Not long ago, that dream came true. My home is a 100-year-old bungalow, originally built as a shack, on one of the many beaches along the Derwent River in southern Tasmania. My children are now the fourth generation of my family to live in this area. My father lived a street away from my current home during World War II and I grew up over the hill.
From my home, I can see the club where I sailed every Saturday through the sailing season between the ages of 10 and 18. When I was 16, I got my first kayak and would paddle 5 km from my beach to this one several times each week.
As a teenager, I spent many nights on this beach swimming in phosphorescence, making a fire and listening on while someone told stories or played a guitar. There were years when I rowed this bay on Sunday afternoons as a sea ranger in the Girl Guides, six of us crewing the old whaling boats that were incredibly heavy to pull through the sea.
Since I moved here, I have swum the length of this bay from November to June, in calm, wind, sunshine and rain. One morning I swam with a pod of dolphins, me in my wet suit with snorkel and goggles, as I made for the far point. They kept pace with me as I continued swimming at my slow human pace. They leapt and twirled making rainbows in the air; it was so magical, I considered I may be dying.
My children were mostly grown by the time I moved here, but still there have been sandcastles, beach parties, fires and several lost Fr is bees. There have been many morning and evening walks up onto the cliff where there is a bench. We call it The Grateful Bench. Whenever I go that way with friends or family, it’s a place to stop and consider what we are grateful for. There’ s another place along the coast where I sit and meditate. The view takes in about 100 kilometres of sea, land and sky.
There’s a river at the end of the beach where water flows down from the slopes of Mount Wellington, endlessly called to the sea. One day it is a narrow rush of water; another day it might be wide and slow. Some days it snakes to the east, other days to the south. Sometimes sand blocks the mouth of the river, turning it into a lagoon. When there is a king tide, the sea swallows the riverbank entirely, creating a broad shimmering expanse of water bright with moonlight. Unless you see this river day after day, you can’t imagine the daily effort of nature as it redraws the boundaries between land and sea.
Last year a massive storm threw up huge rounds of timber from the sea. Two fish farms were washed up, too, giant nets borne more than seven kilometres upriver. Many nights, there are fierce storms and big seas. The waves are often so loud they make my windows rattle. On the days of big waves, I put on my wetsuit and throw myself in, body surfing, tumbling, rolling about like a seal until I am spent.
Some days at first light, I‘ve seen a tall lone pelican standing at the edge of the sea. Most days there are Pacific gulls. Always there are seagulls and some nights I hear the cries of penguins on the shore, although I have never seen them by day. The sea bed is bare of weed or rocks, so fish are quite rare here. Sometimes there are skate, half buried on the sandy floor, and crabs that wave their arms at me as I pass overhead. At the end of the bay, a new breakwater has created a little reef where I have seen seadragons mating.
I grew up with the sound of the ocean hushing on the shore. Tonight the sea is calm, but still there is the metronome of waves on the shore. After a windy night, I find sand on my doorstep.
I have had to surrender to the realities of a seaside garden. I grow green leafy vegetables – spinach, kale, silverbeet – and raspberries. [Nobel prize-winning author] Patrick White came to this bay as a boy and much of it was a raspberry farm. It’s as if my raspberry plants remember. They fruit from November until June – providing me with sustenance throughout my whole swimming season.
There is not a night I don’t go outside onto my deck to look over the sea, observe the moon and stars, the light on the water, smell the salt air and listen to the waves, and feel immense gratitude for the wonder of being able to call this place home.