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.
