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Dinner parties are always a roll of the dice. You could find yourself seated beside the guest who presses a business card into your hand before the entr\u00e9e has even landed, or the one determined to recount between courses the entire plot of a television series you\u2019ve already admitted you don\u2019t watch. But Heather Rose got lucky, ending up next to someone who told her a story that lingered long after the tables had been cleared.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019d been sat next to a winemaker, and he said that thing you sort of dread as a writer \u2013 \u2018Oh, I\u2019ve got a really good story you might be interested in\u2019 \u2013 because you think, I\u2019ve got enough of my own ideas, please don\u2019t tell me,\u201d Rose recalls with a laugh.<\/p>\n
The winemaker in question was Dr Andrew Pirie, a pioneer of Tasmanian viticulture, and the story he shared was an overlooked fragment of local history: a 19th-century vineyard, established by ex-convict Bartholomew Broughton in Hobart around 1823, which produced such exceptional sparkling that, legend has it, one vintage travelled all the way to Paris and took home a medal at the great wine exhibition. The vineyard fell fallow in 1829 after Broughton\u2019s death, but today, more than half of Tasmania\u2019s grapes are grown for sparkling \u2013 a lineage that begins with this almost-mythical fizz, the state\u2019s first commercial vineyard.<\/p>\n
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Tasmania\u2019s Apogee winery, run by Dr Andrew Pirie. Credit: Nic Walker<\/p>\n
At the time, Rose was deep into what would become her Stella Prize and NSW Premier\u2019s Literary Awards-winning novel The Museum of Modern Love. But the story of the vineyard began to age in her imagination, like a good vintage. \u201cI sort of said, don\u2019t tell anyone else that story, I\u2019m really, really keen on that,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
Fast forward some 15 years, and Rose raised her own glass of bubbles at the launch in Hobart this week of A Great Act of Love \u2013 her tenth novel, and her most ambitious yet.<\/p>\n
Onto the fertile ground of the vineyard, Rose overlays another \u2013 one rooted in her own family tree. At its centre is Caroline, modelled on Rose\u2019s grandmother\u2019s real great-grandmother, a young woman who arrived in Hobart, then Van Diemen\u2019s Land, searching for her father. Jacques-Louis, an apothecary, had been transported from London to the brutal Norfolk Island penal colony after confessing to the murder of a woman with whom he was having a relationship. Rose believes his life was marked by spells of madness, the result of a frontal-lobe injury. Louis himself was born into turbulence: his parents, Rose believes, were a duke and duchess executed in the French Revolution, their children escaping to Scotland and then to London.<\/p>\n
Rose had known the story for some time \u2013 her sister, Melinda, had researched the family history and court documents and letters had been uncovered \u2013 but for years she resisted writing about it. \u201cI thought, God, I\u2019d never write about that,\u201d she says. \u201cIt just felt too awful.\u201d<\/p>\n
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The novel draws on Heather Rose\u2019s own family history of settlement in Van Diemen\u2019s Land.<\/p>\n
But the fragment of wine history opened the door to her family\u2019s own past. \u201cWhen I realised that Caroline had lived almost beside the vineyard in colonial Van Diemen\u2019s Land, I got this spine-chilling feeling. I thought: I have to wind those stories together somehow.\u201d<\/p>\n
What emerged is less a straightforward historical novel than a layering: a palimpsest of Tasmanian history, family lore and myth. The fabled Broughton sparkling becomes entwined with Caroline\u2019s journey and the shadow of her father\u2019s crime. The characters in A Great Act of Love are all wrestling with what it means to inherit a legacy \u2013 of shame, of violence, of ambition \u2013 and how to transform it. Rose was, too.<\/p>\n
\nThere is something very powerful about coming to terms with your ancestral lineage.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s been a long journey to come to terms with that,\u201d Rose says of her ancestor\u2019s violent crime, the legacy that explains why Tasmania is now the place she calls home. \u201cI did feel a real sense of responsibility to the past. There is something very powerful about coming to terms with your ancestral lineage. It felt important to honour the past, to come to terms with the past. It was a painful reckoning.\u201d<\/p>\n
The violence perpetrated against the island\u2019s First Peoples is not foregrounded in the novel; their absent presence runs like a gaping wound through a text, a reminder of the enduring brutality of settlement. While A Great Act of Love is, in one sense, an intimate story about a daughter searching for her father, it also expands outward \u2013 to the French Revolution, global commerce routes, the slave trade, and the violence of the British Empire.<\/p>\n
\u201cI started with a question really. I thought, how the hell did we get here? How did economics become the dominant conversation?\u201d Rose says.<\/p>\n
Her reading ranged widely, from Adam Smith and Benjamin Franklin to John Milton and the Bront\u00eb sisters and in her studio \u2013 no Wi-Fi, only books (more than 160, Rose estimates) \u2013 she immersed herself in another century, one that still echoes today.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was very peaceful because I could be away from the modern world,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd the longer I wrote it, the stranger the modern world seemed when I came back up to the house at the end of the day.\u201d<\/p>\n
Maggie O\u2019Farrell\u2019s 2022 novel The Marriage Portrait sat on her desk as a reminder of the power of the best historical fiction to make the past pulse with life.<\/p>\n
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Wine, of course, was never far from her thoughts. As a young adult, Rose spent a season picking grapes in Champagne, where she became fluent in French. Plans to return were thwarted by COVID, so instead she read widely, visited vineyards and interviewed winemakers. And writing and winemaking share a temperament: both are labours of love, requiring patience, tradition, and a touch of alchemy.<\/p>\n
Across her career \u2013 spanning crime, satire, magical realism, and a New York art world novel \u2013 Rose has always sought to stretch herself as a storyteller. Now, as her back catalogue is being reissued by Allen & Unwin, Rose admits revisiting her early novels is strange. \u201cYou kind of don\u2019t really recognise the person who wrote them. It takes a long time to just become a reader of your own work \u2013 and I\u2019d prefer never to have to do it.\u201d<\/p>\n
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And yet, despite 10 books and now decades of writing, Rose says the task doesn\u2019t get easier. \u201cIt\u2019s very hard to write novels,\u201d Rose says. \u201cIn fact, I think it\u2019s possible that it gets harder because I keep setting my bar of what I expect for myself higher.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rose is already at work on her next book \u2013 something new, perhaps Haruki Murakami-inspired \u2013 that will once again test her range. But for now, she is happy to raise a glass of Tasmanian sparkling.<\/p>\n
You can bet I did, absolutely,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd I fully intend to have many more.\u201d<\/p>\n
A Great Act of Love is out now via Allen and Unwin. Heather Rose is on tour until October 25. Find dates and locations here<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n