Bruny by Heather Rose

Members generally liked this novel as a “good yarn”, if a bit “fanciful”. Some of us thought it was prescient concerning Australia and China’s relationship.

Others were a bit disappointed, felt it was too slow in getting anywhere with a denouement that was dealt with too quickly.

At the start of the book the central question for the reader is why such a huge and very expensive bridge is being built by the Tasmanian Government from the mainland to Bruny Island. The bridge is not popular and a number of protest groups from across the political spectrum have sprung up, representing everyone from local people wanting to protect their paradise and their upmarket local businesses, to environmentalists wanting to conserve ecological values.

And then five divers in a grey speedboat blow up a section of the bridge. The Tasmanian Premier is determined the State will not be held hostage to terrorists. But can the bridge be fixed in time to be opened before the next election?

In the middle of this drama, the central character of the book arrives from New York: UN mediator, Astrid (Ace) Coleman, who has been working in the Middle East. Her job is to talk to the people in the protest groups and try to get everybody to support the government’s bridge. Along the way she uncovers what is really happening and who blew up the bridge. She also has family issues to resolve during the course of the narrative and becomes entangled with the book’s love interest, the bridge foreman, Dan Macmillan. Will she opt to stay in Tasmania or return to New York?

Ace is the twin sister of the Premier, John Coleman (known as JC). Ace and JC are in turn the half-siblings of the head of the Opposition, Maxine Coleman. Some of us found these relationships a bit hard to swallow. However, the plot device gives the author the chance to tell the family saga and to give the characters both public and private faces as the action unfolds. Rather amusingly, the author has Ace telling the reader that Tasmania is renowned as being a small population which has been “marrying each other for two hundred years” and everyone is consequently related to each other.

Ace hasn’t been back to Tasmania for 10 years and in fact has only been back a few times since she first left to go to university in 1981. She is now 56, divorced with two grown up children who live in the States. However, she does own a beach shack on Bruny Island and still considers herself a Tasmanian.

She is back not only because her brother has asked her to help him but also because a shadowy authority in the States has insisted she do so. She also wants to see her beloved father, Angus, who has had a stroke, and her toxic mother, Hyacinth, who has cancer. The story reveals that Angus was a Labor man and a former respected member of the Tasmanian Parliament. Maxine has followed in his political footsteps, but JC has switched sides, arguing that it is only by improving the Tasmanian economy that Tasmanians can thrive.

The Greens are not forgotten in the narrative with the head of the Greens, Amy O’Dwyer, depicted as a young, beautiful woman who is the increasingly popular political rival of both JC and Maxine. Ace tells the reader that Tasmanians have always been good at protests with the political greens movement having begun in Tasmania in the 1970s. (If you check the internet, this is apparently true, unless you count the Dutch group, the Kabouters, who won green seats based on environmental issues in a variety of city councils in June 1970.)

The author rather annoyingly presents each new character to the reader as someone who looks like such and such an actress or actor, which may be lost on those readers who don’t keep up with these things. Perhaps the author was thinking of a future film as she wrote it.

The political concerns of the characters are expressed conversationally in the dialogue throughout the book. Ace describes herself as menopausal and gives us her jaded opinions, too. Here is a flavour of the subject matter. Ace asks whether happiness has been a casualty in a world of “conflict, refugees, climate change and capitalism".

“It would be easy to blame capitalism but it wasn’t just capitalism. It was this idea that everyone had a God-given right to live as they pleased. Now, in the US, there was a righteous, well-armed underbelly wearing their brown shirts and creeping deeper into America’s psyche while the Democrats might as well have been talking underwater.

“When the GFC happened back in 2008, the money to bail people out in America went to Wall Street and Silicon Valley, East Coast and West Coast. But it was the places in between - the ‘flyover zone’

- where the real pain was felt; where the homes were lost and the suicides happened and the kids went without decent food and schools. Lots of those people had bought the messages of the far right. Men and women, young and old with their Christian creed and their right to bear arms, had elected themselves a leader who was going to save them. But he hadn’t and America was paying the price. Australia had been teetering on the brink of right-wing extremism for years. Across the world there was a deepening sense of powerlessness. In Europe, a lot of people were overwhelmed by the tide of refugees and the influx of islam. Now there was also the fear of speaking out. Of being seen as racist and xenophobic, anti- multiculturalism, anti-progress. The chaos of Brexit was really the desperate bid of the English to salvage whatever values they’d surrendered back in the 1950s. The growing movement to dismantle the EU was the same. What were our shared values? Nobody seemed to know, other than to look to the past. But you can’t wind back time. There was trouble coming. We could all feel it.”

While the book is set slightly in the future (there is a king on the throne in Britain and protest laws have been tightened in Australia), the novel was written in 2019, two years into the Trump presidency in the United States, by which time many people who considered themselves liberal democrats were feeling very uneasy about the state of the world (before COVID-19 hit and we really had something to worry about). The author sets down that unease in this book.

However, the political characters at times border on the satirical. The deeply conservative Tasmanian senator who is described by Ace as the ‘puppet-master’ of the Tasmanian liberals has the name, Barney Viper. It seems likely the character is modelled on either Brian Harradine or Eric Abetz.

A central question asked by this book is whether eventually everything could be “up for sale” in Australia, under the pressures of increasingly powerful nations with large populations and the need for arable agricultural land and water to grow food. (Some members argue this is already the case.) And what would be the response from the average citizen who is offered a tantalising economic carrot by the government to go along with the plan?

The descriptions of the island of Bruny and Tasmania are beautiful, as befitting a proud Tasmanian writer. However, the action could equally be set in many other parts of Australia where development is proposed for currently unspoiled areas.

Who is Heather Rose?

Heather Rose was born in 1964 in Hobart, Tasmania.

She had a weekly column in the Hobart Mercury at 16 and won the Tasmanian Short Story Prize in 1981.

She left school and Tasmania to travel in 1982, returning to Australia in 1986 to work as an advertising copywriter in Melbourne.

In 1996 she returned to Tasmania and co-founded an advertising agency, Coo’ee Tasmania, in 1999.

In 2007 she left the Coo’ee Network and partnered with Green Team Global in New York. Green Team Australia became Australia’s first advertising agency involved in green issues and specialising in community engagement and has won more than 25 international creative awards.

In 2008 Rose was appointed Chairman of the Festival of Voices, a Hobart-based arts festival. The Festival and Green Team Australia won the Tasmanian and the national 2010 Australian Business Arts Foundation Award for SMEs.

In 2011 Rose was awarded the national ABAF Woodside Better Business Award for her work with the festival.

She was appointed as a Trustee of the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery in 2020.

She has written five novels - Bruny (2019), The Museum of Modern Love (2016), The Butterfly Man (2005), The River Wife (2009) and White Heart (1999). She also has written three books for children: Finding Serendipity (2013), A Week without Tuesday (2015) and Blueberry Pancakes Forever (2016).

She received the General Fiction Prize in the 2020 Australian Book Industry Awards for Bruny.

For The Museum of Modern Love she won the 2017 Stella Prize, the 2017 Christina Stead Prize for Fiction in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and the 2017 Margaret Scott Prize and the People’s Choice Award in the Tasmanian Premier’s Literary Prizes.

She won the Davitt Award for Crime Novel of the year for The Butterfly Man in 2006.

In 2020 Film Art Media optioned Bruny to be developed as a television series.