Heart of the Grass Tree is an exquisite, searing and hope-filled debut about mothers and daughters and family stories, about country and its living history.

There is something about this place, its expansiveness, its wind-rush, its sea-howl that makes everything we hold tight just fall away. This place—Kangaroo Island, South Australia. Heart of the Grass Tree draws on the early contact history between European sealers, and their stolen Aboriginal ‘wives’ who lived on the island before its official settlement in 1836. When Pearl returns to the island in the wake of her grandmother Nell’s death she begins to unearth a connection to the island’s Indigenous history, and learns that in love, we become inextricably tied to one another.

Pearl remembers Nell’s feet stretched towards the campfires on the beach, her fourth toe curled in and nestled against the middle toe like a small prawn. They all have a curled fourth toe – Diana, Lucy, Pearl.

Each woman must reckon with Nell’s sudden passing in her own way, but grandmother Nell had secrets and silences. As Pearl, Diana and Lucy interrogate their feelings about the island, Pearl starts to pull together the scraps Nell left behind – her stories, poems, paintings – and unearths a fierce connection to the island’s early history, of the early European sealers and their first contact with the Ngarrindjeri people.
As the three women are in grief pulled apart from each other, Pearl’s deepening connection to their history, the island’s history, grounds her, and will ultimately bring the women back to each other.