When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
~ Wendell Berry, “The Peace of Wild Things”
I first met Karen Harrland through her words.
In 2022, still fresh in my role as an assistant publisher, I picked up Daughter of the Plateau from the pile of submissions on my desk. From the first page, I knew that I was in the presence of an author of rare sensitivity, wisdom and insight. I was struck by her intimate descriptions of landscape, and enchanted by the central character, Manna – a wild, strong, fiercely independent child named for the regal white gums and yellow-tailed cockatoos of the Central Highlands of Tasmania.
At our first meeting, Karen swept through our office door like a warm breeze off the mountain. She radiated grace and generosity. Her broad smile and laughing eyes put me immediately at ease.
Mandy Renard, one of her closest friends, says this was how Karen moved through the world. “She had a naturally maternal, welcoming way about her. She made everyone feel seen.”
. . .
Karen grew up in the Adelaide Hills. After a few years adventuring around Australia and overseas, she came to Tasmania and fell in love, first with the wilderness and then with Alistair (Al) Dermer, whom she met through the Green Corps. Fused by a mutual love of nature, sustainable living and conservation, they bought a two-hectare bush block in the foothills of Kunanyi and set about building their dream home.
In 2004, an opportunity came up to manage a former cattle station turned conservation reserve called Ethabuka in the Simpson Desert in outback Queensland. Eager for adventure and ready to learn, they signed up to spend the next two years mustering stray cattle, fixing fences, nurturing native plants, bringing good fire back to the landscape and removing the wild camel population.
It turned out to be a very different adventure than the one they imagined. Soon after arriving in their remote desert shack, Karen fell unexpectedly pregnant with their first child, Asha. As the months passed, Karen battled prolonged morning sickness, post-natal depression and isolation. But the struggles of early motherhood ignited something in her, and set her to writing. “This desert with its rolling dune fields is an unforgiving land that relentlessly destroys even its own ancient beauty,” she wrote. “It is a place where, compared to the age of the landscape, a single life means less than a grain of sand.”
Eventually, Karen and Al returned to Tasmania and built their family home at Neika, consciously using recycled materials as much as possible. They were still screwing on doors and sweeping out the sawdust when their second child, Clay, was born.
The family returned to Ethabuka and nearby property Cravens Peak for five months in 2010, and their third child, Zavier, took his first steps in the desert, just as Asha had years earlier.
. . .
Encouraged by a course at the Tasmanian Writers Centre and a local writers’ group, Karen wove together the strands of memory, meditation and nature writing that became Spinifex Baby (2014), a brave, honest and engrossing account of a young couple raising a family in a remote and unforgiving landscape, and of the power of nature to wound and to heal. It won the prestigious Finch Memoir Prize for the best unpublished life story or memoir manuscript by an Australian writer.
Karen’s time at Ethabuka was not only formative for her as a writer. Her immersion in Wangkamadla country, with its ancient petroglyphs, ceremonial sites and ever-present spirits, fed into her creative work as a teacher at Margate Primary School. With guidance and permission, Karen drew on indigenous ways of knowing and oral storytelling techniques to develop her own specialist program called Story Circles, which has since become a cornerstone of the school experience.
Sitting outside on mats designed with First Nations motifs, Karen encouraged her students to be mindful and to make full use of their senses by composing tales inspired by the living stories unfolding all around them in nature. In her final Forty South essay, “Watchers in peace” (2025), Karen describes teaching as a joyful process of noticing, observing, and responding with wonder. When a magpie built its nest in a nearby eucalyptus, she moved her class closer to the trees. “The children watched the story of the magpie unfold above them, as at the same time they learnt how to tell stories themselves.”
Karen’s Story Circles were transformative for her students, but also for her friends and fellow-teachers. Leah Waugh remembers how persistent Karen was when she first came to her with the idea. “She knew it would be beneficial. She was a forward-thinker, ahead of the curve. Families loved it, because they could see the difference it made in their children’s lives.”
“Karen could identify kids who were nervous about writing,” remembers Amy Austwick. “By giving them room to express themselves, they learned to relax and explore imagined worlds with freedom and safety. They transferred that confidence to their writing. Kids felt seen, heard, and nourished by her.”
For Gay Lynch, the Story Circles helped students develop a strong sense of place and rituals that gave meaning to the world around them.
Susan Munro added, “Karen would glide into my classroom with the hugest smile ready to welcome her students. She listened to them. She cared for them. She encouraged our students to be still. To look. To listen. To breathe in the scent of eucalyptus. To be grateful for our fresh air and wide open skies. My students always returned from a lesson with Karen more centred and grounded, calmer and happier.”
“Karen made each and every one of her students feel heard, seen, special, unique,” said Deb Lie. “She had an inspirational way of ensuring all students in her Story Circles were given equal opportunities to participate, shine and achieve success and growth.”
“She inspired a sense and importance of community in us all and encouraged everyone to be the best versions of themselves,” reflected Maree Thompson. “Her positivity was infectious and her ability to inspire all students to be storytellers has left a wonderful legacy to all her past and present students.”
“Karen was the golden thread that connected us,” said former principal Kate Slater. “From her heart to others, to nature, and then to herself. She was our teacher, mentor and coach.”
. . .
Karen’s heart was always at home in wild places: the mountains, the desert, the forest. But in later life, she felt most at home by the water. A few years ago the family moved from the rich peppermint forest of Neika to the beachside community of Coningham. In a powerful, poetic essay for Forty South, “The call of the water” (2024), Karen describes how cold water swimming helped ease her own overwhelming grief. “When my own mother died, that deep body of water held me. The pain of the cold relieved a little of the pain of the grief ... it is in the ocean that I feel I am being held by a sort of maternal energy that nurtures me as I dive beneath the surface ... as if I’m being held by my mother.”
Some passages in this essay are difficult to read now – they seem uncanny, almost prophetic. Always the teacher, her words offer guidance to those of us struggling with our own grief. “At a time in life when I’ve felt as though the earth revolved without me, and my heart was broken, I gathered my raw emotions and submerged with them into the cold wildness. My land-bound world couldn’t hold my pain, but in the ocean, it fitted. With all its jagged edges, it sank into the currents until the sharp bits softened.”
. . .
On Thursday, October 2, Karen Harrland lost her life on the Franklin River. She was, in Paulette Whitney’s words, “fulfilling a long-held dream – an adventure in one of the most beautiful places in the world with her beloved husband Al and three dear friends. They were in a party of 11 brave humans, to whom we are forever indebted for their extraordinary level of care, bravery and heroism during such a tragic ordeal.”
I’ve been struck by how often Karen’s friends use the same words to describe her. She was naturally maternal. Welcoming. Warm. Nourishing. Funny. Energising. “She had a lot of capacity for people to lean on,” said Mandy.
Above all, Karen delighted in connection. “As much as the writing process fills me with peace and expresses that part of me that’s otherwise hidden away, the best part of writing ... was the responses I received from my readers. I was awed and inspired to know that I had touched people, made them think hard, helped them to understand their own journey or the Tasmanian wilderness better.”
A teacher under trees, a mischievous friend, Al’s soul-dancer in the moonlight, a ritual-maker, a taker of care, a gardener of flowers, a teller of stories, and the most amazing mother to her children. Karen Harrland invited us all to revel in the mysteries of this one wild and precious life – to learn, to find courage in our own fragility, to love and be loved by the world, and to be free.
Rayne Allinson is a writer and teacher with a PhD in History from the University of Oxford. She has worked and travelled in many parts of the northern hemisphere, and is currently Assistant Publisher at Forty South.