Roots

The core message within Roots has been in my heart for many years. It was originally for me and my own healing journey - exploring my ancestral roots (of both human and soul) and finding my place as a white Australian. The more I reflect and observe, the more I realise how systemic this displacement is throughout white Australian communities. So it seems this short story wasn’t just written for me - it is intended to start a broader conversation about the displacement of white Australians from their original ancestral roots, and the part this plays in Australian societal dysfunction (and the dissatisfaction of many).

May Roots stir within you your own curiosities about where you come from - where we all come from, where we belong, how we belong, and what this all means. May this story and these characters land gently in your heart, planting seeds of hope, purpose and ultimately, true happiness. x

ROOTS, by Jo Worsfold

Evelyn

It’s another cool, overcast day in Queenstown on the rugged west coast of Tasmania. Evelyn’s favourite sun hat sits dutifully on top of her head, just as it has always done whenever she’s in the garden – dampened not by the heat, but by frustration and menopause manifesting across her brow. Evelyn looks down at her trusty yard boots and sighs a deep, exasperated sigh. To think of the blood, sweat and tears she’s poured into this place, the care she’s taken to plant native and endemic species for it to now be stripped bare by the rainbow lorikeets – again.

“Good-for-nothing pests. That’s all they are,” she mutters to no one in particular, for the umpteenth time.

The spritely tips of the Libertia pulchella tickle her exposed white shins. This playful gesture from her favourite native herb softens her mood just enough for her to pause, catch her breath, and cast a wistful gaze around her garden. This incessant war with yet another introduced pest is wearing her down. She can feel the tiredness in her bones. But her love of this island, this precious land and all its original inhabitants, is far stronger than any havoc wreaked by foreign terrors.

Brodie

Brodie feels the whispers from her paintbrush caress the canvas and careen down through her body. She feels them ripple through the bare soles of her feet, through the bare worn floorboards, until finally these whispers – laced with longing – disperse into the little patch of the island on which her great-great-grandparent’s homestead still stands. Brodie catches a glimpse of her ageing hands, dappled by the sun and a full life. Full, but not quite whole.

The findings of her decade-long ancestral studies lay splayed and incomplete on the table behind her – myriads of invisible question marks rising from the pages like ghosts from her past, here now to haunt her.

I am displaced.

These are the words that have filled her dreams for longer than she can remember. So, was it luck or fate that her residency brought her here, to her ancestors’ homestead in Queenstown? To this place where her convict grandfather started over with his new love, imagining a better future for their family? Time heals all wounds, so they say. But as far as Brodie can tell, the empty space she feels so viscerally inside her is as fresh and real as the space Pa felt on this lone little island to which he was banished, thousands of miles away from his roots – his home – over two hundred years ago.

Damo

“Fuck you, too!” Damo hollers at his latest failed fling as she hightails it out the door. The rage liberates his senses as the all-too-familiar words explode from him.

Yeah, keep walking. You were a shit lay anyway. Appeasing himself with his unabashed thoughts, Damo throws open the door to the beer fridge. At least he’s got plenty of XXXX Gold. And Banjo. He can hear the kelpie-cross snoring on his bed in the other room, and despite himself, a smile creeps across Damo’s face.

Taking a deep swig from the cold can, he walks into the bedroom and ruffles the loose skin at the nape of Banjo’s neck with casual affection. That familiar pang of emotion starts to stir inside him again, making him feel vulnerable. It’s an emotion he can’t understand, because he’s never quite ready to face it. So he hastily retreats to the loungeroom, where his beloved Adelaide Crows are readying themselves for the centre bounce from his HD flatscreen TV. Today is Damo’s RDO in Queenstown, after working twelve-hour shifts over fourteen days straight – he’s stuck in the middle of “woop woop” and he’ll be damned if anyone’s going to ruin it.

He really misses his mates (although he’d never tell them that). They’re all on the mainland, working for the man from Monday to Friday, then living it up on weekends with BBQs, booze, women, and footy. Gravitating to each other through mateship – close enough to banter and defend to no end, but not too close because that’d just be weird.

He hopes they’re catching the game, too. “Cheers, boys.” Damo surreptitiously raises his can to his absent mates.

Baby

The bright glare and cold air shock every cell in his fragile wrinkled body as he crosses the threshold from utero to earth-side. He realises the wailing is his own as many hands grapple at his form. Suctioned, shaken and swaddled, he is whisked into an alien space that his senses can’t recognise.

The medical team are smiling determinately, entrenched in this, their latest success – the birth of Gail and Frank Heathcote’s healthy baby boy. All hands were on deck; the entire birth manufactured to perfection. Seamless. Timely. Convenient. Gail is happy to be resting, face still on, hair scraped back into her signature up-do, feeling orderly and composed. Frank fist bumps the lunch staff as they bring the food in, right on cue. The unmistakeable scent of success in the room doesn’t seem to be suffocating anyone except Baby – minutes born, yet to feel, smell or taste his mother.

Ceremony traded for convenience. A mother’s instinct and intuition are nowhere to be seen. A baby has been born into this world, untethered. In a room so full of laughter and love, yet altogether empty.

Lutruwita | Tasmania

This little patch of mine – “Queenstown” – is next in line.

The fires have arrived.

This is how I can show you.

This is how you will see.

This is how you find your way back to your roots, and to harmony.

Evelyn

She’s quite certain the soles of her boots are melting atop the scorching ground, but Evelyn presses on towards the shrieks and screams erupting from the bush near her garden – now unrecognisable from the recent flames. The cries are distorted by so much distress and pain that an ID is impossible right now, despite Evelyn’s years of experience with wildlife. She must find it, and fast.

Clawing her way through the charred remains of the undergrowth, flashbacks nip at the edges of her consciousness…

“Fire! Fire!” The sounds of neighbours’ vehicles speeding away collide with the roar of the approaching fire. Does she stay or does she go? Her heart is breaking in real time at the thought of her precious garden perishing. And the animals! My god, the animals. Heavy with a grief she has never experienced before, and pressured by the commanding hand of mother nature, Evelyn speeds up the road to join the rest of the community seeking sanctuary further up the coast.

The bush burns all around her as she drives for her life. Smoke, fire and ash almost entirely obstruct her view. The roar is now deafening. Evelyn begins to pray, white knuckles strangling the wheel, “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy Name…” Words last spoken in Sunday School thirty years ago, yet somehow she still remembers. Words now so much more than just words. She feels her faith returning – tentatively – as she drives on to safety.

Evelyn snaps back to the present as the screams become louder. Her boots are barely holding it together. She feels her spirit anchor firmly into her body, and a superhuman strength of sorts takes over. An innate knowing ripples through her… she will save this animal.

Little did Evelyn know, this animal would save her too.

Brodie

Through eyes spilling tears that seem to have no end, Brodie examines the homestead’s remains. She’s unsure if her heart still beats inside her chest, beyond the numb. Brain frozen. Can’t speak. Shock is setting in again, for what feels like the millionth time since last Thursday morning when everything changed.

Brodie recognises the burnt silhouette of a wooden structure that was once an easel cradling her latest creation, Untitled. As with all her paintings, it was going to birth its name in her final brush strokes. She estimated it was roughly ten hours away from revealing its identity, and she had planned to paint all through that day and night to usher it into the world.

Standing here now, in the ruins, the names of her previous creations dance in her thoughts. Home was born in the Blue Mountains, where Brodie spent the better part of 2013 working with a local genealogist, retracing the steps of her ancestors. Belonging came to be during her residency in Naples, the birthplace of her great-great grandmother. She spent a couple of years here studying the local culture and tradition and loved every moment, but it never felt like home. Aesthetic was her problem child of 2019. Talk about a labour of love! And Carousel of Dreams, her one and only abstract, was quite the adventure too. It embodies those vivid, gut wrenching dreams of hers in ways words can’t ever express. Oh! The longing.

This familiar longing guides her back to now, standing at a threshold built by her ancestors, once leading into a loving home and now leading to emptiness. That god-awful space inside her threatens to swallow her alive. Alone, and still displaced, her tears continue to fall and fall.

She finally lets the weight of her grief bring her to her knees, and as she clutches at the blackened earth, her fingers brush against something buried just beneath the surface.

Damo

Fuck me. Fuck me! Jesus fucking Christ. Damo has come to – barely – to find himself laying on the floor of his little mining rental. His breathing isn’t right, but he’s still too out of it to mind. What the actual fuck! He remembers seeing the fire closing in. He had watched the flames dance toward his unit as he madly scrambled to throw his belongings in a bag and round up Banjo to get the hell out of there. He can’t remember anything after that. Fuck. Am I still alive? Is this hell? As his senses slowly trickled back in, other details of his current situation come into focus… it’s dark, but not in a nighttime kind of way. A putrid smell triggers his gag reflex. An eerie silence blankets over him, the unit, and the bush… the deathly quiet forcing the hairs across his entire body to stand to attention.

Damo tries to clear his throat, and instead a warbled sound escapes his body as pain sharp as razorblades slices through his lungs. The pain awakens the rest of his body, escalating the animalistic sounds now erupting from his entire being with brute force. As the whole world starts to spin uncontrollably, Damo slips into unconsciousness once again.

All around the little mining rental are footprints of the bushfire. Everything burned to the ground. Yet there stands the building with the unconscious man inside – untouched.

Baby

“Frank! We need to move! Now!”

At lightning speed, without a single thought given to plans or strategies or anything really, Gail is in motion. Baby watches his mother closely as the façade she’s worked so hard to maintain her entire life evaporates in a split second. Baby sees his true mother for the first time. The chaos unravelling all around them is entirely irrelevant, as he feels the bond he once felt in utero – so familiar and safe – rekindle anew.

The passion and certainty in her eyes right now, as she extracts her family from this volatile environment, makes him fall in love with her even more. Her face, shiny from sweat and tears, is ferocious and wild – a face that was altogether absent from his birth. A face – an expression – that can no longer be contained or controlled erupts now like a volcano.

Meanwhile, the what ifs are running wild through Frank’s mind like the bushfire itself. Why now? Why not a week ago when we were in the city for the birth? Why not next week after my CEO transfer to Coolgardie? Why us?

He tries to pull himself together – now is not the time for philosophical questions. He’s not even a philosophical man, for goodness’ sake! Frank hustles to load the car with as many belongings as he can manage, as those same thoughts follow him like pesky gnats that don’t know when to leave well enough alone.

Baby sees his mother and father lock eyes for a split second amidst the chaos, and the jolt of electricity that passes between them takes his breath away. Baby cries a full-bellied, guttural cry – like a wolf howling into the night, calling his family home.

Evelyn

Weeping softly, she cradles the dying bird. Studying the brilliant blue plumage on its face, words beyond her control rise from the depths of her soul. As gentle as a lullaby, Evelyn whispers words of love, apology, and understanding to the rainbow lorikeet as the very last breath peacefully leaves the bird’s tiny body.

In those moments between life and death, Evelyn feels her bias melt away. Her heart opens wide, letting all creatures in. The irony of her – a white Australian living on unceded land – hating on invasive species fills her with humility and shame. And so, the healing begins.

Brodie

Dusty, tired, and – she suddenly realises – also very hungry, Brodie considers the small black box now balanced on her lap. Sitting on the charred land where the homestead kitchen once was, Brodie turns the box over carefully in her hands.

The faintest breath of air lifts ever so slightly, and this subtle shift stirs something inside her. She can’t quite place the feeling, but she trusts it, and this calms her. As she carefully opens the box and observes its contents, realisation dawns. The answers to which she has sought all these years are now right in front of her.

The whispers of her paintbrushes as they birth this next chapter beckon her. The words that have haunted her dreams for years, I am displaced, are being laid to rest. The dreaded space that has lived inside her ancestors for generations – the elephant always in the room – begins to stir inside her in an entirely new way. Her heritage, her roots – the place where she will return with the spirits of her ancestors right alongside her – is no longer a stranger.

Damo

Is this a miracle?

Damo surveys the land, struggling to make sense of last week’s fire jumping his unit while he and Banjo lay trapped inside. Patting Banjo with one hand, he drops his other hand into his pocket to retrieve his phone. Scrolling through his contacts, he finds the name he’s looking for.

“G’day Cobba – Yeah, I’m okay – Hey, listen… I uh… I just wanted to say I love you.” He sits through the awkward silence coming from the other end of the call, then bravely continues, “You’re my mate. You’re family, bro. My life would be shit without you in it – I uh… just wanted you to know.” Damo’s voice tapers off into more silence.

As his mate discreetly clears his throat and begins to speak, Damo feels that emotion he’s pushed aside forever – his loneliness – lift like a weight from his shoulders.

Baby

They both hold him in a protective embrace, crying uncensored tears of relief and joy. Their instincts, once snuffed out from a lifetime of conditioning and expectations, now firmly on their sleeves alongside their hearts. Faces smeared with ash, effort and emotion, and they honestly couldn’t care less.

This is what it means to live. This is why he came earthside – to be with his mother and father as they all find their way home. Baby no longer feels untethered as he burrows his face into his mother’s breast.

Lutruwita | Tasmania

The rain has arrived,

and in good time.

Many lessons have been learned.

Trajectories, aligned.

Your roots, embedded firmly

in the soil of your soul,

are only ever a word,

a whisper,

a heartbeat untold.

Copyright© Jo-Anne Worsfold, 2025

This short story was originally published in Emerging Possibilities Volume 2, Issue 2 “Place” by Pen and Possibility