In her latest role, the 50-year-old star of The Twelve goes on a journey of identity not unlike the one she’s taken in real life.
ON a beach on Bunurong country in Victoria’s Point Nepean National Park not so long ago, actor Tasma Walton and Indigenous elder Aunty Gail Kunwarra Dawson, lit a cleansing fire. In that moment, Walton, star ofvividly pictured the day, almost 200 years earlier, when sealers abducted a group of Indigenous girls and young women around that spot.
Under pressure to return the women, the sealers fled with Nannertgarrook and one of her kinswomen, first to Kangaroo Island in South Australia, then as far as possible from the authorities to Bald Island, off the coast of Albany in Western Australia. One sealer, a white man, gave Walton’s ancestor a new name: Eliza Nowen, but documented in a baptism record as Eliza Gamble. She bore three daughters by him.
The actor flashes an engaging smile and laughs a lot, with a vivacity and openness that has made her a screen favourite since her breakout role as Dash McKinley in the popular 1990s Melbourne police seriesGrowing up in social housing in Geraldton in the 1970s and 80s, and raised by a single mother with two sisters, Walton says she had an inkling of her Indigenous heritage, but in Western Australia, the “so-called” Aborigines Protection Act had been repealed only a handful of years before her...
Alongside this talent for Greek tragedy, Walton’s imagination was captured by the surviving saltwater stories of her ancestor, Nannertgarrook. When Walton was filmingfor 42 weeks of the year, she rented an apartment on St Kilda’s The Esplanade that looked across Port Phillip Bay. Her maternal grandmother would come to stay, telling her amazing women’s Dreaming stories of giant whales, mermaids and mystical rainbows as they looked across the sea together.
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