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Tasma Walton explores a tragic family story in her new novel, I Am Nannertgarrook
Growing up, there was a story actor and author Tasma Walton often heard about one of her Boonwurrung ancestors.
According to family legend, Walton's great-great-great grandmother, Nannertgarrook, fell in love with a merchant seaman and ran away with him.
But Walton came to realise this story wasn't the full one.
It was a "more palatable and romanticised version" of the truth, she tells ABC Radio National's The Book Show.
The man wasn't a merchant seaman, and this wasn't a love story.
From the late 18th century, seal and whale traders rode the wave of British colonisation, pillaging the oceans in pursuit of their lucrative prey.
Operating in treacherous conditions far from home, they relied on First Nations' knowledge to survive.
"In the 1830s, [Nannertgarrook] was abducted alongside some of her sister-cousins and their kids by sealers and then taken to the islands off the coast of Tasmania and sold into a sealer slave market," Walton says.
Sadly, they weren't the only Aboriginal women subjected to this treatment.
"There's a lot written about [the sealers] in the colonial records," Walton says.
In I Am Nannertgarrook, Walton's second novel, she tells her ancestor's story, exposing a dark chapter of Australian history.
Walton, a Boonwurrung woman born in Geraldton, is a well-known Australian figure, thanks to her roles in television series including Blue Heelers, Mystery Road and The Twelve.
She says writing is not all that different to acting: both require world-building and crafting a character's "inner monologue".
"It's an extension of the same approach to storytelling," she says.
In researching her grandmother's life, Walton uncovered stories of atrocities long obscured by history.
"It was very clearly something that we're not taught in schools. We're not shown the true complexity and depth of what was happening and, a lot of the time, we're seeing [history] from a very limited perspective," she says.
The fate of Nannertgarrook disproves the widely held belief that slavery has played no part in Australian history.
"She was kidnapped by a group of men, she was sold for money to other men and she was their captive to do what they chose with her, which included making her work so that they could earn money off her labour," Walton says.
Walton found only a handful of references to her grandmother in colonial-era diaries and journals held in historical archives.
To flesh out Nannertgarrook's story in the novel, she relied instead on family stories and contemporary firsthand accounts from other women taken by sealers.
Walton wanted to tell the story as a first-person narrative to allow the reader to see the world through Nannertgarrook's eyes.
"I don't know what she was thinking. I don't know what she was feeling. I wasn't there. But … I can imagine how it would have felt as a young woman, having to look after kids and try to keep yourself alive," she says.
"What I wanted to do with the story was channel a perspective we don't ordinarily see, which is a young black woman … so that, as a reader, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, we can travel in those shoes [and] walk on that songline."
As the novel opens, Nannertgarrook is living on Boonwurrung/Woiworung Country on what is now known as the Mornington Peninsula.
"When we first meet her, she's happily married and going about women's business as well as her family responsibilities," Walton says.
Nannertgarrook and the women and children of her clan are gathered on the shores of the bay, awaiting the seasonal arrival of whales and their calves to the sheltered waters.
The whale —betayil in Boonwurrung — is her family's totem and they will celebrate the annual migration and honour Babayin Betayil, the sacred Mother Whale, with a ceremony known as ngargee: "an ebbing and flowing of song and story, dance and drumbeat".
As Nannertgarrook lays down by the campfire one night to sleep, her two children close by, the world is as it should be. "All is peaceful. All is perfect," she reflects in the book.
Nannertgarrook and the Boonwurrung women were highly skilled skin divers who collected abalone and crayfish from the giant kelp forests on the sea floor.
"They were renowned for being able to hold their breath for huge amounts of time," Walton says.
"[She's a] Saltwater woman through and through."
Walton took great joy in describing the landscape as it would have appeared before colonisation.
"Whenever I'm out on Country at different places where there's less city and urban noise, I always imagine what it would have been like," she says.
"I really enjoyed writing the first part of the story because I could feel myself in that place, having walked that landscape so much in my lifetime.
"Imagining it back in that time when it was fully itself was a lovely experience."
Walton evokes a culture rich with ritual and myth that existed in harmony with the natural world.
Nannertgarrook's chest is marked with initiation scars, marking her as a mother, and she teaches her children to respect the flora and fauna around their camp, or wilam.
As she prepares for ceremony, she uses ochre to paint patterns on her body, signifying her story: "The tracks of koonwarra the swan, waving lines that speak of the sea, the shapes and stories of our Biik."
Woven through this portrait of traditional life are the "threads of women's lore" shared with Walton over the years.
"It's like a love letter to women's business, sisterhood and motherhood," she says.
Tragically, Nannertgarrook, who was also known as Eliza, is taken far from her beloved Country, or Biik.
Initially, the sealers take the group to their meeting place on an island off the coast of Tasmania.
"In Nannertgarrook's case, she is then taken to Kangaroo Island off South Australia and then onto Bald Island off the coast of Western Australia … [which is] literally [just] a rock that's thrusting up out of the ocean," Walton says.
Windswept and desolate, it's an alien world to Nannertgarrook.
"She goes from … the Mornington Peninsula, with all of its incredible beaches and giant trees, to a rocky outcrop in a very isolated place on the southern Western Australian coastline."
Walton offers few details about Nannertgarrook's abductor, who she never names in the book.
She says excising the man from the narrative was a deliberate decision.
"That was my way of mirroring the colonial records … [which contain] a lot about the sealers. We know all their names; we know all the terrible things they've done.
"What we don't see are the women: their names, their true identities, anything they're experiencing in any depth or context."
Walton says there was a "half-hearted attempt" to rescue the group by the colonial government of the day.
"My ancestor and the women that are with her are mentioned by a travelling government surveyor to the Aboriginal protectorates at the time in Port Phillip.
"And they ignore it. Nobody goes for her. They know they're there. They talk at length about them, but all we get in the colonial records is a cursory nod to them and the fact that they want to come home to Westernport."
Nearly 200 years later, Walton wants to restore the women to the historical record.
"This is about reclaiming [Nannertgarrook's] voice and identity and those of her sisters and their bubup, their children," she says.
I Am Nannertgarrook is published by S&S Bundyi.
