Tasma Walton: ‘I understand what it’s like to be powerless’

Dark clouds hover above the Indian Ocean when I meet Tasma Walton at Scarborough beach in Perth, the sea below heaving and churning in green-grey folds. Every now and then, the sun emerges and the water flashes silver. Despite the drama offshore, Walton seems at ease. “I’m a salt water woman,” she announces matter-of-factly, as we set off along Scarborough’s promenade, weaving between dog walkers and wetsuited surfers. “I need to be on the beach. It’s very good for the soul.” It’s 2pm when we meet, and Walton has spent the morning at her desk, deep in back-to-back deadlines for Pilli Sisters PI, a six-part ABC crime drama she’s writing. Our walk is a brief reprieve. “I liken writing to running a marathon,” she says, flashing a wry grin. “It is such a gruelling process.” Wrapped in a cream-coloured jumper and a blue skirt patterned like ocean waves, Walton is assured and quick, with soft brown eyes and an easy smile. At times she’s disarmingly open, at others guarded. But there is also a kind of delighted curiosity to her. Mid-conversation she peers at the coastline, convinced she has spotted an animal. It turns out to be seaweed. “I thought I saw it move,” she says, still looking out to sea. Walton grew up in WA but spent nearly three decades in Sydney. In 2021, when Covid hit, Walton was already in WA filming Mystery Road, her husband Rove McManus’s live standup work had largely disappeared, and both sides of the family were in WA. They settled in a coastal suburb of Perth and stayed. Looking back, Walton says Sydney had come to carry “this kind of constant low-level anxiety and stress, even just driving on the roads”. Perth, she says, feels much calmer. “When the world’s spinning out of control, it’s nice to have an easier everyday life.” As we continue along the promenade, Walton points south. In the distance, the cranes of Fremantle port rise above the coastline. “There it is!” she says. Fremantle occupies much of her imagination at the moment: it is the setting for Pilli Sisters PI, the first of her works to be set entirely in Western Australia. At its centre are Marlee and May, two Indigenous sisters working as private investigators. Crime is familiar territory for Walton, who famously played Constable Deirdre “Dash” McKinley in Blue Heelers. But Pilli Sisters PI is as interested in the women themselves, and the history and friction between them, as it is in the mysteries they solve. Early publicity described Marlee and May as “heroines”, but Walton resists the label. “They’re just two women going about their everyday,” she says. She is equally wary of framing the series as a political statement, or the women themselves as exemplars. Yet Walton is deliberate about placing two middle-aged Black women at the heart of the story. After three decades as an actor, she says there are still generally more roles for men, while female roles “skew younger”. Things have changed since she started in the 1990s, “but it’s not enough, really”. As we loop back along the pathway, the sunken skate park comes into view, with the hulking facade of the Rendezvous hotel opposite. “I remember when that was built in the 80s,” Walton says. As a young girl, she would make the trip down to Scarborough for surf-lifesaving carnivals, jumping into the same roaring ocean beside us now. Walton is one of four sisters, who she describes as “very close, but also very, very different”. Pilli Sisters PI draws on that closeness, as well as the rivalries and “very specific bugbears” siblings accumulate over a lifetime. “There’s an intimacy to that sibling relationship that is very difficult to replicate in any other relationship,” she says. As the second youngest, Walton says she tended to come off worse when sibling roughhousing turned physical. She was an outlier in other ways too. In a family mad for sport, Walton preferred books. “I could have just happily laid in bed and read all day,” she says. Instead came netball, football, surf club and little athletics, all “kind of annoying,” she says, laughing. When I ask where her love of stories came from, Walton is unequivocal: her mother. She read to the four girls at bedtime, changing the characters’ names so her daughters became the protagonists. “I loved the escape,” she says. Books offered some distance from a childhood that was not always easy. At school, Walton was called “all sorts of names”, her connection to mob apparent even if it was never openly discussed at home. For several years, her family also lived with her mother’s partner, who could be violent. When I ask whether living in such close proximity to violence has made its way into her writing, Walton is reluctant to draw a straight line. “One of my golden rules is you don’t use your personal life.” “That being said, I understand what it’s like to be powerless,” she says, “and to look in the eyes of a man who is in a dark state of rage.” Yet if her own life is off-limits, her family history is another matter. Her 2025 historical novel, I Am Nannertgarrook, imagines the life of a Bunurong ancestor who was abducted by sealers, sold into captivity and separated from her family. Growing up, Walton inherited a different version of Nannertgarrook’s story through her family: that she had fallen in love with a merchant seaman and run away with him. But the more Walton learned about the period, and the violence inflicted on Indigenous women by sealers, the less plausible that story became. “You know when someone tells you a fairytale, you have an instinct that it’s a fairytale,” she says. Perhaps, she suggests, the romance was simply a way of living with the truth. “I think we try to make sense of awful brutality in some way.” In writing the novel, Walton put Nannertgarrook back at the centre. Her abductor is never named; instead, the women so thinly recorded in the colonial archive occupy the story. The process was emotionally gruelling. Asked whether there were particular moments that affected her, Walton says: “Multiple times. I think every time.” Each return to the records meant placing herself imaginatively in Nannertgarrook’s position. “I’ve never experienced any creative journey like it.” Family history had reached Walton in fragments long before she began researching it. As a girl, she would take the six-hour bus from Geraldton to Perth with her grandmother, who told strange, vivid stories of baby whales and women living among kelp forests. Those stories took on another meaning as Walton began to explore her Bunurong heritage, something she says was understood in childhood but “never explicitly discussed”. That silence had deep roots. Until 1963, the Commissioner of Native Welfare was the legal guardian of Aboriginal children in Western Australia, a history Walton says left “a lot of fear and a lot of anxiety in the community” for generations. As we make one last loop of the promenade, the dark clouds have thinned and the sun is beginning to appear. Walton’s break from the writing desk is almost over. Tomorrow brings the first general casting session for Pilli Sisters PI, and she hasn’t ruled out playing one of the sisters herself. “We haven’t got to that point yet,” she says. But one thing is clear: what lights Walton up now is the chance to shape stories of her own. Knowing which stories matter to her. “It comes back to what is the story that you want to tell and how desperately do you want to tell it?” Perhaps that instinct has been there all along. “I’ve always been very intrigued by and reliant on the power of story,” she says, “to take you out of your existence and open your heart to new worlds.” Comments (…) Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion