I am Nannertgarrook by Tasma Walton
2025 Shortlist - Adult Category
About Tasma Walton
Tasma Walton is a proud Boonwurrung woman from the saltwater country of Melbourne and surrounding coastlines. As an award-winning actor, she has most recently garnered recognition for her acclaimed role of Mary Swan in the highly regarded Mystery Road television and film franchise. She has appeared in numerous television productions, including The Twelve, Rake, Cleverman, Deadloch and The Secret Life of Us; for her renowned role of Dash McKinley in Blue Heelers she received a Best New Talent Logie Award. Her films include Ivan Sen's Mystery Road, Jub Clerc's Sweet As; How to Please a Woman, Kid Snow, Looking for Grace, Blessed and Fistful of Flies, for the last of which she won the Sochi Film Festival Award for Best Actress. Her work across both film and television has seen her nominated for multiple AACTA Awards. Tasma's first novel, Heartless, was nominated for an ABIA Award for General Fiction, and the first book in her children's series Nerra: Deep Time Traveller was longlisted for the DANZ Children's Book Award. She has worked in various writer's rooms and workshops in the development stage of many film, television and theatre productions. Tasma's most cherished role is playing mum to her ten-year-old daughter, Ruby.
About I am Nannertgarrook
Based on the true story of Tasma Walton’s ancestor, a powerful, heart-wrenching novel about maternal love that endures against pitiless odds. Kidnapped by sealers and enslaved far from her homeland, Nannertgarrook has a spirit that refuses to bow …
From her idyllic life in sea country in Nerrm (Port Phillip Bay, Victoria), Nannertgarrook is abducted and taken to a slave market, leaving behind a husband, daughter and son. Pregnant when seized, she soon gives birth to another son, whom she raises with the children of her fellow captives.
Nannertgarrook is separated not only from her Boonwurrung family, but from her birthright – the ceremonies she once was so joyously part of, the majestic whales who are her totem, the land and sky and sea country and its creatures. All these things she loves as deeply as she does her blood kin.
But now, as her reality becomes profoundly different, she must keep that family and her old life alive in her mind. Their rich, pulsating elements sing to us through her beautiful voice, even while Nannertgarrook herself is subjected to the worst of humanity. This sweeping novel asks us to consider who, in colonial history, were the real savages, and what it truly means to be civilised.
Tasma Walton says: "I am honoured to be shortlisted for the 2025 ARA Historical Novel Prize. Looking at our shared history through a fictional lens has the power to open hearts and minds to truths that may be long buried, forgotten or ignored. I am so thankful to the ARA Prize for its generous celebration and acknowledgement of this literary form and the worlds it can open."
From the judging panel: Every now and then a novel arrives to bring us the stories we have been missing. I Am Nannertgarrook is vital, raw and visceral – and demanding. Readers are given to hear the voices of stolen, Indigenous women kidnapped and enslaved by sealers, voices that have been absent from both the historical and literary record. This is a painful and at times angry account of early 19th century life for a group of women, telling of the courage and resilience needed to survive brutal colonial oppression. But it is also a story of love for family and a lyrical celebration of a way of life dramatically altered. Tasma Walton has called on ancestral history and the tragic history of this nation to write a narrative that will resonate with readers long after they close the book’s covers.
