Rare look inside Tasma and Rove’s marriage

Tasma Walton explains how writing her second novel opened up a new understanding of her Indigenous roots – and transformed her personal relationships.

‘Very supportive!’ Tasma Walton has given a rare insight into her marriage to Rove McManus. Picture: Getty Images

While deep in the process of penning her second book, Tasma Walton would sometimes go away for several days at a time – or stay up until 4am some nights – to write, while her husband of 15 years, Gold Logie winner Rove McManus, stepped up on the home front with their daughter Ruby, 11.

“I had to remove myself from family life and go to another place,” Walton tells Stellar.

“It was almost like I needed the world to be still to really be able to go into that space and to reflect on it, because it wasn’t a space that was easy to get into and get out of,” Walton recalls.

But when her new book, I Am Nannertgarrook was ready, McManus was the only person – apart from her publisher – to whom she showed the first drafts to.

“He’s always very supportive and encouraging,” she adds.

‘I needed the world to be still.’ Tasma Walton has opened up about her latest creative project. Picture: Steven Chee for Stellar

‘I had experiences at school where I was called names that had that implication.’ Picture: Steven Chee for Stellar

Walton – long an acclaimed actor for her work in series such as Blue Heelers, Rake, Mystery Road and The Twelve – did not grow up with a deep connection to her Aboriginal roots, despite recalling being enthralled by her maternal grandmother’s tales about the origins of the flora and fauna around her.

The actor suspects her family wanted to shelter her from a past involving the forced removal of her ancestors from their Victorian homeland.

“I did always think I was [First Nations] because I had experiences at school where I was called names that had that implication,” Walton says.

“And my nanna also told me a lot of really interesting stories that felt different and unusual and interesting to me.

“What became the family protective device was to say that we think we have Māori blood.”

Tasma Walton is a proud Boonwurrung/Bunurong woman. Picture: Steven Chee for Stellar

Walton and McManus, also 51, have carried on the storytelling with Ruby.

“It’s the most wonderful thing to be on Country and tell the stories that the country has provided,” Walton says.

“We often will go and walk the old song lines, the old trails – go to those special places that Nanna showed me, and tell the stories.

“The more we do that, the more she becomes wonderfully grounded in that business. So we do it all the time.”

Now, Walton identifies herself as a proud Boonwurrung/Bunurong woman and is using historical fiction as the medium by which she can share her ancestors’ stories with a wider audience.

Tasma Walton and Rove McManus. Picture: Richard Gosling

“My focus is on those people who have open minds and hearts, and who love their country as much as First Nations people do,” she explains.

In I Am Nannertgarrook, a pregnant woman is ripped from her husband and young children, taken to the other side of the country and enslaved, and must fight for survival.

“I have always had this feeling of my ancestor needing resolution, in a sense,” Walton says of the catharsis she experienced in writing her second novel.

“In many ways, this is my attempt at providing that and reclaiming her identity and her story and her voice to give her some peace, and in doing so, it kind of gives me peace as well, because I feel like I’ve honoured her in the best way I can.”

The couple share daughter, Ruby. Picture: David Clark

Picture: Getty Images

Just as Ruby has come to value her family, culture and environment through those active walks, Walton says she hopes that writing I Am Nannertgarrook from a first-person perspective will allow readers to gain more empathy by experiencing her protagonist’s abduction so viscerally.

“It was about going deeply into what that means for somebody to have their life [and] their identity taken from them, and then be taken from their home and not see their family again, so that it’s not just this footnote in the history books.”

In addition to planning her next novel, which she assures “will be much lighter,” Walton is working on a screenplay and will be seen later this year in the second season of the Stan drama Scrublands.

More than 30 years into her acting career, Walton is glad that Australian popular culture is more open to nuanced and diverse roles for women on screen.

“It starts to have a deeper resonance because I have a daughter,” she explains.

“I want to make the world a better place for her. I want her to have the capacity to realise whatever her dreams may be, and not be limited by any kind of societal viewpoint that wants to restrict her development.”

I Am Nannertgarrook by Tasma Walton (S&S Bundyi, $34.99) is out Wednesday. See the full shoot and interview with Tasma Walkton in Stellar tomorrow.

For more from Stellar and the podcast Something To Talk About, click here. The full shoot and interview with Tasma Walton is out tomorrow in Stellar, inside The Sunday Telegraph (NSW), Sunday Herald Sun (VIC), The Sunday Mail (QLD) and Sunday Mail (SA).

Originally published as Rare look inside Tasma and Rove’s marriage