Books
Tasma Walton
I Am Nannertgarrook
Tasma Walton’s second novel, I Am Nannertgarrook, is an exercise in loving. It’s a captivating ancestral story and a contemporary song spiral of profound cultural significance.
Embodying the mind of Boonwurrung woman Nannertgarrook, the symbiosis of language with culture and Country holds the reader like the liquid blanket of Nerrm (Port Phillip Bay). Songs are a conversation of the soul spanning species and generations and enact layers of gratitude for shared purpose. Blessings of life shine like the millennia of emptied shells that make up clan Keeping Places.
Nannertgarrook lives an idyllic lifestyle. Trees are burn-hollowed over generations to create sheltering caves where babies are birthed into a bowl sculpted in the sand. Scars cut across her chest celebrate the passage of motherhood. The soft luxury of possum-skin cloaks is etched with family stories to affirm Boonwurrung people’s place in the world. Sweet fruits are gathered by young children from Waa’s pantry, rich game is hunted and “bounty from Sea Country is wrapped in a fold of paperbark”.
When Nannertgarrook is kidnapped and sold to a sealer, crashing waves and crushing violence dominate her life. The sealers’ indiscriminate slaughter shows “no awareness, no knowledge of how the world really works. Like a toddler, they just grab what they want, when they want, no thought for what comes after”. They hide their shame in darkness and the anaesthesia of firewater.
Imprisoned on a rocky coast, Nannertgarrook is hypnotised by the rhythmic balm of “the eternal pendulum governing the undulating tides”. Pregnant when enslaved, she discovers the bonds of sisterhood through their shared traumas of servitude, birth, theft and death. When she is finally released into a world with buildings, beds and uniforms, the people stare at her with primal fear, shame, pity and uncomprehending ignorance. Even her long-ago stolen daughter is changed.
Nannertgarrook’s understanding of her place in this modern colonial world is visceral. Walton creates a mirror for contemporary Australians who “have watched, mute from the sidelines, no courage to combat the cruelty, no will to make amends”. The maternal grace of her writing takes us beyond the narratives of colonial history to envelop readers in a communal embrace.
S&S Bundyi, 288pp, $34.99
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on April 19, 2025 as "I Am Nannertgarrook".
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