Actor Tasma Walton has used a story about former prime minister Harold Holt’s disappearance being linked to mermaids as evidence in a significant native title dispute covering land from Werribee to Wilsons Promontory.
Several members of the Bunurong Land Council Aboriginal Corporation are challenging expert evidence that supports a native title application from the Boon Wurrung Land and Sea Council covering 13,000 square kilometres along Victoria’s coast.
Tasma Walton has referenced stories from her grandmother in support of a native title claim.Credit: Getty Images
Bunurong group witnesses – including Walton, who is married to entertainer Rove McManus and lives on the Mornington Peninsula – responded in the Federal Court on Monday to the expert evidence that raised questions over their claimed ancestry.
The court will decide if Walton and the others are descended from apical ancestors who were traditional owners of Bunurong/Boonwurrung Country at the time of colonisation by Europeans.
Walton told the court her Aboriginal heritage comes from her mother’s side, descending from Eliza Nowan – sometimes known as Eliza Gamble – who the Bunurong claim was a traditional owner of the area known today as Port Phillip Bay.
The Bunurong group claim Nowan-Gamble and two other Aboriginal women were taken from the area by sealers in the early 1830s, according to oral history passed down through the descendants of the women.
Walton told the court how, over a period of years, her grandmother passed down Bunurong cultural knowledge in the form of stories containing cultural lore. The origin of these stories was Eliza Nowan-Gamble, Walton said. Much of the cultural knowledge was imparted to Walton in the mid- to late-90s, when her grandmother visited Melbourne from Western Australia, she said.
At the time, Walton was working on the television series Blue Heelers and living in St Kilda. When the program’s gruelling schedule allowed, Walton said, she would take her grandmother on excursions around Port Phillip Bay to the south-east of Melbourne.
On one of these outings, the pair visited a beach on the Mornington Peninsula where her grandmother told her the “the old prime minister disappeared”, Walton said.
Former prime minister Harold Holt at Portsea in 1966, where he disappeared in heavy seas one year later. Credit: National Archives of Australia
Holt disappeared after swimming at a beach near Portsea in 1967. Walton said her grandmother had told her Holt “shouldn’t have been swimming there”.
Asked by the Bunurong’s lawyer why, Walton told the court: “Well, that is mermaid country. Her belief was that [mermaids] took him.”
Walton said identifying as Indigenous was important to her. “There’s an obligation for Indigenous owners to Country and culture,” she said.
Genealogical evidence in an expert report provided by Dr Ian Clark that supports the application of the Boon Wurrung group disputes the Bunurong/Boon Wurrung heritage of Nowan-Gamble, instead posing that she may have been a Tasmanian Aboriginal woman taken earlier by white sealers who went on to establish a settlement or temporary camp at Western Port, Victoria, from the 1820s.
The Boon Wurrung application lists three women – Marjorie Munro, Ann Munro and Louis Briggs – as apical ancestors and traditional owners.
Walton says Nowan-Gamble was taken to Western Australia, where she died in Albany in the south-west of the state in 1867.
She recalled in court growing up in social housing in the 1970s and 1980s in Geraldton, WA, where she said she was born. Although Walton, her mother and her grandmother did not identify publicly as Aboriginal, it was known within her family, she said.
Walton was often treated as Indigenous due to her appearance, including sometimes being targeted with racial epithets, she said.
Best known for her recurring roles in Blue Heelers in the ’90s and later The Secret Life of Us, Home and Away and Rake, Walton began identifying as Bunurong in 2018-19, she told the court.
She said she believed her grandmother learnt the stories from oral tradition handed down from Eliza Nowan-Gamble and that they were of traditional Bunurong origin.
The Boon Wurrung people are part of a larger group known as the Eastern Kulin nation, which comprises the Boon Wurrung, Woi Wurrung Wurundjeri, Taungurong, Dja Dja Wurrung and Wathaurong peoples.
Senior Boon Wurrung woman Caroline Martin declined to comment outside the court.
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2023-07-10 09:20:04Z
CBMijwFodHRwczovL3d3dy50aGVhZ2UuY29tLmF1L25hdGlvbmFsL3ZpY3RvcmlhL21lcm1haWRzLXRvb2staGltLWhhcm9sZC1ob2x0LWRpc2FwcGVhcmFuY2Utc3RvcnktY2l0ZWQtaW4tbmF0aXZlLXRpdGxlLXN0b3VzaC0yMDIzMDcwNy1wNWRtamsuaHRtbNIBjwFodHRwczovL2FtcC50aGVhZ2UuY29tLmF1L25hdGlvbmFsL3ZpY3RvcmlhL21lcm1haWRzLXRvb2staGltLWhhcm9sZC1ob2x0LWRpc2FwcGVhcmFuY2Utc3RvcnktY2l0ZWQtaW4tbmF0aXZlLXRpdGxlLXN0b3VzaC0yMDIzMDcwNy1wNWRtamsuaHRtbA
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