Arabic version: تاسما والتون تصوغ حكايات في أستراليا الغربية
According to The Guardian, actor and writer Tasma Walton is working on Pilli Sisters PI, a six-part ABC crime drama set in Fremantle. The project is her first work set entirely in Western Australia, where she returned in 2021 after spending nearly three decades in Sydney.
Walton was in Western Australia filming Mystery Road when Covid hit, while her husband Rove McManus’s live standup work had largely disappeared. With both sides of their family in the state, the couple settled in a coastal Perth suburb. Walton said Perth offered a calmer daily life than Sydney.
Pilli Sisters PI centres on Marlee and May, Indigenous sisters who work as private investigators. Walton, known for playing Constable Deirdre “Dash” McKinley in Blue Heelers, said the new drama focuses on the women, their shared history and their friction as much as on the cases they investigate. She has deliberately placed two middle-aged Black women at its centre, noting that female acting roles still tend to skew younger.
Walton, one of four sisters, drew on sibling closeness, rivalries and long-held “bugbears” for the series. She is also considering whether she might play one of the sisters, though she said the production had not reached that point as casting preparations began.
Her family history informed her 2025 historical novel, I Am Nannertgarrook, which imagines the life of a Bunurong ancestor abducted by sealers, sold into captivity and separated from her family. Walton said the family had inherited a more romantic account, but her research into the period and violence against Indigenous women made that version less plausible. She described researching and writing the book as emotionally gruelling.
Walton said her childhood connection to Bunurong heritage was understood but not explicitly discussed. She linked that silence to the history of Aboriginal children in Western Australia, where the Commissioner of Native Welfare was their legal guardian until 1963. For Walton, the chance to create her own work remains rooted in the power of storytelling to open audiences to new worlds.
