Two years on from the end of season three,Oly and Santi (Carlos Sanson Jr) are back together,with Santi switching to home-parenting duties. Oly’s free-spirited mum,Angie (Karvan),is living in a protest camp defending trees in an urban strip the mayor wants to remove to make way for affordable housing.
“It’s such a complex issue,” says Tisdell,who was in the writer’s room for her storylines. “We had conversations like,‘Would Shauna be against this destruction of land?’ Of course,she would. But what she has to do as a politician is make the best decision. She’d be frustrated. She’d be angry. Also,[being Indigenous],she would be getting so much hate. So while everybody else would be dealing with normal political stuff,she’d be getting it extra.”
For inspiration for the role,her second with a political narrative,after Blackfella Films’Total Control (the third series of which airs on the ABC in January),Tisdell looked to two political figures.
“I fell down this rabbit hole a while ago,getting really interested in in-group/out-group empathy. Gandhi,apparently,was an arsehole,person to person,” she says. “But it’s because he was so focused on the bigger picture. I thought that would be an interesting character to play,regardless of whether we make it clear or not,as an Indigenous woman,what Shauna’s overcome to be at this point in politics.
“She does not care who she collects along the way. She’s just got her eye on the prize … She’s someone like Bob Katter. He’s a fool,but I do think that he has his mind made up about what he’s doing,and it’s just poor social skills.”