I wish I could have watched Sweet Country with Mum. How, like on the 13th of February 2008, we watched the National Apology on the television in her commission flat—me on the couch and Mum a safe distance away at the dining room table. I remember feeling proud and relieved that the government was acknowledging historical wrongs. Holding back tears, I snuck a peak at Mum to see how she was feeling. She was playing Solitaire, but her chin angled toward the television told me she was more interested in what Rudd was saying. I remember thinking that it wasn’t my place to cry—she was the one who had been stolen. Mum, and her mum, and quite possibly her mum before her.

Sweet County is Warwick Thornton’s cinematic immersion into one version of the Stolen Generations’ experience. Set in the wild ‘western’ frontier of central Australia in the 1920s, it highlights white-supremacist attitudes and exposes the condescension of the missionaries and policy makers, those who never would have thrived in their outback holdings without the labour of Aboriginal children kidnapped from family and country far away.