A beautiful story, a great cast and a recurring theme of the ugliness of racism and self-imposed ethnic supremacy that brought about the century of the Stolen Generations.

An era of injustice either unknown to or forgotten by many outside Australia; children of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent were forcefully taken from their families by the Australian Government and Christian Missions, largely on the basis of unfounded fears of miscegenation (genetic mixture of different ethnic/racial groups through reproduction), and racial impurity. Fuelled by ignorance and a general sense of white supremacy, this policy was in place for almost a hundred years until the 1970s.

The story of Nullah (Brandon Walters) is interspersed between other sub-plots of the film. Telling the story of a half-caste; the son of an aboriginal woman and a white man; who is not only cast aside by society, but perpetually having to hide from the authorities who will take him away from the land he belongs to. As he says, “I not blackfella, I not whitefella either. Them coppers come take me away and make me into a whitefella”. His bastardized sentence structure peppered with Aussie colloquialisms are in fact an implicit reflection of his mixed origins.

There are several moments in the film where you think that it might end, but the story goes on, beautifully.

p.s. it’s out in sg cinemas on Christmas Day (today!) – eric, andy and I only realised that we’d watched the sneak preview when we came out of the theatre yesterday…

Related posts:

1. A Year After Sorry Day
2. A Tribute to the Civil Rights Movement
3. Burma, Land of Fear