Australia's appalling human rights record is in the limelight at the moment, thanks in part to the referring of Australia Day as "Invasion Day", and protests about the locking up of refugees (including children) and New Zealand criminals in offshore detention centres.
Google's Australia Day homepage "doodle" this year even recognised the trauma of the Stolen Generations - indigenous Australian children who were forcibly removed from their families and placed in foster homes or institutions.
So the time seems ripe for Hart, a one-man play which does a great job of personalising mass confusion and heartbreak by presenting fragments of the stories of three Stolen Generation survivors, in their own words. These are small-scale individual histories situated within a large political maelstrom - the show starts with voiceover snippets of real speeches, by turns bigoted, activist and apologetic.
That one of the featured survivors is performer Ian Michael's own father makes the show even more immediate, and Michael also presents an exploration of his own cultural identity: sometimes he wished, he says, to scrub off the black of his skin. Matter-of-factly, he states that the inter-generational trauma has continued and will continue: it will affect his own children, and his children's children.
