The inherently fragmentary nature of memories is a difficult thing to visualise, but The Last Daughter’s co-directors, Brenda Matthews and Nathaniel Schmidt, do a fine job of it in this tenderly crafted documentary. Imagery throughout the film is tuned to the testimony of Matthews, a Wiradjuri woman and member of the stolen generations who was removed from her biological family when she was very young. She was placed in the custody of white foster parents who raised her in a loving home for five years before being directed to return her to her Aboriginal family. This created, in the long run, a large gap in her understanding of her past.
Matthews’ first memories were of growing up in a white family but where did they go? Why did they leave her life? Adapted from Matthews’ memoir of the same name, The Last Daughter is a very personal detective story, at times very sad but underscored with a rich humanitarianism that makes it spirited and uplifting. Endeavouring to bring together both sides of her narrative and her family – Aboriginal and white – the film joins a canon of productions (including documentaries such as Zach’s Ceremony and dramas such as Mystery Road) that grapple with the difficulties of reconciling Indigenous cultures with a postcolonial society, with its Judeo-Christian foundations and genocidal past.
Most productions about the stolen generations understandably and necessarily focus on the people removed from their homes. The Last Daughter also provides insight into the foster parents, who took on caring for a child with the noblest of intentions.
We meet Matthews’ white foster parents, Mac and Connie, who wanted to help children who “needed a home and weren’t as fortunate as we were”, as Connie puts it. Mac recalls what it felt like when a clearer picture emerged of the personal and societal implications of their fostering. “We thought we were the heroes,” he tearfully recounts, “but we ended up being the villains … to deprive a mum of her child.”
For most of The Last Daughter, Matthews and her former foster parents are visually disconnected: they don’t share the frame, which builds a desire to see them unified. Matthews’ mother, Nana Brenda, who had all seven of her children taken away, understandably has mixed feelings about her daughter’s desire to track them down and reconnect 40 years later.
Her journey reveals many things, including that the reason authorities gave for Matthews being adopted out in the first place – that her father was an alcoholic – was a lie.
The point is made, without the film needing to directly state it, that systematic and institutionalised racism is to blame for what happened, and that same system continues to oppress Indigenous people today.
Early in the runtime the directors harness the symbolic potential of doors, which can be powerful in visual storytelling. Doors can represent passage from one world into another (The Wizard of Oz), or the act of escaping entrapment (the end of The Truman Show); in The Last Daughter, the opening of a door symbolises accessing or unlocking a distant memory. The film loops back to vision of a slightly ajar door, opening gradually as the camera inches ahead, two young girls in a light-filled room on the other side. Again this connects with Matthews’ narration; in particular, her reflections on how she “always had dreams of houses and doorways and hallways and hiding places”.
There’s also the mystery of the person Matthews describes as her “little white sister”, whose presence is carefully and sporadically visualised. She appears via vague, poetic glimpses that dance on the edges of the film, like a beautiful, benevolent spirit, sort of there and sort of not.
The Last Daughter also uses more conventional documentary forms, including talking heads, observational footage and re-enactments. The latter are tastefully staged, with large portions of the frame blurred out – an obvious choice, perhaps, to depict subjects looking through the fog of their past, but certainly highly effective. They also visually express how our minds may forget the periphery details of long-ago events, we can vividly recall how we felt; the reason those moments are rooted in our psyches.
There’s lots to appreciate here, story and subject-wise, as well as texturally and aesthetically. The Last Daughter gracefully shows how old wounds can be healed and how distant memories can come back into colour and focus.
The Last Daughter is out in cinemas around Australia now
