Metaphor and realism enmeshed Night Cries was shown in my university course to discuss the relationship and unresolved issues a lot of people have with their mothers. The mother in Hollywood films and tv series, the homemaker, the shopper, the department store user, the controller, the cleaner, the sexless mother in Leave it to Beaver. All characters distant from the Australian outback and most people's lives. The unresolved and the loss is physical experience. The child now the carer becomes almost her mother for her mother. We don't know whether the white woman adopted her daughter or had a child with an Aboriginal man and this uncertainty leaves the viewer with questions about society, the law, skin groups, and family ties. Isolation becomes the cliche for the outback as well as mother-daughter relations. Expectations isolate a child. Attachments and trust building are isolated through social expectations. Left grieving, is death too late to cry and to question and talk?
