While I lived in Sydney (where there are comparatively few aboriginal people in the metropolitan area) this story wouldn't have had much impact on me. But since moving to Perth where a lot more indigenous people live in the suburbs – and where the casual, cultural and institutional racism and assumptions about their character and conduct are pretty ingrained – it made a lot more sense. Coincidentally, it was all shot in and around Perth.

It actually leaned into some stereotypes our culturally sensitive age of inclusivity doesn't officially recognise but which the silent majority are very aware of; how indigenous people are assumed to be criminals at worst, ne'er do wells at best, how you can't give one good aboriginal person an inch because their entire extended family of hangers-on will come and take a mile, etc.

They come in the shape of Doug (John Moore) and his friend/frenemy Floyd (David Ngoombujarra). Doug got grassed up by his supposed friends on a robbery and did time for it but now he's out and determined to go straight, including raising the money to buy back a horse property out in the country that's been in his family for years but which nobody – least of all his career criminal father – can afford to keep.

But his fast talking friend Floyd is constantly trying to persuade Doug to join him on scams and jobs and enjoy the good life, to hell with the system, the cops and the whites who assume they and their kind are all trash.

Doug is pulled in so many directions he can barely think straight. His white mother wants to see him prosper, representing something of a rejection of the ways of the community he feels like he belongs to, especially of it leading to drinking, stealing cars and particularly his father.

There's also a burgeoning relationship with Polly, a local girl from his group of friends who might offer a way back to the light but – being a thief herself, albeit not on Floyd's level – might just be another erstwhile devil tempting him off the path.

As soon as you think Doug's going to break through and achieve what he set out to do, one stupid decision might derail it all, and the movie ends without you really finding out whether he makes it or not because in the final scene it actually becomes Floyd's story, and after Floyd himself has been given a few chances to right his own life, he's squandered them all and his story becomes a tragedy.

It's very competently shot, better written than you expect from the government-funded filmmaking firmament of the era, and even though you can see the actors trying a bit too much here and there, their commitment and enthusiasm for the roles never waver and that does a lot to carry you the whole way.

Ernie Dingo is in the cast too somewhere, but I didn't even recognise him.