It’s the bright green play mat, with nine perfectly placed patches in different stimulating colours and friendly animal faces, that lets me know our protagonist Sadie is a NSW mum like me.

The play mat given to new mums as part of the NSW Health baby bag, which filled my camera roll for the best part of a year, is casually draped over a bassinet on Cris Baldwin’s homely stage.

Abutting a simple bookshelf tightly packed with nappies, baby wipes, baby books and other postpartum essentials, Baldwin paints a tidy picture of motherhood – one in direct antithesis to the cluttered bomb site of a baby room I waded through each sleep-dazed morning of postpartum.

Jorjia Gillis quickly blows this propriety of motherhood wide open with her canny depiction of postpartum through Sadie (Stephanie Somerville, Big Girls Don’t Cry). A new Martu mum who has recently moved to Sydney, Sadie’s husband travels for work and, away from her family and Country, she finds herself alone, trying to settle a dysregulated baby who refuses to sleep.

Seeking connection and support, she joins an Inner West mum group, where she meets two blonde mums...