They say that a baby knows its mother from the first day they are born, just by her smell. The scent of everywhere she has been – the freshly cut grass that brushed her feet, the salt from the seas in which she swam, the spices with which she lovingly cooks, the musky sweet aromas of the community she calls her own. The scent of a home.

Where would any of us be without the grounding of home? Would we be anywhere? Or everywhere and nowhere at once.

The cast of Sydney Theatre Company’s Stolen. Photo © Daniel Boud

After the success of his moving directorial debut Constellations in Sydney Theatre Company’s 2023 Season, Ian Michael solidifies his residency with a haunting, poetic and striking production of Jane Harrison’s Stolen that embodies the loss of home experienced by the stolen generation.

First produced in 1998, roughly a year after the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission released the Bringing Them Home report, Stolen examines the horrific impacts of the Assimilation policies of the early 1900s that saw thousands of children forcibly removed from the spaces and people to which they belonged.

Through...