Short Changed

[3] After spending six years in the bush, Stuart, a young Aboriginal man, is trying to get in contact with his nine-year-old son, who lives with his white mother and grandfather in a well-to-do area, goes to a Christian Brothers school, and is unaware of his father's existence.

[4] The cast included a number of Merritt's Eora Centre students,[5] among others.

However he was worried about getting the project financed with him as director and instead decided to work with George Ogilvie, who had directed Merritt's play The Cake Man in 1976,[3] and was a member of staff at Merritt's Eora Centre for the Visual and Performing Arts in Sydney.

National Film & Sound Archive curators later described it as a depiction of "the daily struggle for dignity of a contemporary black man caught between two worlds", and called it "a successful collaboration between an Indigenous writer and a non-Indigenous director".

[7] Critic David Stratton wrote that it was "an excellent film which presents a very vital problem with great sympathy, understanding and fairness... one of the most interesting, low-budget, urban Australian films to have come out in recent years".