His employer, Fred Smith, a kindly preacher, agrees to lend Sam, his wife, Lizzie, and his niece, Lucy, to a bitter, abusive, and alcoholic veteran of World War I named Harry March on a neighbouring farm to renovate the latter's paddock fences.

Eventually Sam and Lizzie return to turn themselves in, while Fletcher has a gallows constructed and tries to influence the judge who comes to the town to conduct the trial.

The storyline of the film was inspired by the true story of an Australian Aboriginal man named Wilaberta (or Wilberta or Willaberta) Jack in 1929 and his shooting of ANZAC veteran Harry Henty.

[8] One reviewer muses on the label "neo-Western", which invokes a very old genre (including the classic Western doomed hero character) as well as a "sense of newness and revival".

[9] Set in outback Central Australia about ten years after World War I, rather than the earlier colonial or pre-federation period of Australia's history of many traditional westerns, the film deals with the effects of the war on its white inhabitants, the extreme racism and slavery which existed at that time and how Indigenous workers were used to build the country,[2] and personal morality.

[8] Fred is a White character who shows kindness and morality, but even the worst villain (Harry) is also shown as a victim of life in the trenches of the war, who has returned damaged.

The website's critical consensus reads, "Sweet Country makes brilliant use of the Australian outback as the setting for a hard-hitting story that satisfies as a character study as well as a sociopolitical statement".