Valerie Linow, 73, belongs to the Bundjalung nation and was separated from her parents when she was two years old.

When she was nine, she was taken to south-west New South Wales, to the Cootamundra domestic training home for Aboriginal girls. She left six years later and was forced to work in the town of Wombat for a former police officer, who raped her when she was 15.

She ran away to Redfern and attempted suicide three years later. To this day she experiences flashbacks, for which she takes medication.

Servant or Slave is an emotionally charged one-hour documentary that explores the formative years of Linow and four other Indigenous women who share stories of upbringings ravaged by racism.

The title appears at the start along with two definitions of the eponymous words:

Servant (Noun): A person employed by another, especially to perform domestic duties.

Slave (Noun): A person who is forced to work for another against their will.

A national past pockmarked by slavery is something Australians generally associate with other countries, such as the US. And while the director, Steven McGregor – who wrote the excellent Redfern Now: Promise Me – doesn’t explicitly level that accusation, it’s clear from the start what he’s suggesting.

“We wanted to be straight upfront and give the audience some context,” he tells Guardian Australia. “The film won’t be everybody’s cup of tea and there will probably be a few knockers. But we took those words straight out of the dictionary.”

Produced by No Coincidence Media for NITV and screening on Wednesday, Servant or Slave revolves around the testimonies of its five subjects: Rita Wright, Violet West and the three Wenberg sisters, Adelaide, Valerie and Rita.

Their voices come and go in the opening scene. An exquisite rendition of Down in the River to Pray is matched with beautiful, autumnal looking images of young Aboriginal women outdoors. The colour grading was inspired by the town of Cootamundra: the blues of its sky, the yellows of its wattle trees.

These melancholic visions are antithetical to the documentary’s message and the town’s ignominious place in 20th-century history. The Cootamundra home opened in 1911 and closed in 1968. During that time, hundreds of Indigenous girls were forcibly removed from their parents and placed there. They were raised by white people for the purpose of assimilation and trained to serve non-Indigenous households.

The stories told are heartbreaking, encompassing rape, domestic violence, abuse of various kinds and the overarching shadow of institutionalised racism. These activities were partly funded, McGregor believes, by wages stolen from people including his documentary subjects. This is the first time his subjects have gone on the record.

“They’d been approached on various occasions over the years but they weren’t quite ready,” he says. “For some reason they felt this was the time to tell their story.

“Some people say that was then and this is now, so get over it. But these things are living with these women everyday. It affects them today. It affects their children and it affects their grandchildren.”

McGregor set about making these women, who had no prior experience of being interviewed, feel comfortable. He stripped back the artificial nature of film set environments, making the atmosphere as private and personal as possible.

There were no papers on his knee; the director believes that referring to notes is a bit too businesslike. The sound recordist was located off to the side, unseen. The director of photography (crack shutterbug Simon Chapman, who shot Cut Snake and Joe Cinque’s Consolation) was positioned behind a black screen, where he could observe a monitor but be out of sight.

“I set the tone and mood in the room as, simply, we’re having a yarn,” McGregor says. “We’re just having a talk.

“But sometimes it was hard. When Valerie talked about how she was raped, that was a very difficult story for her to tell. There was about four of us in the room at the time. Our DOP and sound person were non-Indigenous and weren’t aware of any of these stories. At the end of that day everyone was pretty shattered.”

During filming there were times, Linow says, when she “kept breaking, kept breaking down”. Like all the subjects, she approves of the finished film (“If they didn’t like it they’d let you know,” says McGregor), but Linow couldn’t bear to watch herself on screen: “I just looked away and started crying.”

Linow became the first member of the stolen generations to receive compensation for crimes committed against her while she was a ward of the state. She was compelled to speak, she says, because: “I want my story out. It’s been locked inside me so long. I want everybody to know what happened to the Aboriginal kids in that era, because it was a cruel era.

“As I keep saying, the stolen generation were the first street kids. They just pushed us out and we had nowhere to go. We were street kids.”

Many Australians have some knowledge, or assumption, of the kinds of things that might have transpired during these dark times. But to hear them articulated by the victims themselves, and illustrated by powerful albeit discreet re-enactments, brings the details to mind in terrible ways. As McGregor says: “You’d have to have a hard heart not to be affected by it.”

The film-maker was knowledgeable before he took on the directing job but there were things that took him by surprise.

One of them was how the women, being raised by white people, came to regard their own kind. They didn’t know what to make of fellow Indigenous Australians when, as adolescents and adults, they saw them on the street for the first time.

“We were frightened,” Linow says. “We had never been taught about our people. When we saw an Aboriginal person, you didn’t know who they were.

“A lot of Aboriginal people in the stolen generation do think, do feel they are white. With me, I always say to myself, you might have tried to bring me up like a white woman, but you forgot one thing: the colour of my skin. And that’s black.”

Towards the end of the interview, Linow broaches an easier conversation – one that generates nothing but positive thoughts. She talks about her beloved dog, a kelpie-cross. She says she loves animals, prefers them to humans. And after a moment’s thought, adds: “It’s not a terrible world we live in. It’s a beautiful world. But people have the power to make it terrible.”

• Servant or Slave is broadcast on NITV (channel 34 on free-to-air) on Wednesday 30 November at 9.30pm