I see that John Howard, the Australian prime minister, was in Downing Street this week asking for Tony Blair's help in repatriating the remains of more than 2,000 aborigines. Before making a decision, Blair and the museum bosses could visit some of the shows in the Australian Heads Up season currently playing in London, in particular Jane Harrison's Stolen at the Tricycle, and a pair of one-woman shows at the Barbican.

At the very least, the shows would tell them something about the wrongs aborigines have historically endured and about their sacred relationship with the past. Stolen is extraordinary, as moving as any show in London. Its starting point is the Australian government's policy, which apparently lasted from 1910 to the mid-70s, of forced integration of aboriginal people: in practice, this meant wrenching children from their parents and placing them in special homes. Some were adopted by foster parents, some went into domestic slavery, others drifted into petty crime. But the social disruption was immense and the violation of the natural tie complete. And only now is the nation confronting its collective guilt and hungering for reconciliation.

Harrison's play has been part of that process. It started in 1992 as a research project funded by an aboriginal theatre group. It is now on its second national tour and is making its debut outside Australia here. But the reason for its success is instructive - it is not worthy, it is not preachy, it is not even violently angry. It simply recounts the aboriginal experience in fluid and entertaining form.

What it proves - not unlike the South African production of The Island - is that good theatre is the best way of recording social injus tice. Harrison's method is to focus on five characters. We meet Shirley, the classic earth mother, desperate to find her abducted kids and see her grandchildren. Then there are Ruby, a crazed solitary sold into domestic servitude, and the pale-skinned Anne torn between her suburban foster parents and her real family. The two males are Sandy, a vagrant with a mystic sense of the past, and Jimmy, an orphaned outsider driven to suicide.

All have one thing in common: they were stolen children. But a key point the play makes is the diversity of aboriginal experience.

What is impressive is the form, a restless, time-transcending mosaic dazzlingly realised in Wesley Enoch's production. One moment we see the five characters as institutionalised children playing rhyming games but always fearful of authority. The next they are adults either seeking or being sought.

Sometimes their plight is expressed visually, at others verbally. Ruby's lifelong slavery is embodied by a mop descending on her head from the ceiling. Sandy tells a Catch-22 tale about the arbitrariness of authority: welfare condemned his mother as unfit because her shelves contained an outdated can of peas which they themselves had supplied in the first place.

You are moved by the authenticity of the experience - these are true stories vividly told. And the effect is overwhelmingly reinforced by the closing moments when the actors abandon all pretence and recount their own experiences.

Pauline Whyman tells of her own mother who had 11 children stolen from her and of what it was like growing up as an aborigine categorised until 1967 under "flora and fauna". Kylie Belling describes the shock of meeting her natural parents when she was 24. Glenn Shea expresses the hope that one day all the stolen children may sit with their aboriginal gods.

But the overall effect is not pious. Rather, one is moved to tears by the way an unthinking white bureaucracy distorted and even destroyed so many individual lives. Apologists for the past might point to the way some of the stolen children prospered.

And there is a fascinating solo show at the Barbican, White Baptist Abba Fan (playing in tandem with Box the Pony), which I saw in Sydney and in which Deborah Cheetham recalls how she was brought up as an "adopted aboriginal", studied music and became an opera singer. But Cheetham also recalls the emotional cost of severance and the pain of reunion with her real family. Nothing can excuse an unfeeling official policy; and, as one of the actresses in Stolen points out, those who survived it amount to a freakish 1%.

While seeing these shows I've been reading Jonathan Bate's The Song of the Earth which offers an ecological reading of literature and makes a powerful plea for poetry as the place where we save the earth. Seeing Stolen and White Baptist Abba Fan suggests to me that drama may have a parallel function. It is the last place, in a hi-tech world, where we gather to hear stories and possibly redeem the past.

Poetry, Bate says, becomes the original admission of dwelling. Theatre, in the case of these exhilarating Australian shows, becomes a vehicle for reconciliation.

• Stolen is at the Tricycle Theatre, London NW6 (020-7328 1000),till July 15. White Baptist Abba Fan and Box the Pony are at the Barbican, London EC2 (020-7638 8891), till July 8.