Beneath Roads

Beneath Roads is a response to a purposeful void in Australia’s collective knowledge. Long before horses and carts found their way across the country, the land was crisscrossed by Indigenous pathways that remain the foundation for countless highways and roadways today.

Knowledge of these routes, their features and cultural significance is depicted in songs, which are memorised and passed down through generations. These traditional forms of navigation and spiritual understanding of place are known as Songlines. Many of the roads you drive on today are the result of this practice. One of the most identifiable pathways in Victoria navigated for centuries is the Omeo highway connecting north-east Victoria to Gippsland through Ngarigo, Jaitmatang and Gunnai Kurnai Country.

This visual poem ruminates on the layering of bitumen over these ancient routes through the lens of Australian cinema. The portrayal of the outback on screen has become one of this nation’s most recognisable cultural exports and the road genre offers one way to unpack a constructed national identity.

ABOUT THE SOURCES

Beneath Roads is assembled from a range of different film sources.

Ivan Sen’s debut feature, the road film Beneath Clouds (2002), considers the unresolved tensions of settler Australia. As two Indigenous teenagers, Vaughn (Damien Pitt) and Lena (Dannielle Hall), hitchhike toward Sydney, their journey is defined more by racism than the freedom that the road often symbolises. Director of photography Allan Collins captures the landscape as one hemmed in by powerlines and overcast skies, the terrain patrolled by cops and trampled by industry. But despite these settler interventions, the beauty and grandeur of Country prospers, captured through wide vistas and intimate close-ups of the landscape. Both Sen and Collins won an AACTA award for Best Director and Best Cinematography respectively.

Beneath Clouds and other narrative titles are juxtaposed with archival historical films about Australian road building. These Government-made promotional films of the 1950s and 60s were used to build support for ‘nation building’ and were released during the same period First Peoples gained the right to vote in 1962. These are included in Beneath Roads to highlight the lack of awareness of centuries-old Indigenous navigation and travel routes upon which many modern roads were built.

Beneath Roads further counters this lack of awareness by including footage of the Southern Warriors, a Victorian Aboriginal motorcycle club. On Survival Day in 2024, the Southern Warriors rode to Coranderrk mission to honour Wurundjeri activist William Barak’s historic protest walks from Coranderrk to Melbourne, during which Barak advocated for the mission and his people’s rights. Historically First Peoples’ ability to travel was restricted by systemic racism and discriminatory government policies that pervaded Australia until the 1970s. The Southern Warriors stand in stark contrast to this history, representing a sense of freedom, safety and pride for Indigenous communities. Impossible to ignore, the self-described ‘warriors’ travel the state Black, loud and proud.