Beneath Roads

At the entrance to the Yarra Ranges Regional Museum in Lilydale, a matched pair of low, horizontal plinths mark the threshold. At just below knee height, they are somewhere between bench seats and cenotaphs. One carries a quote from Dame Nellie Melba: “It is applause I live for.” The other, in stark contrast to the opera diva’s bon mot, reads “Yarra… my father’s country,” attributed to William Barak, Ngurungaeta of the Wurundjeri-willam people, whose Country the museum now occupies. The comedy of this juxtaposition prefigures the curation of the Connections Gallery upstairs, which moves from Barak artefacts to Melba memorabilia and then to vitrines encasing such curiosities as a treasure box belonging to the daughter of a Scottish convict, Violet Brierty. Inside Brierty’s box were “handwritten letters, several teeth, locks of hair and what are possibly gall stones.” Other curios include the Cave Hill Social Club cricket trophy and Weet-Bix swap cards circa 1961.

The first room you encounter upstairs is dedicated to Barak, in a classic museum exhibition of photo collages, pull quotes, and specimens behind glass. It foregrounds his relationship with Swiss-born Baron Frederic Guillaume de Pury, who planted a vineyard next door to the Coranderrk mission—a two thousand-acre block near Healesville, gazetted by the Victorian government in 1863 as a reserve for displaced Aboriginal people of the Kulin Nations. Under government supervision, Barak and his cousin (then Wurundjeri leader Simon Wonga) led their people along the Black Spur to get there—the Songline that is now one of Victoria’s great winding motorcycle roads. The Baron was a magistrate and long-standing member of the local roads board. Preceding their story of “human connection” are two 1920s land sale advertisement brochures in a cylindrical display cabinet. One subdivides the Mooroolbark township into “33 Grand Blocks” with a subheading that reads “Blazing the Trail.” The other is for “Bell Bird Heights” in Lilydale with the slogans: “A man’s worth is the worth of his land” and “live where you WANT to live.” The museum wall texts tell us these subdivisions saw suburbia grow, and “the modern urban face of the Yarra Ranges region emerged” thanks to newly constructed railway stations and roads. The advertising strategy worked. Today, Lilydale certainly does not feel “regional.” It is precisely this terraforming project, underpinned by the trailblazer mythology, that Luritja artist, writer and curator Jenna Rain Warwick interrogates in Beneath Roads (2024), a three-channel video work on display downstairs.

The first time I saw Beneath Roads was its premiere at ACMI (who produced the work) in 2024. It was on view in that strange ‘Gallery 3’ space, sandwiched between the ‘Story of the Moving Image’ and whatever interactive family friendly thing was going on in the basement main gallery at the time. The video is a collage of archival government films and iconic Australian road movies, spliced with new footage of the Aboriginal motorcycle club, the Southern Warriors. Warwick filmed the twenty-something men on Invasion Day in 2024 on a ride tracing the same protest walks Barak made between Coranderrk and Parliament—shot on three cameras and two drones with DOP Rah Dakota and Wurundjeri elder Jacqui Wandin, whose family remain at Coranderrk. One hundred years after the closing of the Coranderrk mission, we see the Warriors ride out on the dirt road towards the cemetery there, which holds many of their ancestors’ bodies. This new context for Beneath Roads at the Yarra Ranges Regional Museum resonates, which drew me to take the short trip out to see it again.

These potentially didactic exhibition contexts might suggest that Warwick’s work is simply educational or historical, but this composition is more poetic than its source material. And Warwick is both a road movie enthusiast and antagonist. The Australian road movie crosses as much genre terrain as it does actual terrain—thrillers, hotrod, New Wave romance, social realism, Western, stoner comedy, drag. From early westerns like The Overlanders (1946) to classics like Wake in Fright (1971), Mad Max (1979), and Priscilla (1994), through to lesser- known greats like Running on Empty (1982), Australian road movies contend with the Wild West frontier mythology of survival and discovery. When I need a reco, I know who to call. Warwick told me about Esben Storm’s In Search of Anna (1978), which she described as a metaphor for the ultimate colonial Australian sense of self: one that is established in proximity to the natural world, but not in dialogue with it. Richard Moir (a younger, sexier version of his dad-character from the 90s TV show Round the Twist) gets out of prison and sets out on a search for an old girlfriend, Anna, which sees him travel from Melbourne to Sydney before ending up in Queensland. Spoiler: he’s so caught up in his search for Anna, he almost misses the chance to find love with his road companion, Sam. It is an excellent film.

All the action happens within the four doors of a 1938 Buick, and the 1970s coastlines are mostly experienced framed by its windows. Self-discovery becomes the final frontier (that’s the postwar road movie’s structural promise—see Wim Wenders who’s also having an ACMI moment). Very “I’ve been to QLD, but I’ve never been to me.” In a 1995 interview with Peter Malone, Storm describes the film as an attempt to depart from AFC period films like Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), to make a film about “leaving the past behind and coming to terms with the present,” adding “that’s what I felt Australia should do.” This is the anxiety that has marked most of Australian film history: building a story over the top of the one that was underneath. But unlike the American road movie, there’s no escape—you can’t leave Australia by road. The road just loops back.

At just over nine minutes long, Beneath Roads includes only three road movies from Warwick’s repertoire: Backlash (Bill Bennett, 1986), Beneath Clouds (Ivan Sen, 2002), Stone Bros. (Richard Frankland, 2006). Each selection, in different ways, considers connection and disconnection to land. However, the bulk of the Beneath Roads collage comprises all the archival government films that an ACMI commission grants access to. Woven in are highways, roads and bridge constructions from films by the Country Roads Board (now VicRoads) between 1952 and 1965, and one from The Commonwealth Film Unit (now Screen Australia), produced in 1966. Another significant contributor is the feature-length documentary, The Back of Beyond directed by John Heyer for the Shell Film Unit in 1956. Shell operated its own film unit producing travelogues of the Australian interior from the late 1920s that are often categorised as documentary, but in practice were oil expeditions, mineral surveys, and corporate image-making exercises. Key to these films is the production of settler colonial space as empty, exotic, and available, where the outback journey could be reconfigured as an act of settler self-discovery. In the postwar boom that saw rising prosperity and the mass availability of the car, ordinary Australians could drive into the interior for the first time and Shell wanted to fuel the adventure.

Lines from Beneath Roads that stood out include: “nature doesn’t provide us with roads, we have to build them,” and “just a man and his truck.” The word “Standardise” flashes up on one screen and three-fingerpost signs appear on another: “Where to go, How to go, Ask Shell.” The three channels wrap around the spectator seating, which feels like being “inside” the propaganda. This is how it would have worked on its original audiences—through immersion and repetition rather than a direct address. But the three screens also ensure something is always at the edge of vision. The 517-kilometre Birdsville Track—the one travelled fortnightly by mailman Tom Kruse in The Back of Beyond—had already been traversed, for tens of thousands of years before it was a perilous post route or Shell film location. Countless other roads and highways in Australia are built on the foundations of Indigenous Songlines—from the Nullarbor crossing to the Maroondah Highway I took to get to Lilydale. These pathways are also records of historical, cultural, spiritual, and ecological wisdom that were memorised in song and passed down through generations, making vast journeys across Australia possible. Without these, the stock routes and vehicular adventures that historical accounts have prioritised could not have existed. But a new story for a “young country” needed to overwrite this land as untravelled, as terra nullius.

The experience of the motorbike offers a proximity to the road that a car or truck does not. You can feel the temperature change, the elevation, smell the change from eucalypt to pine. But the motorcycle club as a cultural form also has this outlaw frontier thing embedded in it (American lore but enthusiastically adopted by Australian culture, Ned Kelly spec.) One of Warwick’s inspirations was Hunter S. Thompson’s Hell’s Angels (1967), which is essentially about white men processing the collapse of the American frontier myth. The Angels perform outsider status as freedom, but Thompson’s whole revelation is that they’re actually the most inside people imaginable: working class Americans crushed by the same system they’re performing rebellion against. The outlaw thing was a performance of the myth (of freedom, lawlessness, of living “outside society”). And what makes this performance possible is the fantasy that the road “belongs to no one.” Their “freedom” is premised on emptiness and a central identity crisis.

The Warriors collapse this mythology. They may mirror the iconography of the outlaw (they ride American low-seated classics like Harley-Davidsons and Indians with patches from “3%” and “Exodus 21:24,” to “such is life”), but they’re not outside society riding through empty space. They’re inside Country and community, riding through storied land. This is why Beneath Roads is such an elegant title. It is literal in terms of the infrastructure built over Songlines, but it reflects the central cultural conundrum that haunts Australian film history: the perpetual building of a story over the top of the one that was underneath. This is the true expression of an “underground.” It is also both the threat and the source of cultural admiration, of unfulfillable desire, that underpins so much of Australian film history.

Warwick also shows that a counter-tradition was already inside the genre. It is not incidental that two of her three chosen road movies—Beneath Clouds and Stone Bros.—are by Aboriginal directors, Ivan Sen (Meriba Omasker) and Richard Frankland (Gunditjmara). Even Bill Bennett’s Backlash can’t escape it. From the slavering compromised cop in Backlash who finds himself dependent on the Aboriginal woman in his custody—for survival and for absolution—to the white New Age cop in Stone Bros. who dreams of going walkabout, the genre is cuffed by this desire.

Of all three, it is Beneath Clouds (2002), from which Warwick derives her title, that demands the most attention. The story follows Lena on a quest to escape her small rural town (somewhere west of Moree, New South Wales) and her Aboriginal mother with whom she lives. She’s heading off in search of her long-gone Irish father and the green misty mountains and sacred sites of Ireland, which she sees as the antidote to the flies, alcoholism, teenage pregnancies, and youth incarceration of her hometown. She finds a travel companion, Vaughn, an Aboriginal boy on the run from a minimum security prison and introduces herself as Irish (and keeps up the ruse throughout). In Beneath Clouds we get a different picture of the landscape. It is never menacing. It holds weight, power, history, and sacred beauty, which Lena comes to appreciate. The threat and eerie gothic energy comes instead from the looming concrete silos protruding from the warm red earth, the huge trucks rattling fast down dirt roads, and pallid cops punctuating the journey. Both Beneath Clouds and Beneath Roads challenge the stories we’ve been telling ourselves. As Vaughn says, in an excerpt included in Beneath Roads, “wouldn’t believe everything you read, all written by whitefullas anyway.”

There’s nothing more Australian than romanticising Irish heritage. Lena wasn’t the only one wearing a Claddagh ring in the 2000s. Ned Kelly, the rebel convict, the green mythic homeland, is the closest settler Australia can come to its own indigeneity: a prior claim, a sacred geography, a persecution narrative that doesn’t require acknowledging anyone else’s. Lena’s running toward the substitute because the real thing has been oppressed and continually overwritten. Ned Kelly is what you get when the thing you actually want is inadmissible. Aboriginal culture is the thing that’s actually being reached for—the deep belonging, the unbreakable relationship to Country—but it’s inaccessible and inadmissible because to claim it would be to acknowledge the dispossession that makes it unavailable. In this sense, the “outlaw” connotations of the Hells Angels, Ned Kelly and the “open road” are essentially a domesticated rebellion. The real underground, the actually suppressed knowledge and national identity is the one Beneath Roads is about. If Esben Storm imagined Australia driving away from its past, Warwick shows we’ve just been driving over it. And this is true too from the land’s perspective: the axis of time runs vertically, in strata. Stories can be paved over but remain present, and load-bearing.