Beneath Roads is a striking new three-channel video work coming to Yarra Ranges Regional Museum this March.
Opening 7 March at Yarra Ranges Regional Museum, Beneath Roads is an ACMI production developed by Jenna Rain Warwick that challenges how Australian cinema has shaped and distorted our national story.
Road movies are baked into Australian cultural identity. From the Ford Falcon tearing down the highway in Mad Max to hoofs thundering across the highlands in The Man from Snowy River, the genre taps into something deep: a sense of freedom, adventure, and mastery over a vast, supposedly untamed land. It’s become a cinematic export, a cultural shorthand for the Australian spirit. But that story has always had a blind spot.
Beneath Roads – Yarra Ranges Regional Museum
- 7 March 2026 – 5 July 2026
- Yarra Ranges Regional Museum, open Wednesday – Sunday, 10am – 4pm
- Free entry
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Beneath the roads that stitch this country together, including the Omeo Highway, the Bicentennial Track and the Birdsville Track, lie Indigenous walking paths and trading routes that predate cities, cinema, and colonisation by thousands of years.
These weren’t just tracks through the bush; they were sophisticated navigational networks, channels of knowledge, trade, and culture. Colonial history often relabelled them as stockmen’s routes or cattle tracks, quietly erasing First Peoples’ ownership of and relationship to Country.
Warwick’s three-channel work cuts through that erasure. By weaving together archival government films, iconic Australian road movies, and newly captured footage of Aboriginal motorcycle club The Southern Warriors, the exhibition puts First Peoples’ knowledge and legacy back into the frame.
It’s a recontextualisation of cinema, history, and Country that asks audiences to reconsider what stories we’ve been told, who told them, and what’s been left out.
Running through to 5 July, Beneath Roads is free and open to all. It’s the kind of work that sits with you long after you leave the gallery, quietly reshaping the way you see the landscape out the car window on the drive home.
For more information, head here.
This article was made in partnership with Yarra Ranges Regional Museum.
