Still from Highway Improvements Australia, 1965
Still from 'Highway Improvements Australia' (1965) Country Roads Board
Stories & Ideas

Wed 14 Aug 2024

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Mid 20th century film travelogues embedded machinery, fossil fuels and battles against the landscape deep within the colonial psyche.

One of the most curious chapters in Australia's cinematic history began in 1948 when petroleum group Shell Company of Australia formed its own film production unit.

'Shell Film Unit Australia' produced hundreds of promotional and educational films about mining, roads, infrastructure, sports and motoring and other similar topics. While films like The Back of Beyond (1954), which won the Grand Prix Absolute at the Venice Film Festival, provided a fascinating snapshot of 'remote' mid century Australia, its depictions of life in the Red Centre and the First Nations people who lived there, were often clouded with desires to further the colonial project – and oil.

With her three-channel artwork Beneath Roads, ACMI Curator Jenna Rain Warwick has produced a poetic response to these works, intercutting archival government films, iconic Australian road movies and newly captured footage of the Aboriginal motorcycle club The Southern Warriors, to reinsert First Peoples knowledge legacies and representation into our cinematic canon and recontextualise our relationship to history, culture and Country.

Jenna was joined by Art Gallery of New South Wales' curator of Film, Ruby Arrowsmith-Todd to discuss the Shell Film Unit and the nature of its travelogues, and the making of Beneath Roads, in a recorded conversation that took place at ACMI in July 2024.

About the artwork

Transcript

Jenna Rain Warwick: I'm Jenna Rain Warwick, I am one of the First Nations curators here at ACMI. I curated and produced one of the works exhibiting in ACMI at the moment, Beneath Roads. Beneath Roads is a three-channel video work exploring Australian cinema through the lens of road movies and questioning why the road movie is so attached and synonymous with Australian cinema. And how does that sit along with the truth of roads... the majority of Australian roads being Aboriginal walking paths, trading routes, and in a bigger system of songlines throughout Australia. And that's kind of knowledge that not many people really know about and there's kind of two topics and points of interest that I guess the work downstairs talks to.

Why I’ve asked Ruby to come today is because of one of the films used in Beneath Roads is ‘The Back of Beyond’. And ‘The Back of Beyond’ was produced and funded by the Shell Film Unit. And Ruby is a programmer, researcher. She runs a free cinematheque at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and I came across her work as her thesis is ‘Mapping the Settler Colonial Travelogue, the Shell Film Unit in Australia 1939 to 1954’.

Ruby, did you want to just talk about how you first came across the Shell Film Unit? Because I kept on kind of seeing it when I was doing research into the work Beneath Roads and it seemed like a bigger picture in Australian cinema than it was really talked about or when I first kind of came across it.

Ruby Arrowsmith-Todd: So, I first came across ‘The Back of Beyond’ back in my undergraduate years. I was always struck that Australia's first internationally acclaimed art film was sponsored by a petroleum company. So, ‘The Back of Beyond’ won the Grand Prix at the Venice Film Festival in 1954 and was really I guess a landmark of the 1950s era of Australian cinema. And back then I was struck by the alignment of artistic production and industry very naively, and I now know having worked in the arts for several years, that those two things are of course deeply entwined and have always historically been deeply entwined. We can think about cultures of patronage and of course the imbrication of the fossil fuel industry in the arts today persists.

JRW: I wondered if you could talk a little bit to the financial ecosystem of when ‘Back of Beyond’ was made and what... because they brought John Heyer onto the team to make this documentary; it wasn't kind of him coming with the project. And I just wanted to think about, how is it possible and what was the kind of, you know, the financial landscape of Australian filmmaking at that time?

RA: Totally, there's a lot to unpack there. I'll just maybe begin by giving a bit of a broader overview of Shell's film operations at the time. So, why was an oil company invested in the production of moving images? So, Shell really began sponsoring films in Australia in the 1930s and they made films for a huge range of reasons. We need to remember in the early 20th century, the oil intensive lifestyles that we all inhabit today weren't yet second nature. So the production of films was very much part of this project of naturalising oil in our lives, of selling the promise of new ways of moving across the land new ways of working, new products, this sort of transformative potential of oil.

So in 1948 Shell, as you say, invited John Heyer, and he formed the Shell Film Unit Australia. So this was an in-house production team. At the time, Shell, which was a multinational based in London and also the Netherlands, had a whole sort of transnational network of film units that radiated out from the metropole. So what was happening here in Australia was just one part of this broader circuit that went across the world from Egypt, Venezuela, parts of Southeast Asia and so on.

As well as making films, Shell was also actively invested in distributing and exhibiting them. So they had theaterettes in each capital city, they had a 16mm lending library. So if your organisation, your classroom, your church, your advocacy group had 16mm projection capabilities you could loan a film from Shell, and they also had a fleet of mobile film units. So that's I guess a sort of... and by mobile film units and maybe we can sort of touch on this more later because it's a really interesting point, these mobile film units werethese vans equipped with generators, equipped with drop down screens with 16mm projectors and also with films that circled all around Australia showing films in tiny townships at pastoral stations in places where there wasn't necessarily a fixed commercial picture palace nearby.

So I guess just to zoom back from what I've been saying, the company was invested in the production, distribution and exhibition of cinema in Australia across the mid-century. In this way it was a fully vertically integrated ecosystem kind of like a Hollywood studio. So it's a really significant form of industrially sponsored filmmaking that as you say is not really well known and not really part of the Australian film narrative.

JRW: Which I came across; I'd done a little film studies at university and I just had thought that this was a really big chapter that kind of seemed not just left out but obviously left out and that's kind of what struck me.

RA: Totally, I think like the Australian... the story we tell about Australian cinema tends to be one of boom, bust, boom. So the boom of the silent era, the bust of the mid-century the 1940s to the 60s being these fallow years and certainly in terms of feature film production that was the case. And then of course the second boom being the 70s film renaissance. It's interesting I think it really, these kind of films challenge what we understand as a film because we're not talking about theatrical feature films that were made for the purpose of entertainment and shown in the multiplex.

JRW: Yeah and I guess that kind of brings me to another point of like what a travelogue is and ‘The Back of Beyond’ is seen as a documentary although is it a documentary when it's like quite scripted or quite you know... positioned on purpose. And I kind of wondered what is that... what is a travelogue really and how does that kind of fit when we're thinking about Australian feature films and theatrical kind of films? To me as well because it was a travelogue, because it was a documentary then it would sit outside of like these films like you know the Snowy - you know - all those, those films.

RA: Totally, the ‘Mad Max’ canon.

JRW: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

RA: Well I think you're totally right like those feature films you mentioned... the travelogues are a part of the lineage. They're the sort of the mid-century bread and butter, these narratives. And just to go to your question about what is a travelogue as I understand it and having watched now quite a lot of them, they all tend to follow the same formula. It's this, it's documenting movement across space. It's usually, you know, I can talk specifically about a Shell film called ‘Through the Centre’ which is a film that, it sets out from point A, it goes usually through the north and the centre of Australia which at the time in that mid-century moment was such a sort of frontier for the settler imagination, and then it sort of safely returns back to point B.

And why there are so many films that are travelogues in Shell's corpus is quite obvious because it is a documentary that can showcase the, you know, the promise of oil as a means of travelling across the land, collapsing time and space. So travelogues are really key to the sort of, not just the oil sort of cinematic imaginary, but as you mentioned like the cinematic imaginary of Australia more broadly and even like a kind of national ethos because the stories that these travelogues tell, they're the sort of same stories we see repeated from like, you know, explorers’ journals and then 19th century like bush ballads and painting culture. So, you know, the construction of Australia as a settler nation is so founded on these stories of heroic overcoming of a so-called hostile or intractable land.

Audio excerpt from ‘The Back of Beyond’: Supplies and mail for lonely cattle stations. Stations measured by thousands of miles, where the man living a hundred miles away is your neighbour and your only link with the outside world is Her Majesty’s royal mail... Tom Kruse... laying heavy iron sheets kept beside the track and carried on the truck, while the sun beats down a hundred and twenty degrees in the shade, and the only shade is the shadow of the truck. A carrier called Kruse. Every fortnight, fighting the sand seven hundred miles to Birdsville and back. Every fortnight, the story begins...

JRW: I think I read John talking about the work and also kind of referring to past films and that like, you know, it's trying to depict this Australian, this great, this one topic or this one kind of thing that is a singular like vision of Australia and it ultimately is a battle against the natural, a battle against, you know, the Red Centre. But then I was kind of thinking in that in First Nations perspectives like, are we the natural or like that what is that kind of as well. But yeah I think broadly as well when you're thinking about what we think of Australian cinema today, that theme just comes through so much. And yeah I just am trying to understand like this kind of history that we're talking about and how like the construction of Australia on screen is really constructed like very much on purpose, but in that it's one of our best or like most significant cultural exports is the outback.

RA: Totally, totally. And I think looking at Shell's films from this period is one... it's an archive that helps us look at how oil companies, how corporations themselves were so key to that construction. So, you know, oil companies and the state were so often working in cahoots to propagate these images.

JRW: Yeah, I came across that with Paramount films as well because I was doing quite a lot of research into government road building films, gazettes kind of thing, news reels, and it was so strange to kind of come across films that were from like 1930s around that time that again I guess were sponsored or if they had the Paramount logos before them going into you know videos of men going to bush tracks.So I think it was a bit of a, I think probably naively I did think that the kind of separate of the two was very much the case and I think uncovering it a little bit, it almost seemed didn't real it seemed like this can't be true this can't... and then you find out more and more and yeah.

But I also wanted to kind of another kind of similarity was that ‘The Back of Beyond’ is it's a journey and you say that's a big thing of travelogues. But they're talking about the Birdsville track which is, you know, a significant trading route and walking track from... it's like an ochre trading route from like western Queensland down to South Australia or vice versa and I kind of started making these connections that so much a part of the Australian identity on screen was about overriding these pathways. And that kind of comes back to like car culture and yeah there was like these two kind of things I was like how can this too be real as much as I like yeah research it too. Can you speak to that a little bit or did you kind of know much about that kind of track history at all?

RA: I knew a bit...

JRW: They mention it briefly in the film. They say, “On the pads of camel tracks and bare black feet of desert tribesmen...” that’s as much as it gets, really.

RA: Yes that's true but I do think, um, rewatching the film this week in anticipation for our talk, like the fact that there is acknowledgement that Birdsville is built atop of this trading route is quite rare for the kind of the travelogue culture of the time. And I think that speaks to you know ‘The Back of Beyond’ is just such a deeply complex, ambiguous film that's riven with contradiction because, you know, compared to the prevailing racist stereotypes of most First Nations people when they were captured in travelogues at that time, you know, at least in ‘The Back of Beyond’ you know the fellas, they're individuated. They have names, they have characters, but you know in the next sentence there will be reference to a vanishing race, so it's not a straightforwardly you know progressive or positive representation by any means.

JRW: I was interested in, yeah kind of coming across how progressive that it was seen at the time and the kind of the reception of it was like, you know, shown in classrooms. It was very much an educational look into like what is life like in central desert. And also like, I'm a Luritja woman so like, my family's country is just outside of Alice Springs and that's why I also very much resonated with the thesis and thinking about through the Red Centre is like I've never really known that place in Australia as to be hostile. So like, seeing representations of it has always kind of like made me try to ask more and kind of like why is this positioned like that? But yeah, I guess speaking to the reception of the film because it was like groundbreaking and it's interesting as well.

RA: It was, it was. So as you mentioned it was, I think, you know, seen by an estimated 10 percent of the entire Australian population. It was translated into multiple languages abroad, it you know obviously had international acclaim.

JRW: It won at so many film festivals.

RA: So many awards and I do think that that comes back to Heyer, John Heyer who's a really interesting figure. You know, he was reading, you know, he would read Sergei Eisenstein's constructivist film theory, he was being actively surveilled by ASIO at the time for his supposed you know left-wing communist tendencies. And one of the things that's really interesting about the reception of ‘The Back of Beyond’ is that ASIO were really displeased with the film. So there's correspondence where they say, “if Heyer has deliberately set out to discredit Australia then he's achieved his aim,” so they were very unhappy with the image that it exported abroad and I think that, you know, when I try and make sense of what could they be unhappy with, I think it does come back to the complex way in which... I mean for me it's a narrative... whereas so many travelogues are that sort of triumphalist movement from A to B, there's so many scenes here of going in circles, of getting lost, of failed enterprise. There's such a preoccupation also with ruination with you know the scenes of the copper mine emission, these scenes of there's such an emphasis also on fossils, on carcasses, on a real dwelling with that.

But there’s also I think a, you know, as problematic as the film is, you know, a recognition that there are multiple different ways to live on the track and I think here particularly of the scenes of Bejah Dervish the cameleer who is, who's featured in the film and the acknowledgement that you know South Asian communities were also key to the transformation of that landscape as well as the different First Nations folks who appear on the film and there's this you know great anecdote about one of the guys they call him Joe the Rainmaker I'm sure he has his own you know he would have his own name.

JRW: – yeah, the last of the Rainmakers, they say.

RA: – the last of the Rainmakers, you know. But they, you know, they also say his incantations and, you know, caused them to... caused huge production delays and caused, you know, huge flooding so it's sort of a film where you need to look at the edges to try and find moments of tension like that.

JRW: Do you think that it was, you know, hiring or bringing somebody like him on was very much... because he was a little bit edgier or he was a little bit more progressive that was, that's what the Shell film was really looking for to kind of like bring them into like this new age really?

RA: I think so. I think they gave Heyer the deliberate brief to capture the essence of Australia.

JRW: That's right, essence, triumph of man kind of. But like, he brings his problems to it really.

RA: He does. And that's why I think it's like it's such a complex text but I'd be really keen to hear you know Jenna as a Luritja woman, you know, you've talked about sort of being drawn to but also repelled by, you know, some of these images I'd love to hear, you know, your thoughts on the representation of the landscape.

JRW: I guess that's that kind of ambivalence too because in one aspect it's positioning

my people as a dying race, but then the other it's... I just kind of look at the country and I'm like at least I have some type of like filmic video of it as well. So, it's as much as I feel... and I can see why it is perceived as progressive I guess by what you're comparing it to. I'm grateful that it exists and that although, yeah, I kind of... the overtones of the death and the rotting, the skeletons... and then also, you know, the story at the end with the two little girls kind of going off and being lost in the desert that again, you know, that's... and that's the main sympathetic story that we hear from it. I was surprised watching it, I think I probably thought it was going to be a lot worse, you know, just thinking about the time. But then I think yeah reading a little bit more about him and, you know, his work and what he was kind of interested in. But I also like I just yeah... I feel pretty gross about it too at the same time yeah. But I wanted it was very I wanted to put it in my work, into Beneath Roads, as to kind of acknowledge that and to also like take more ownership of the depiction of the central desert, you know? And then just reading your thesis I was just really interested if in the network of screening the show and how, that the viewership... because I really don't understand why they would do it. Like, what was the purpose of that kind of screening back to communities that they were trying... they were representing as well like I was, you know, what's the impetus to that?

RA: So, the network of 16mm screenings that were particularly big post-World War II, so World War II was this really important moment for showing the supposed power of 16mm, and by you know 16mm here I'm referring to you know the smaller gauge film stock that has a projector that's far more lightweight, flexible, mobile can be moved around, right? So, after World War II, all range of organisations, industries, churches, advocacy groups various, you know, governmental departments like the roads board for example all want to get in on the game of 16mm and I'll speak specifically about the Northern Territory here. So the Department of Native Affairs explicitly sets out to set up this network of 16mm screenings at government-run missions, settlements other places of attempted First Nations containment.

JRW: And it was mainly at like Blak missions and it wasn't like in town it was like specifically for Blak communities, is that right?

RA: So for those particular like Department of Native Affairs screenings were, so it was this sort of idea that like screenings would come to these communities and, you know, in the correspondence the Department of Native Affairs are talking about, you know, using these screenings as part of broader project of assimilation that was, you know, the kind of governmental policy at the time so they set up this network. And then because Shell, like because these oil companies were so big in the 16mm space their films inevitably fed into these circuits, right? And because also, you know, in the various travelogues that we've discussed often, you know, and this is you know deeply, deeply problematic but part of this history, you know, stopping in at, you know, missions stopping in at pastoral stations other places where there were, you know, large First Nations communities was part of the itinerary often part of the itinerary in these travelogues because, you know, documenting travel to supposedly exotic places often went hand in hand with, you know, capturing footage of the supposedly exotic people that occupied them.

JRW: It's like we'll go shoot some black fellows and then we'll yeah put that back on.

RA: And so because Shell had often kind of made films in these communities you know it's very likely that there were instances where you know folks under the guise of an attempted assimilatory film screening would have sort of seen their images back on screen.

JRW: Am I right in thinking that they cut them kind of differently too?

RA: This is like the culture of like Indigenous cinema going and segregation is I think so poorly known.

JRW: I was very... I had no idea about it until reading your work and I always felt like why didn't I know about it as much really.

RA: Yeah so I think it was in 1928 there's this royal commission into moving image in Australia and one of the findings is that there needs to be censorship for Aboriginal viewers and I think the line is that, you know, Aboriginal viewers, their minds might be “riotously aroused” by certain films so there's this sort of broader – 

JRW: And this was thinking about films that depicted Indigenous community Indigenous people, or just broadly kind of...

RA: I think it was really broadly like you know the fear of certain narratives being suggestive.

JRW: Like revolutionary kind of narratives of yeah.

RA: Yeah, or certain genres that you know. So there is these like cultures of censorship but also of segregation like in the Northern Territory at the time like it's you know in Darwin or in Alice like it's my understanding that cinemas were deeply racially stratified.

JRW: I guess what we talked about like why isn't this widely known or like why isn't this like more research on it. Do you feel like you can assume or make any kind of assumptions about that I guess? Or just like that it’s we are living in a colonial settler state really and this is like...

RA: I guess it's like a deeply shameful part of Australian cultural.

JRW: I kind of find that the thing about being deeply ashamed especially about like ‘The Back of Beyond’ because I don't... like it is, like there's deeply racist elements to it but I think that we are better for it like by watching and trying to understand it.

RA: Oh no definitely with ‘The Back of Beyond’ I'm talking about like the histories of like cinema segregation and like, those spatial practices. 

JRW: I think I was also, sorry to jump, but thinking about like other creators working and was reading about how Sidney Nolan he went on John Heyer’s excursions to on that same track the Birdsville track.

RA: Right, right.

JRW: And a lot of his paintings were inspired by that journey. I think he said, “This trip had a profound influence on Nolan. The animal carcasses strewn across the landscape on the open plain or lodged trees on the flood level intrigued him. He said the landscape presents scenes of desolation which mark the memory of all who see it. Thousands of carcasses are strewn on the baked and cracked planes. There is a brooding air of almost biblical intensity over millions of acres which bear no trace of surface water. The dry, astringent air extracts every drop of moisture from the grass.”

I was interested in that like they weren't just bringing filmmakers, now they've got the painter come along and to create this like dead idea of the Red Centre.

RA: I hadn't, I've never heard that quote before and I only recently learned that Nolan was there as well and he's, you know, the poster boy for mid-century Australian landscape painting. The transformation of the dead centre into a Red Centre was such a settler project like all throughout the 20th century and you know oil companies were you know often position themselves as the benevolent handmaiden to this transformation, the benevolent corporate handmaiden to all range of national interests because of course petrol and the camera are about the collapsing of time and space. And, you know, the bringing of the centre and the north into the Australian sort of national body like it was always thought of as sort of recalcitrant or, you know, you read... sort of these narratives come up again and again and again. So, you know, laying down roads, putting down petrol pumps, aviation, you know, all of... laying down all of this infrastructure which as you say it was all on top of existing infrastructure, was seen as so key to that that transformation of the dead centre.

RA: I was really keen to speak more about Beneath Roads and I wanted to talk about in particular montage and the three channels. And I guess one of the things that's so hard working with some of these travelogues is that all of their narratives seem so over-determined, like they explicitly state their horrific superior claims to triumphalism so obviously and I'm curious like how that work of like juxtaposition sort of helps break that down at times or provide a counter narrative.

JRW: I think it definitely, it helped, really because they were some of those narrations provided the perfect... I could just, I mean when I was researching other Blak cinema road movies I already could kind of hear these narrations over the top that I had heard so it was interesting working with a production team to kind of put those things together because unless you had really deep research you didn't know why they went together. And I think having people come along that journey and then they really I'm like okay this is why we need to put these two shots together because, yeah. But also like the montage and putting two things together that's the reason why I had the Southern Warriors in there, because I realised early on what I was trying to show just didn't exist. There is no movies that kind of there's a subtext of Aboriginal walking paths. The opposite is true, and they don't really exist. And I do think that the over kind of narration and the over kind of positioning of what they that is very much true in the government road building movie- films. And I felt that that kind of that push was really trying to hide something more so than anything and that's what I kind of got. So what I was trying to do with the Southern Warriors is trying to have a visual representation of something that just wasn't isn't visually acknowledged in Australian screen culture I guess. I didn't really know how that's why that was going to fit into them until like we had got the footage and I was just thinking about it and I think subconsciously they were like, I chose them to be this answer to this void and it kind of speaks to the I felt like the purposeful void in what we are talking about as well. The shape of Australia on screen is very much shaped and formed. And it is not by creative accident it's not even by even a director or somebody creating it because that's what they felt, but it was like government and these big conglomerates really.

RA: Totally no that that those scenes at the end are so powerful and I also really liked the way that you use scenes from Gamilaroi filmmaker Ivan Sen's ‘Beneath Clouds’ and I wondered if you could speak a bit more to that film.

JRW: Definitely. I think when I saw that film when I was about 14, 15 it just had such a huge impact on me and I just always thought like whatever I'm going to make I want to pay homage to him. Yeah, kind of growing up on a rural place and seeing these... I think it's interesting as well with that film how people perceive it in that is it a really sad story or is it this triumph of black love. Which, I think it depends really who you ask. I think my love of that film probably came before any of this. But I also, why it made perfect sense was they're really, you know, it's about a journey. They're on a journey together. But they're walking that by foot most of the time and I thought that perspective was just really different, to see country by your feet and not by like a car. I emailed Ivan and I was like could I name it after you and can I use it. He asked me a few questions and he said yeah of course and I was like... I think I was just trying to talk to Ivan really, yeah. But yeah that's and I think it was a conscious choice for me to use, you know, when you think about Australian road movies you don't really think about Blak Australian road movies and I could have used Priscilla, Mad Max you know the things that come to mind but I really just wanted you know it's kind of obvious and I just wanted to showcase that they're even though they might not necessarily be taglined as a road movie because it's not in a car or because it's not... doesn't follow the same kind of formula, they kind of very much are.

RA: Totally and there's that I think particularly powerful scene where the young man Vaughn you know points out the, you know, the mountain as a massacre site and I mean you know acknowledgement also of the Australian landmass as a huge historical crime scene is also so rare in Australian cinema.

JRW: Yes definitely and I think that could only really come from a Blak filmmaker I think that was very, when I was working with the team from ACMI to put that together, that was one thing that I pointed out to them in that there are different experiences of country because of that crime scene, because of that history. You know, an Indigenous person could be walking somewhere and you don't really know that this is like a big crime scene, a big massacre site. And also it's kind of those... that history that's not really, I mean obviously it's not acknowledged in Australian road movies but even like in a passing way or even like to further the kind of the bad and good kind of thing. I think it's a loss. It's stories being put on the land but the land already has these stories for, you know, from the time of settler Australia and even before.

RA: Yeah, the narratives that you know Australian road movies and car culture more broadly have kind of constructed you know they just for so many centuries have just been inscribed and reinscribed and perpetuated and so it's so important to have that counter-inscription which is of course like referencing stuff that's already there kind of in the land but in terms of artistic production I think it's really powerful.

JRW: Yeah especially when it's not a documentary it's not a factual based media like in kind of creative spaces as well I think that is just as powerful really.

RA: Totally, totally, totally. I really enjoyed it and I've actually been thinking a lot differently about how I move through Sydney with the knowledge of, you know, that say Parramatta Road or a road that I go down to go to work every day was a, you know, centuries old, you know, Aboriginal walking track.

JRW: The thing with the “buried underneath” and it was interesting when I posted about the ‘Beneath Roads’ on my social media, I got a couple messages from Indigenous friends of mine saying, you know, oh well on Noongar country there's a hospital built on healing grounds and there's multiple cases, you know, it's like the MCG here built on like ceremonial grounds. It's one of those things that kind of a lot of Indigenous people they will know it specific to their country or, you know, examples of that but it's kind of hard to wrap your mind around that as well if that's the first time hearing it. But there is deep, deep bones within and it's just like, whatever's already there kind of needs to exist as a healing ground or there's a... there's one that's, I forget where exactly in New South Wales but it's a big stadium and there's often fights there like UFC kind of fights, but that's a traditional fighting ground. And it's... I always think about how interesting that would be to incorporate it in kind of like creative things as well as not documentary but as like acknowledging these histories and I think it's that creative endeavour that can tell it in such a really emotional connection way.

RA: Totally, totally well I think you've... yeah you've really done that in Beneath Roads so I thank you for it and I encourage everyone to come and see the work while it's up at ACMI. Thank you so much for the chat.

JRW: Thank you so much for coming.

RA: It's been a pleasure.

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