ROAD TRIPS
The joy of hopping into the car and heading out for an adventure has long been part of Australia’s holiday season. Now, a new photography book captures the spirit of the road
R egardless of the length or purpose of the journey, getting behind the wheel means so much more than simply moving from Pinnaroo to Lameroo, Wollongong to West Wyalong, or Stanley to Sandy Bay.
The road stimulates our senses and stirs our emotions. Even after more than a century of motoring, the mere sensation of moving has a powerful, even hypnotic effect, opening our minds to the patterns of the scenery accentuated by the rhythm of the journey.
Being out on the road means engaging visually with the space through which we move. No matter how familiar the route may be, following wherever the road leads us means generating a fresh sequence of mental images – from the mundane and scenic to the humorous, romantic, even poignant. And we take with us our memories of previous trips, and wherever we go we program our own soundtrack.
Australians in general and keen photographers in particular have a remarkable affinity with the road. Indeed, road photography deserves a category of its own, nestled among established genres such as landscape and street photography.
In this country, it has often been said that distance rather than history defines us, and not just in terms of our geographical separation from other regions of the world. Australia, which has more kilometres of road per head of population than any other continent on Earth, is also distant from each part of itself. As the most sparsely populated continent, Australia relies more on the road than any other nation. Including the roads of Tasmania – with a population similarly dispersed and road-dependent as that of the mainland – the total length of the Australian road network is approximately 900,000km, with almost two-thirds of that being unsealed.
This represents an amazing infrastructure achievement when you consider that little more than 200 years ago there were no roads at all, and that progress in building them during the 19th century was difficult and slow. For instance, until the 1820s, the capacity to design and build something as basic as a stone-arch bridge ( such as the convict-built Richmond Bridge has spanned Tasmania’s Coal River since 1825 and is Australia’s oldest surviving large stone-arch bridge) was not available in the newly settled Australian colonies. Fast-forward to the 1950s when the National Highway 1 was completed, linking the state capitals except Hobart, for the first time. Stretching 14,500km, it is among the longest national circuit highways in the world.
As the arteries and capillaries of the nation, every kind of road imaginable has been made in Australia, from the flattest desert highway to the narrowest city thoroughfare to the steepest alpine pass. All of those surveyed and graded lengths of bitumen, gravel and bare ground mean that the landscape and built environment are uncommonly rich in subject matter for road photography.
The Australian imagination has always been excited by what might be accomplished behind the wheel, especially when the feat is achieved in driving conditions that we know to be challenging. And historically and culturally, the road has played a crucial role in defining who we are.
Since the moment motor vehicles first began to move here, Australians have been impelled to travel. By the late 1920s the eccentric, crazy-brave adventurer Francis Birtles had completed more than 70 transcontinental crossings before there were many roads of any kind established in Central Australia.
These days anyone with a licence can cover distances that the early road-builders and motoring pioneers could scarcely have imagined. In 1926 it took Birtles almost eight days to drive from Melbourne to Darwin, a journey that now takes less than two days.
In 1964 the dapper daredevil Donald Campbell set the world land speed record of 648.73km/h streaking across the vast salt plain at Lake Eyre in South Australia.
The camera and the road were made for each other, enabling us to catch glimpses of people, animals, places and objects – the sublime, the ridiculous and always the unexpected that dot the Australian road. It’s a journey not to be missed.
Edited extract and photographs from Behind the Wheel: Photographs from the Australian Road, featuring the work of 71 photographers from around the country, published by The Worldwide Publishing Empire, $39.95