The Hard Road

"We had a big premiere screening back out in Winton last week,” says Ivan Sen, of returning to the rural West Queensland town in which he shot his latest feature film, Mystery Road. The film is a policier set against a tenor of racial tensions, in which Aaron Pedersen's Aboriginal detective investigates the murder of a local black girl, to the dismissive ire of the white powers-that-be and the resentment of the local community. It's a murder-mystery as sociological study – boasting a cast including Hugo Weaving, Jack Thompson, Ryan Kwanten, Damian Walshe-Howling and Tasma Walton – and that meant the screening in rural Queensland was a loaded event.

“The screening brought together all the Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, the traditional owners of the land and the current land-owners,” explains Sen, 41. “As far as we could gather, it was the first time that this had actually happened in the long history of this town. To have so many people, and such a mix of people, all gathering in the one place, all gathering to watch this film meant that we were asking a lot of non-Indigenous people to experience a story through the Indigenous perspective, in an audience filled with Indigenous people. It was a pretty powerful screening in that way.”

Sen's fourth narrative feature – following 2002's Beneath Clouds and 2011's Toomelah, two portraits of wayward Aboriginal youth, and 2010's Dreamland, a bizarre film-experiment obsessed with America's extra-terrestrial hotspot Area 51 – was inspired by the idea of the Aboriginal cop, and what that culturally means, and the treatment of Aboriginal women by rural police. Two of Sen's documentary works, 2004's Who Was Evelyn Orcher? and 2007's A Sister's Love have explored the plight of the 'lost' Indigenous woman: a topic that hits close-to-home for Sen.

“I had a distant cousin who, a month after going missing, was found under the roadway outside the local town,” Sen explains, declining to give the specifics, of an event that shadow's Mystery Road's plot. “The police investigation seemed non-existent; they were very inactive about trying to find the killer. There's many other examples of that around, and even another one from my family: another cousin, in Tamworth, was the victim of a murder up there, and very little seemed to be done about trying to find the killer. If it were just my own experiences, I probably wouldn't be motivated to make a whole film out of it, but it's a problem that runs throughout the whole country: crimes against Aboriginal women being borderline ignored by law-enforcement.”

So, Sen set about making what he calls “a multi-layered genre-piece, as seen through the Indigenous perspective”, enfolding thriller, procedural and Western elements. Pedersen's character is, therein, a maligned and borderline powerless figure – treated with a turncoat's contempt – Sen seeing him as being a modern echo of the historical figures of Aboriginal trackers, who aided white settlers in apprehending wanted natives.

“Growing up, I could never identify as being either white or black, so I've always sympathised with these people caught between two worlds,” Sen explains. “It's an incredibly complex emotional experience for these turncoats, who are trying to lift themselves up by doing something that is, in its way, destroying their own people. For Aboriginal policemen in rural communities, it's a really difficult occupation, [one] that often doesn't last for long. The psychological pressures of performing a job where you're eventually forced, at some point, to lock up your own family members, it's too much for them, and they inevitably quit.”

The story is set against a savage landscape, rife with wild dogs – “I saw dogs as a metaphor for rural Australia: you've got the native dogs, and you've got the introduced species, [and] you run into a lot of problems with the integration of these two worlds” – and ruled by guns. The film ends with another genre element, the shoot-out, torn from its familiar range and staged over a vast distance.

“Out in the country, it's the domain of the rifle,” Sen says. “Rifles are a part of culture. You use them to protect your stock from wild dogs, you use them to put your stock down, you use them for food, for hunting. That's been my experience of using guns: you shoot, then there's almost enough time for you to look at each other before you see the result of your shot.”

Initially Sen hoped to make Mystery Road in an urban setting – “I felt like I'd done enough outback films” – but eventually ended up in Winton, which had been the location for John Hillcoat's The Proposition. “I think The Proposition turned them all into film buffs,” Sen smiles. “They were very supportive – and very informed – of the whole filmmaking process.”

But there were also three days shooting in remote Moree, where the social problems Sen was dramatising – a stark divide between wealthy land-owners and impoverished mission-dwellers, writ along racial lines – were manifest in reality. He went there to film amongst the housing-commission houses. The time in Moree was brief, and, logistically, fraught; there was, Sen says, an air of tension during the filming. But the filmmaker took it as a spur, that what he was doing with Mystery Road made it necessary. “I haven't got my head up in the clouds about it, but I think every film can make a difference to the people who see it,” Sen says. “Whether it's conscious or unconscious, whether it's immediate or delayed, it will have some influence, and make some difference. We're always conditioned by what we see and what we hear as human beings.”