Tapa-arra, Through the Landscape

This photographic series, Tapa-arra Through the Landscape, highlights historical Indigenous roads, songlines and trade routes across Australia. For thousands of years, Aboriginal people have used roads to link different nations for travel, migration, trading, and other cultural purposes. This series specifically looks at roads that link the Kaurna people with their neighbouring nations in South Australia and other nations across Australia. There are several well-recorded Kaurna roads from Adelaide, South to Rapid Bay, South East to Encounter Bay, West to the River Murray, North East to the Barossa Valley and North to the Northern Adelaide Plains. The British and German colonists used all of the Kaurna roads during colonisation in the 19th century, and these routes have become main highways today. Kaurna people and their neighbouring nations created these roads because they were the most accessible and most direct paths through the landscape. The photographs depicted the sites of these historical roads, and the pictures are cut in half to symbolise the path of least resistance through the land. Tapa-arra is a Kaurna word that means “along the path” and translates Tapa “path” - arra “along”.