Worse Than a Non-Place

Abstract In this article, a single road, the Roper Highway, in the Northern Territory of Australia becomes a focus for the exploration of colonization, mobilities, separation, and continuing inequalities for Indigenous people in the region. We argue that the needs of the people situated at the end of the road are usually secondary to those of strategy and big business. We bring together perspectives from participant observation, traveling the road, historical accounts and contemporary experience, to describe the Roper Highway as a meshwork of intersecting biographies, histories, interests, and experiences and explore why, despite our extensive experience as anthropologists driving this road, our knowledge of the road from the perspective of the people we worked with remained elusive and incomplete.