In 2013, two buddies from the Adelaide Hills, remote area nurse Aidan Glasby and website builder Daryl Clarke, bought two second-hand ultralight aircraft, and flew them 4,000km north to Broome in Western Australia over eight weeks, fundraising for charities.

Conflict was inevitable: the pair had learned to fly the fragile aircraft only a week before their adventure, eschewing flight plans, emergency beacons or satellite phones. Glasby pushed boundaries, keen to fly on even in dodgy winds; Clarke was more chilled, prioritising cigarettes and coffee and taking in each location. There were crashes.

“They were rank amateurs,” drily notes director Charlie Hill-Smith, who shot extensive footage of the adventure, which he has crafted into Motorkite Dreaming, a 90-minute documentary for a national cinema tour in August, to be followed by a five-part TV series to air later this year on SBS and NITV.

“They’ve done this on a shoestring and lived to tell the tale: real pilots call microlight pilots ‘temporary citizens’. Aidan was a natural pilot and still found it difficult; Daryl found it difficult as well. Terrifying. I wouldn’t do it.”

The men’s partners, remote area nurse Lexi Keneally, then three months pregnant, and paediatric nurse Elsie Clarke, followed in a four-wheel drive, towing two fuel drums – which at one hair-raising point flipped over on the rough track – and the group camped and cooked in deserts, under the stars.

Crucially, also on the journey were Ngarrindjeri man Carroll Karpany, a founder of seminal Aboriginal rock-reggae band Us Mob, who co-wrote the soundtrack with David Bridie, and Narunga man Bart Sansbury. Not to mention Karpany’s tiny dog, Mylo, which Karpany jokingly passes off as a miniature dingo.

It soon becomes clear that the white men’s adventure in Motorkite Dreaming is a Trojan horse for engaging a non-Indigenous documentary audience with Indigenous cultures, as the group immerses itself in remote communities along the flight path, representing 20 different language groups.

Elsie Clarke, as the one person in the documentary who had never been to a remote Indigenous community, overcame fears she would find the experience confronting.

“I was really quite nervous because I was aware of being culturally sensitive but didn’t quite know what to expect,” she says. “I connected with a lot of the ways Aboriginal people live out there, being very close with their family, and their appreciation and connection with the land.”

On the far edge of the Simpson Desert, Kokatha man Ramath Thomas speaks of the rainbow serpent, firesticks and western desert law. Treaty and reconciliation are then given eloquent voice by Albert Wiggin, of the Nyul Nyul nation.

At Windjana gorge, in the Western Australia Kimberley region, Carroll Karpany, who says his great-grandfather fought for country – “when he died, my law and country went with him” – meets Bunuba nation man Dillon Andrews, an ancestral songkeeper who teaches Karpany his lost clan song.

“That was profound,” Karpany tells Guardian Australia. “When an elder walks up to you – there’s no eye contact – and speaks in a subtle, soft voice, but very directly, you think: Shit, what have I done wrong? I was profoundly surprised at the information he told me: ‘I’ve got your song and dance here’.”

Karpany reflects on how his law and ancestral song became lost to him: “The Karpany clan were among the last ones to be forced off our traditional lands, notwithstanding the fact that a silent war spanned one-and-a-quarter centuries. Incredible as it sounds – it sounds like a Hollywood blockbuster – it’s factual. You’re talking about a slow death; not necessarily by gunfire, but with the introduction of alcohol and the low tolerance of the common cold, and the mental stress of unfair, unjust treatment.

“The English had one thing in mind: to get rid of all the evidence [of Indigenous cultures].”

Hill-Smith says the film is not didactic or forceful in its approach, but is designed for middle Australia, for audience members who haven’t had much contact with Aboriginal Australians, with an emphasis on storytelling and experiences.

Politics run deep beneath the surface for the director, however.

“What has occurred in this country in the last 200 years is an epidemic of misinformation and collusive propaganda,” says Hill-Smith. “At the very time experienced murderers and land-grabbers were rolling into Victoria and South Australia in the late 1830s, [English politician William] Wilberforce’s Slavery Abolition Act was passing in London.”

For their part, Daryl Clarke and Aidan Glasby are pleased they have been able to share positive stories from the outback and remote communities.

“There is so much negative media that comes out of those places,” says Clarke. “We wouldn’t have just done this as a frivolous adventure story, to fly across the country for the sake of it.”

Indeed, it emerges that for all the pair’s haphazard attention to learning to fly, much careful preparation had gone into the cultural aspects of the trip: they had undertaken with Hill-Smith and Karpany a reconnaissance journey a year earlier to visit communities and meet Indigenous elders to ask permission to film in those locations.

“Their response had been so positive: ‘Please come back’,” says Clarke. “That for me was the most rewarding thing.”

• Motorkite Dreaming is screening at select cinemas now in a national tour and in a five-part series later this year on SBS and NITV.