Review of the film Walkabout

Australia has a dirty history, much like every country on this earth, but it is just as true and filthy as those. The clean and beautiful lines of the buildings and roadways that snake around the perimeter of that island continent were not always present; their history is new and built on the soil of an older culture. Move inland from these glittering cities on the cusp of the sea and one will find traces of that older culture—one of the oldest on the planet. One sees the outback, an immense stretch of landscape that has shaped that culture and will continue to shape it beyond the time that those gleaming structures of the cities possess. Director Nicholas Roeg places us in this landscape, along with its sordid history, as simply as opening a beautiful picture book.           

The film opens on a brick wall, ordinary and weathered. The camera pans to the side and reveals a vast expanse of desert. Walkabout is a dream—events happen out of order, connect but do not to one another, people speak but others cannot hear the words, moments of great beauty are intercut with grotesquerie, things which have never been expressed are understood and then forgotten, great swaths of time lapse but then circle back on themselves. Somewhere there is a story, somewhere there is a message—we seem to always have faith in that no matter what—but it is muddled by the illusive nature of the telling.

            Like that brick wall, it begins as a simple story—two white children of middle class background and nature lost in the wild outback desert. They are found and saved from exposure by a young Aboriginal boy who is on a “walkabout.” This is a custom of many of the Aboriginal tribes where male youths must go out into the wilderness and survive for six months on their own before being declared men. He offers them water and food, and they follow him through the landscape and a series of adventures until finally coming to something that they recognize as civilization. It is, at first, like a children’s adventure tale with the animals of the land watching them serenely as they pass by on their journey.
            However, there is an intense undercurrent of sentiments and ideas that go much deeper than that simple story. This sense of deeper significance continues as the Aboriginal boy leads the two white children through the outback, foraging for what they need to survive. As he stalks and kills animals for food, there are flashes of a butcher chopping at a carcass, filleting the meat for sale and consumption. Traveling through a rocky outcropping near the base of some foothills, the three children pass by so closely to a house that it is just a ridge that blocks their view and knowledge of it, though we find that the Aboriginal boy is aware of its existence. It is never made truly clear why he did not show them that small outcropping of civilization.
            There is an absence of clear communication between the girl and the Aboriginal boy. He speaks to her in his language, rattling off words in her direction, following her around the cabin they come to near the end of the story. He seems infinitely interested in her, but this interest does not appear to be reciprocated. As she looks through an old collection of photos belonging to those who once lived in the house, she cries quietly. It looks as if she is only interested in the life that she inhabited before and not in this new landscape that she has been led through. This is an adventure that she has experienced; it was not all unpleasant, but now she is ready to return to the city. The Aboriginal boy’s courtly advances fall to her backside as she continually turns from him. There will be no communion between the two.
            What made the Aboriginal boy think that this was a possibility? Perhaps something she did made him believe it, a smile or posture, perhaps he dreamed it, imagined it as they wandered through the outback together. The concluding lines of the story seem deeply pessimistic. But one must understand that time in the Aboriginal world is not viewed in the same straight linear manner as in the world of the cities.  And the film honors this in many of its scenes. Viewers are not sure if they every truly occurred, but there are images that linger from the film which give the impression of that possibility the Aboriginal boy may have felt. They are indelible, and when we last see the girl as a young woman later in her life, we are certain that she cannot forget them either, whether dreamed or realized.