Classic Movie Review: Walkabout
By Josh Spiegel
April 20, 2010
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Few films have been made regarding these people, but they are mostly notable and impressive works, including the 2002 film Rabbit-Proof Fence, which detailed the struggles that Aboriginal people, especially children, had to deal with in the 1930s. Another entry in this mini-genre is the haunting, hypnotic 1971 film Walkabout. Directed by Nicolas Roeg (the director of other strange and singular films like The Man Who Fell To Earth and Don’t Look Now), Walkabout is ostensibly about the travails of a sister and brother who are stranded in the middle of the outback one day after their father initially tries to kill them, and then takes his own life. The children (the sister is a teenager, while the brother is only about six-years-old) are soon joined by an Aboriginal male teenager (David Gulpilil), who helps them survive in the wilderness.
As is mentioned in the opening epigraph, when Aboriginal males come of age, they are sent off into the wilderness to go on a walkabout, living off the land and doing whatever they need to do to survive, from killing animals to even other people. Though it’s never verbalized past this point, the Aboriginal boy in the film (none of the main characters are given names) is on his walkabout when he finds the English siblings hovering near a tree that had previously borne fruit and some water. He first helps them drink water from below the ground, but is soon along for the journey, leading the two outsiders throughout the dusty land. Eventually, yet obliquely, the Aboriginal male and the English girl realize that, yes, they’re right around the same age, and are noticing each other’s bodies, while the little boy is content to play.
Walkabout is a fascinating film, not only for its lack of common cinematic tropes (we not only never learn the names of the characters, but are never given anything close to a concrete reason for why the siblings’ father opens fire on them and himself), but for its editing jumps; in one scene, we watch the Aboriginal boy track and kill a kangaroo and, when he begins cutting up the pieces of dead meat, Roeg cuts between the boy and an Australian butcher doing the same with a cut of meat. The message here is simple: even if we dress the world up, we are, at our core, animals. Though the English siblings are never close to becoming as animalistic as they view their Aboriginal guide, the connection is clear, at least for society. It’s this constant parallel that Roeg forces the viewer to acknowledge that makes Walkabout so compelling.
I could argue that it’s frustrating for so little information to be made clear during this film; though I’d like to think that I’m more able to understand what goes on in the film than, say, the girl (played by Jenny Agutter), it remains perfectly unclear in many respects. There are various meandering scenes that don’t seem to make sense out of anything. A scene midway through features a group of scientists, among them only one female, a beautiful blonde. The other scientists appear to lust after the women, but they’re only in the one scene, and nothing really comes of the matter again. One of their devices, a weather balloon, is discovered by the English kids later on, but as anything more than a statement of the frequent and unwelcome invasion of common society, I’m not sure what Roeg’s getting at. In some ways, the reason why Walkabout is still a talked-about film is because of this lack of awareness and knowledge. Thankfully, it never feels like Roeg’s not answering these questions, simply to not answer them.
Walkabout works best when focusing solely on the issue of society expanding where it is not needed or welcomed, as the vision of Agutter’s character becoming a sexual being is nothing more than a bit of exploitation; about an hour into the movie, she goes skinny-dipping, and the camera doesn’t shy from showing the audience her naked flesh. And that’s about it. I’m not saying that seeing a naked woman is automatically an exploitative image, but when it serves no purpose aside from a director essentially telling his audience that he got his female lead to bare all, it’s pointless at best, and exploitative at worst. The plot thread (if you can call it that) regarding the girl and Aboriginal boy discovering each other is only fascinating from the boy’s side.
In what amounts to being a climactic scene, the Aboriginal boy, spying the girl undressing in an abandoned house they’ve found during their travels, paints his body in traditional colors and symbols, following it up with a tribal mating ritual/dance. The images of the boy, eyes bulging, body flailing around in a unique choreography, are striking and close to disturbing. Though the characters are never able to fully communicate with each other, it’s clear what the boy is after at this point. Though on the outside, the girl feigns bafflement, it seems mostly obvious that she knows what he wants, and is scared at being confronted in such a brazen and confusing way. When she rebuffs his attempts, despite the ritual lasting nearly an entire day, his reaction is initially shocking, but it makes perfect sense.
Walkabout isn’t a movie about exploring, in full, the society of the Aboriginal people, but about how the people who’ve taken over the Australian country don’t understand it, and thus, attempt to destroy it. The siblings are always friendly with the boy, but he realizes that they want to go back to their society, not join his. The dance that follows, the daylong ritual, appears more desperate than anything else. This boy is looking at a girl who represents something he’s never fully seen before. She becomes more entrancing to him because of this; in some ways, she is more exotic to him than the other way around; the girl is more ignorant of the boy’s ways and culture, as opposed to accepting and curious.
Still, as much as can be mined from this storyline, it’s all guesswork, and there’s more definitive points being made by Roeg and the editing style his crew employs when it comes to the two cultures colliding in such a visceral way. As the coda, set in the future, explains, the girl may long for the way things were for that short time, as she completed a personal walkabout of sorts, but the reality is that she’s married (and living in the same place she was when she was a kid - that is, unless Roeg didn’t have enough money for two locations, which I doubt) to a milquetoast businessman. She’s caught daydreaming in the finale, of something that may not have even happened, but something she wanted to happen.
How often does this woman retreat to the time when it was just her, her little brother, and the Aboriginal boy who wanted to be their protector, and moreso? Whatever warped family unit she shared during this period of her life did not survive past the outback, and it could be considered a hellish time for her (in that she loses all grasp of the modern world, and is literally forced to go back to nature). Yet, she longs for something that’s not only out of her reach, but something that can never happen again. Walkabout is a movie that, thanks to some visceral imagery, will stick with me for a while, but the questions it raises are almost too many, even those that can be easily answered. Frankly, it’s the questions whose answers are easy that trouble me most.