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The world is a beautiful, confusing, confounding place, and all we do is ruin it. That may be a bold statement, but so much beauty in this world is so often profaned by the presence of humans. If not all humans, at the very least, those of us who do not respect or understand that which we live in are the ones bound to find ourselves at its mercy. One such place of beauty, if not luxury, is Australia. When we think of the outback, we may think of a desert, but there are marks of unique pleasure in Australia that make it stand out from a desert like the Sahara. And, in parts of the outback, one of the visual standpoints is a race of people: the Aboriginals.

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.

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