Few films are as haunting, strange, and unforgettable as Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout, which is now available to watch on Max. One of the earliest examples of what would later become known as the Australian New Wave, it tells a story of three unnamed children from two very different walks of life, and how their inability to overcome their differences leads to tragedy. As Roger Ebert wrote in his Great Movies review, it concerns “lives that are destroyed, in one way or another, because two people could not invent a way to make their needs and dreams clear.” In that way, it works as a metaphor for our broader issues to communicate with one another across barriers of language, race, and culture.

‘Walkabout’ Explores Our Inability to Understand Others

The plot of Walkabout is deceptively simple: an adolescent girl (Jenny Agutter) and her little brother (Luc Roeg) travel to the Australian Outback for a picnic with their father (John Meillon). Suddenly, their dad starts shooting at them before setting their car on fire and turning the gun on himself. The girl and boy are left to fend for themselves as they try to make their way back to Sydney. Along the way, they encounter an Aboriginal teenager (David Gulpili) on a cultural rite of passage known as a walkabout, and he helps them survive in the desert. As the journey goes on, the girl becomes increasingly frightened by the Aboriginal boy, whose culture she never attempts to understand.

To read that description would make you think that Walkabout is an adventure yarn in the vein of Robinson Crusoe, as the city dwellers learn to live in the wild with the help of their new friend. Yet Roeg sees through these storytelling conventions to something much darker. When the white girl and boy first encounter the Aboriginal teen, the girl is frustrated by his inability to understand English as she asks where they can find water. Her brother finds a way to convey his request in a way the he can understand, not because he’s smarter than his sister, but because he’s more open to communicating with people who are different from him.

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The girl’s fear of the young Aboriginal boy grows when they arrive at an abandoned farm house, and he performs a courtship ritual for her. In any other movie, this would be the moment when the two fall in love. Instead, she is unable to understand what he’s doing, and although she may share similar feelings for him, she tells her brother that they will be leaving the next morning without him. On the other hand, the Aboriginal boy doesn’t consider that his advances might make her uncomfortable, not least of all because she doesn’t understand the means by which he goes about it. What could have blossomed into a real connection is broken by an unwillingness to find a shared means of communicating.

‘Walkabout’ Uses Fragmented Storytelling Techniques to Convey the Mysteries of Memory
Image via 20th Century Studios

Roeg often played around with time to keep the viewer off-balance (see his horror masterpiece Don’t Look Now), and in Walkabout, he uses this technique to make us guess whether events are happening in the past, the present, in the characters’ imaginations, or in memories of an adult woman (Hilary Bamberger) we keep seeing throughout. But there’s another point to his time-jumps, which is to convey the cultural differences that both separate and unite us. During one scene, the Aboriginal boy is hunting for food, and Roeg crosscuts this with a butcher preparing meat in his shop. Later, he is trying to snag a kangaroo for dinner and is nearly run over by a jeep filled with hunters, who want to kill the animal for sport. Depending on who you ask, one is considered civilized, and the other isn’t.

Roeg offers no easy answers, but he does show the consequences of our inability to see our shared humanity. In the end, the Aboriginal boy hangs himself, unable to adapt to a rapidly changing world. We later see the girl as an adult living a seemingly comfortable life in a pristine apartment, still thinking about her time in the Outback Her mind returns to one day when she, the Aboriginal boy, and her brother all swam in a lake, enjoying the paradise she was so desperate to escape. If she only knew then what she knows now.

Walkabout follows two city-bred children stranded in the Australian outback after a tragic turn of events. As they struggle to survive, they encounter an Aboriginal boy who aids them in navigating the harsh wilderness, highlighting the contrast between Indigenous knowledge and modern life’s disconnection from nature.Release Date July 1, 1971 Director Nicolas Roeg Cast Jenny Agutter , Luc Roeg , David Gulpilil , John Meillon , Robert McDarra , Peter Carver , John Illingsworth , Hilary Bamberger , Barry Donnelly , Noeline Brown , Carlo Manchini Runtime 95 Minutes Writers Nicolas Roeg , James Vance Marshall , Edward Bond Expand

Walkabout is currently available to stream on Max in the U.S.

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