After being abandoned by their father (John Meillon), two siblings (Jenny Agutter, Luc Roeg) are left to survive on their own in the Australian wilderness.  With their few resources quickly depleted and death imminent, their paths cross with a young Aboriginal boy (David Gulpilil) on his titular Walkabout, a ritual journey for the boys of the tribe to go off on their own and live off of the land.  Without being able to use language, the three find their own ways to communicate, but home is still very far away for the three of them and the wilderness – despite its beauty – is harsh. 

Released by Twentieth Century Fox in 1971 in the USA after playing at that year’s edition of Cannes, Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout was later restored and released by The Criterion Collection on multiple home media formats.  The script is loosely based on James Vance Marshall’s novel and was long a passion project for Roeg who assisted screenwriter Edward Bond in breaking the story for the screen.  At its core, it is a very simple story about survival and kinship, but there are greater themes of identity and colonialism simmering right under the surface.  While Roeg does not necessarily investigate those themes head-on, he does not outright ignore them either as they are nonetheless an integral part of the story.  His juxtaposition of the beautifully shot Australian outback with the more built-up areas of the continent are carefully thought out and constructed and his intent is delivered more through a feeling than a lecture. 

At the core of the film is the unlikely friendship between the siblings and the native boy – all of whom are never named throughout the duration of the film so for the sake of clarity they will be referred to by their performer’s name. The only lead with any previous acting experience under her belt, Agutter quickly has to take responsibility for her brother after their father’s shocking abandonment. She leads the film well looking after her younger brother and shielding him from the gravity of their situation so that he can continue being more interested in playing with his toys. As she grows more into her role of guardian, it will allow the daughter character to play an interesting foil to Gulpilil’s native boy as he eventually takes the siblings under his wing and offers his protection. 

Walkabout, while it can be seen as an innocent tale of friendship and kindness, also has many of the hallmarks of a coming of age story, and a darkly tragic one at that. As mentioned, it opens with Agutter assuming the role of guardian and protector towards her brother, concurrently, Gulpilil is on his ritualistic walkabout which, upon completion, signifies him as a man in the eyes of his tribe. When the two cross paths, there is hesitation on both sides, but soon the concept of a singular human identity begins to form and they find ways to communicate with each other about their needs. Initially, this is Gulpilil showing the siblings how to draw water up from the dried-out oasis, late shelter, but there are other human needs that go unmet.   

When it was released in the USA, Walkabout originally carried an R from the MPAA, later dropped down to a PG due to scenes containing nudity. The film does confront sexuality, a facet of adulthood, in a very poetic way. Some of the more overt scenes include Agutter bathing in the lake, but there is another more charged scene that really signifies the slight change in dynamic between the trio involving an afternoon climbing and playing in a tree. The way Roeg intercuts between the children playing and then extreme closeups of their legs and a distinct Y shaped branch is a clear indication that – at the very least for Agutter and Gulpilil – there has been a change in how they see one another. This is later driven home when Gulpilil performs an extended courtship dance towards Agutter. He dances to exhaustion, his message heard but not reciprocated. 

In addition to being a film about crossing into adulthood, Walkabout is also a film about cohabitation and the melding, or rather intersection, of cultures. While on his trek with the siblings, Gulpilil encounters many things that were brought into Australia that signify, even back in the early 1970s when it was released, the growth and expansion of technology in the world. One of the prime examples of this is when the trio comes across a rogue weather balloon lost by some nearby meteorologists. It not only gives Roeg an excuse to take detours in his narrative by showing us the meteorologist team who is otherwise totally disconnected from the core trio, but it begins to show the changing of the times as modernity begins to encroach on the ancestral lands and traditions of Gulpilil’s character. It is not just the presence of white characters, both in the form of the siblings but also in the plantation owners who take a much more offensive stance at the presence of Gulpilil on “their” land, either, or the presence of roads in the otherwise vast nothingness that give the characters some hope for a sense of manufactured direction instead of turning to nature as Gulpilil does. Further, Gulpilil is stunned at the sight of poachers gunning down water buffalo with ease using a rifle after the boy had been wrestling with one for a long time to try and bring it down. It is this sight that seems to drive Gulpilil to commit himself to finding a way to stay faithful to his heritage but live symbiotically with the growing white population. This idea is hinted at when Agutter draws a modern house when Gulpilil shows them some of the paintings left behind by his people and expanded upon by the courtship dance, the driving sequence in the third act of the film. The reception and fallout of the dance can be a bit troubling to consider, and while it does have sexual intent when by itself, in the context of the film it seems much more like the offering of an olive branch, an invitation from Gulpilil to Agutter to continue to live and grow and understand each other together.       

The film ends by showing Agutter’s character, now a grown and married woman, greeting her husband home from work. As he tells of his day, she gazes off in memory of her time in the outback splashing and swimming with her brother and Gulpilil. Free and uninhibited. The film does not do much in spelling out exactly what she is feeling through this recollection, but it appears to be positive. In those moments, we too find ourselves recalling everything we saw leading up to this point and it feels so distant as Roeg’s editing style intercuts constantly as if he himself was recalling a memory and having to quickly dart forwards and backward to fill in the details. This is purposeful and something Roeg sets up from the opening sequences in modern Sydney only to strip our characters from almost all of their modern luxuries and leave them in the vastness of the wilderness to rely on nature and Gulpilil’s knowledge to stay alive – knowledge that is at risk of being lost to memory. All that imagery is further coupled with the evocative score by John Barry. On its surface, Walkabout is an incredibly simple story, but the themes run deep and leave behind a trail rich for exploration. It shows that, though very few words, we are all one people and that when you strip away the barriers of language or skin color or culture there is a desire for compassion and kinship at the center of us all.