Walkabout movie review & film summary (1971)

The movie takes its title from a custom among the Australian aborigines: During the transition to young manhood, an adolescent aborigine went on a "walkabout" of six months in the outback, surviving (or not) depending on his skills at hunting, trapping and finding water in the wilderness.

The film opens in the brick and concrete canyons of Sydney, where families live stacked above one another in condominiums. We glimpse moments in the lives of such a family--a housewife listens to a silly radio show, two children splash in a pool, and on a balcony their father drinks a cocktail and looks down moodily at them. There is something subtly wrong with the family, but the film doesn't articulate it, apart from a suggestive shot of a bug that does not belong indoors. In the next scene, we see the father and children driving into the trackless outback in a wheezy Volkswagen. They're on a picnic, the children think, until their father starts shooting at them. The 14-year-old girl (Jenny Agutter) pulls her 6-year-old brother (Luc Roeg) behind a ridge, and when they look again their father has shot himself and the car is on fire.

Civilization, we gather, has failed him. Now the girl and boy face destruction at the hands of nature. They have the clothes they are wearing, a battery-operated radio, and whatever food and drink is in the picnic hamper. They wander the outback for a number of days (the film is always vague about time), and stumble upon an oasis with a pool of muddy water. Here they drink and splash and sleep, and in the morning the pool is dry. At about this time they realize that a solemn young aborigine (David Gulpilil) is regarding them.

They need saving. He saves them. He possesses secrets of survival, which the film reveals in scenes of stark, unforced beauty. We see the youth spearing wild creatures, and finding water in the dry pool with the use of a hollow reed. He treats the child's sunburn with a natural salve. Some of the outback scenes--including one where the youth spears a kangaroo--are intercut with quick flashes of a butcher shop. Man's nature remains unchanged across many platforms.

There is an unmistakable sexual undercurrent: Both teenagers are in the first years of heightened sexual awareness. The girl still wears a school uniform that the camera regards with subtle suggestiveness. (An ambiguous earlier shot suggests that the father has an unwholesome awareness of his daughter's body.) The restored footage includes a sequence showing the girl swimming naked in a pool, and scenes of the aborigine indicate he is displaying his manliness for her to appreciate.

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