Walkabout

Arty flick about survival in the Outback and coming-of-age

A teenage girl (Jenny Agutter) and her little brother get stuck in the Outback, but receive assistance by an aboriginal boy (David Gulpilil) on a ‘walkabout,’ a rite of passage into manhood.

Directed by Nicolas Roeg, “Walkabout” (1971) is an arty cult flick that plays like a Terrence Malick film and no doubt influenced his style (since it came out two years before Malick’s feature film debut with “Badlands”). Agutter was only 16 during shooting while her character is 14, according to Roeg.

The themes about the beauty of nature vs. man-made desecration and the clash of the primitive with the ‘cultured’ & the problems of communication thereof were probably fresh at the time but are obvious and old hat now. "Dances With Wolves" tackled the same issues almost 20 years later. Still, this is an artistic piece with loads of awesome nature footage, plus it’s interesting to see Agutter so young in the bush. It’s a must if you appreciate movies like “Picnic at Hanging Rock” (1975) or anything by Terrence Malick.

David Gulpilil went on to appear in such notable flicks as “Crocodile Dundee” (1986) and “Australia” (2008).

The film runs 1 hour, 40 minutes, and was shot in Sydney, Finders mountain range, the red desert surrounding Alice Springs and (supposedly) areas never traveled by Caucasians up to that point.

GRADE: B

"We are all one blood. No matter where we are from, we are all one blood, the same." —David Gulpilil

Summary: 7/10: Uneven direction cannot diminish the landmark debut of David Gulpilil, whose grace and intelligence anchor a film that's really about the colonial destruction of wilderness and the particular genius of what was lost.

Walkabout marks the screen debut of one of the most luminous talents cinema has known. David Gulpilil was sixteen years old when British director Nicolas Roeg discovered him in Arnhem Land, a Yolngu boy who could barely speak English but was already an accomplished hunter, tracker, and ceremonial dancer. Over the next fifty years, Gulpilil would become Australia's greatest actor, leading a dance company for a decade, winning awards for his performances on stage and screen, and writing two volumes of children's stories that preserve Yolngu folklore for future generations. In this first role, he shows us everything he would become: the physical grace, the emotional intelligence, the capacity to communicate across the chasm of language through movement and presence alone.

Girl and White Boy (Jenny Agutter and Luc Roeg) are equally fine in their roles, particularly in conveying the terror and bewilderment of children stranded without skills or understanding in country that seems determined to kill them. But this is Gulpilil's film, and his Black Boy is its beating heart.

Some critics read Walkabout as a parable of Eden, innocence lost to experience. I see something far more political and far more urgent. This is a film about the destruction of wilderness by white colonizers, and the particular methods by which that destruction has always proceeded. Early in the film, we watch the land provide everything needed for survival and well-being: water, food, shelter, knowledge. Gulpilil's character moves through this landscape with the confidence of someone who belongs to it, who knows its rhythms and requirements. He saves the white chi...