Film Review: Walkabout (1971)

Few landscapes evoke the tension between civilisation and wilderness as starkly as the Australian Outback—a vast, sun-scorched theatre where European modernity collides with ancient Indigenous traditions. It is this dichotomy that Nicolas Roeg’s 1971 film Walkabout interrogates, weaving a haunting allegory of cultural dislocation, survival, and the myth of the “noble savage.” Hailed as a landmark of Australian cinema, the film is paradoxically the work of outsiders: a British director, an English novelist, and a transatlantic production team. Yet its power lies in its ambivalence, refusing to romanticise either the natural world or the societies that seek to tame it. A poetic yet unsentimental meditation on humanity’s precarious place in the world, Walkabout remains as beguiling—and as divisive—as the desert it portrays.

Though enshrined in Australia’s cinematic canon, Walkabout is a product of global collaboration. Adapted from Donald G. Payne’s 1963 novel The Children, the script was penned by British playwright Edward Bond, while Roeg—then best known as a cinematographer for films like Fahrenheit 451—made his solo directorial debut. The cast, too, was largely imported: Jenny Agutter and Roeg’s son, Luc (credited as Lucien John), play the nameless siblings, their English accents contrasting sharply with the Outback’s rugged expanse. Only David Gulpilil, an Indigenous Yolngu man plucked from obscurity for his role as the Aboriginal boy, anchors the film in local authenticity. Financed by American producers Max Raab and Si Litvinoff, Walkabout is thus a curious hybrid—a global artefact masquerading as national myth.

The narrative unfolds with disquieting simplicity. A teenage girl (Agutter) and her younger brother (Luc Roeg) are lured into the Outback by their father, a mining engineer whose brittle sanity snaps during a purported picnic. After a failed murder-suicide attempt—he sets their car ablaze before turning the gun on himself—the children are stranded in the desert. Clad in starched school uniforms, they embody colonial rigidity adrift in an alien landscape. Their salvation arrives in the form of an Aboriginal teenager (Gulpilil) on his “walkabout,” a ritual journey marking his transition to manhood. Despite sharing no common language, the trio form a fragile alliance: the boy hunts, forages, and guides them toward an abandoned homestead, the closest outpost of “civilisation.”

Roeg frames their odyssey as a series of vignettes—part survival epic, part cultural parable. The siblings’ initial helplessness underscores their alienation from the land, while the Aboriginal boy’s intuitive mastery of his environment highlights Indigenous knowledge systems erased by colonialism. Yet the film resists easy binaries. Nature is neither Edenic nor merciless: it sustains and imperils in equal measure. A harrowing sequence where the boy spears a kangaroo—its death throes filmed unflinchingly—serves as a reminder that survival here is visceral, not idyllic.

Released at the tail end of the 1960s counterculture movement, Walkabout superficially aligns with neo-Rousseauist ideals. The Aboriginal boy, lithe and self-sufficient, embodies the “noble savage” archetype, his life unfettered by the neuroses of urban existence. The children’s father, by contrast, symbolises Western rationality’s collapse—a man driven to madness by the very systems (mining, industry) that define his identity. Roeg amplifies this critique through visual contrasts: the siblings’ crisp uniforms against cracked earth; a radio broadcast about stock prices juxtaposed with the boy’s silent communion with nature.

Yet the film complicates these tropes. The Aboriginal boy’s world is not a utopia but a web of strict rituals and unspoken codes. His decision to aid the children breaches walkabout protocols, foreshadowing his tragic inability to reintegrate into either Indigenous or white society. Similarly, the girl’s eventual return to civilisation—depicted in a closing montage of sterile suburbs and strip-mined hills—is no triumph. Her wistful memories of the Outback, intercut with visions of the trio swimming nude in a billabong, evoke a lost Eden, but Roeg denies nostalgia. The Aboriginal boy’s fate, the brother’s trauma, and the girl’s hollow domesticity all underscore the impossibility of return.

As a first-time director, Roeg’s fingerprints are everywhere: disorienting jump cuts, surreal flash-forwards (the girl’s future as a housewife intrudes on the narrative), and handheld camerawork that imbues the Outback with both grandeur and menace. These techniques, honed in his earlier collaborations with avant-garde directors like Donald Cammell (Performance), occasionally veer into pretension. The abrupt cuts to slaughtered livestock and industrial decay risk didacticism.

Yet Roeg’s background as a cinematographer salvages the film. His lens captures the Outback’s surreal beauty: ochre deserts melting into mirages, eucalyptus groves dappled with light, waterholes shimmering like liquid glass. These images, paired with John Barry’s ethereal score—a mix of didgeridoo drones and melancholic strings—elevate the film into visual poetry. The infamous nude scenes, far from exploitative, echo this lyricism. Agutter’s unselfconscious swimming, mirrored by the Aboriginal boy’s nakedness, underscores the children’s temporary shedding of societal constraints—a fleeting moment of harmony before the fall.

David Gulpilil’s performance is the film’s linchpin. Cast for his traditional dance skills (he had never acted before), Gulpilil communicates through gesture and expression—a raised eyebrow, a hesitant smile—conveying curiosity, pride, and desolation without a shared language. His portrayal defies the “noble savage” cliché, imbuing the character with agency and ambiguity. Tragically, the role also marked the start of Gulpilil’s struggles with alcoholism, a legacy of the cultural dislocation he experienced during production.

For Jenny Agutter, then 17, Walkabout was a career catalyst and a burden. Her nude scenes, though artistically justified, overshadowed her nuanced performance in contemporary discourse. Critics reduced her to a voyeuristic object, despite her character’s resilience and emotional arc. Decades later, Agutter acknowledged the duality: the film launched her internationally but typecast her as an ingénue.

Upon release, Walkabout baffled audiences. Its fragmented narrative and explicit nudity (trimmed by censors in some markets) alienated mainstream viewers, while its bleak themes defied counterculture optimism. Yet time has burnished its reputation. Academics dissect its postcolonial subtexts—the Aboriginal boy as Christ-like martyr, the Outback as psychological terrain—while casual viewers gravitate to its adventure elements.

Roeg’s refusal to moralise remains its strength. The girl’s final memory of the billabong—pristine, sunlit, tinged with loss—captures the film’s essence: a lament for worlds destroyed by progress, and a warning that no culture, however “pure,” escapes the entropy of time. Walkabout is not a plea to return to nature, but a reminder that civilisation, for all its comforts, is a fragile veneer. In the end, we are all exiles in someone else’s landscape.

RATING: 7/10 (+++)

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