Walkabout (1971): The Loss of Innocence and the Birth of Aussie New Wave (Review)

Coming to limited edition Blu-ray this week via the Second Sight label is Nicolas Roeg’s atmospheric, 1971 masterpiece Walkabout; a coming-of-age drama like no other, one which effectively heralded in the Australian New Wave movement. Starring Jenny Agutter, the director’s son Luc Roeg and indigenous Australian actor David Gulpilil, the film tells the story of two city-bred siblings, stranded in the Australian outback following the suicide of their father (John Meillon). With no supplies, the children soon face exhaustion under the blistering and unforgiving heat but are rescued when they come face to face with an Aboriginal boy on ‘walkabout’, a survivalist ritual that the indigenous youth must perform at the age of sixteen. The boy imparts his newly acquired wisdom of how to live off the land to the sister and brother as they continue their trek towards civilisation, but the inevitable cultural chasm that exists between the young protagonists leads to devastating and tragic consequences for the Aboriginal boy. Roeg’s film is both beautiful and harrowing, a genuine cinematic experience that is once seen, never forgotten. And if you haven’t seen it, be warned; this review contains spoilers.

The film is based on the 1959 novel of the same name by James Vance Marshall, though Roeg and his screenwriter, the English playwright Edward Bond, deviated significantly from the original source material, which centred around two American children, the survivors of a plane crash, setting out across the outback with the intention of reaching their uncle’s home in Adelaide. They cross paths with an indigenous youth, but the tragic fate that awaits him on the page – becoming infected by the flu that the American boy was carrying – is markedly different from his fate on screen.

Bond’s screenplay is notoriously sparse (and was described once by Roeg as a “fourteen-page prose-poem”) and attaches no names to our protagonists, meaning that Jenny Agutter, Luc Roeg and David Gulpilil are credited as ‘Girl’, ‘White Boy’, and ‘Black Boy’ respectively. This sparseness allowed for a degree of improvisation in production and a greater emphasis on the visual language; something which Roeg, who made his name as cinematographer on the likes of John Schlesinger’s Far From the Madding Crowd and François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451, clearly felt at home with. As a result, the film serves as a metaphor for the difficulties of communication between two separate and distinct cultures. Taken in that context, the decision to alter the indigenous boy’s fate is especially tragic and profound; rather than die of a Western illness his immune system is simply not prepared for, the boy commits suicide, hurt by the fact that his traditional mating dance is misconstrued as an act of aggression by Agutter’s well-to-do white girl. The inability to communicate, to cross that cultural chasm, leads to a terrible tragedy.

Walkabout may have been the second film for which Roeg had received a director’s credit, but it was the first feature that could truly be called his own as Performance (which was made in 1968 but held back until 1970, a year before Walkabout‘s release) had seen him share the directing duties with the film’s writer, Donald Cammell. It is a film that displays all of Roeg’s hallmarks as a cinematic auteur; the elliptical, cryptic narrative – heightened by his atmospheric use of montage and intercutting – designed to stimulate an audience and effectively put them to work in piecing together the plot, as well as the common theme of his protagonists finding themselves in the midst of a culture clash, out of their natural setting or comfort zone. This mutual juxtaposition is presented in dazzling, striking and intelligent fashion throughout the film as Roeg asks us to not only examine Western modernity and indigenous tradition but to explore the similarities and differences that may exist within these cultures too.

Consider, for example, the sequence in which Gulpilil hunts and dismembers a wild kangaroo for food. As he painstakingly sets to work on the dead animal, Roeg intercuts his efforts with that of a butcher going about his business in the town or city, cutting up chops and wrapping up hearts for his customers. Unlike some directors, Roeg’s visual motifs were never just for show, their central purpose was always to provoke thought, and Walkabout‘s audience have nowhere to hide as they consider the matter-of-fact horror of the indigenous boy’s task with their own everyday complicity. Later, Gulpilil sheds tears at the sight of dead buffalo abandoned by white hunters who viewed them only as ‘sport’. The purity and natural communion the indigenous people possess with the natural world around them is wholly absent from a culture that has the audacity to call itself civilised.

Death and the notion of time looms large over Roeg’s tale too. It’s there in the shocking behaviour of the father, who drives his children out into the middle of nowhere and attempts to murder them before taking his own life. As his mental faculties break down and he takes potshots at his terrified offspring with a revolver, he is heard to repeatedly tell them that they haven’t time, that they must be getting along. Like the White Rabbit in that other surreal, coming-of-age tale Alice in Wonderland (and there’s none more wondrous than the outback the children here find themselves in) the father is late for a very important date – his own death. Roeg’s visual style, approaching his narrative in a non-linear, disarranged, fragmented fashion, also echoes the redundancy of time and its rigid schedule within indigenous culture.

Walkabout can also be viewed as a biblical allegory, with parallels clearly drawn between the depiction of the outback here and the Garden of Eden. The notions of a loss of innocence and a desire to somehow get back to a place or period of greater purity was certainly fashionable in late 1960s and early ’70s cinema, chiming as it did with the ambitions of the hippy counter-culture and a desire for greater self-sufficiency within the wider society as a whole. As a result, Roeg’s film sits comfortably in this context but doesn’t date in the way that others have, by virtue of his practical decision to show that the Eden offered here can only ever be lost.

I mentioned earlier that Walkabout is a coming-of-age drama like no other and that’s true because it handles not only the rites-of-passage of the indigenous Australian culture but also focuses on the burgeoning womanhood of Agutter’s character. Again, this is mostly an invention of Roeg and Bond’s, who advanced the age of the girl into her mid-teens and effectively explores her journey from naive schoolgirl to suburban Sydney housewife. Like Eve, sexuality serves as a portent for the Girl and it’s no surprise that Roeg chooses to shoot snakes in the trees that she sleeps so innocently and unsuspectingly beneath. Whereas Marshall’s novel depicts the Indigenous boy as an almost Christ-like figure, passing on his wisdom only to be sacrificed, the film depicts him firmly as Adam. He is sexually attracted to the Girl, but his unapologetic nudity and traditions make her uncomfortable. She is intrigued, but simply too anxious and ill-prepared to succumb to the maturity blossoming within her, and his advances, misconstrued, are dismissed with devastating results. Interestingly, Roeg draws colonial parallels here too, keeping Agutter’s Girl in what remains of her school uniform; a signified both of Western culture, colonisation and even her innocence and dignity. The epiphany that Marshall’s young heroine achieves in relation to her guide is less than forthcoming in Roeg’s vision. Whereas Marshall depicts the girl’s anger and embarrassment at being discovered bathing by the Aboriginal boy leaving her as she realises he is dying, leading to her granting him forgiveness, it is all that her cinematic counterpart can do to wipe ants from his corpse. When we later see the now-married Agutter reminisce with her husband about her time in the bush, the audience experiences a bittersweet irony at her romanticised memory of two cultures coming together, frolicking naked and innocent at a watering hole. The reality of the situation has been long buried, the communication and understanding between cultures remain broken.

A genuine classic like Walkabout deserves a strong release and Second Sight certainly provides it with one. The stunning 4K scan and restoration does justice to Roeg’s evocative, near hallucinogenic cinematography and the beauty and menace of the Australian bush. Extras include a 2011 BFI Q&A with Nicolas Roeg, Luc Roeg and Jenny Agutter, a new audio commentary with Luc Roeg and the film critic and writer David Thomson, interviews with Luc Roeg, Agutter and the film’s producer Si Litvinoff and a new interview with Danny Boyle which sees the director recount his love for Nicolas Roeg’s work. The limited-edition set also includes a cornucopia of treats such as Marshall’s novel, a copy of the screenplay, stills and lobby cards and a booklet featuring several essays.

Thanks for reading our review of Walkabout

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