Walkabout [DVD]

When I was a lad growing up in Southern California I was a Boy Scout and played Little League baseball. The outdoor life was a way of toughening me up, part of a rite of passage into manhood. In the Church I took first communion at age 12 or 13, another marker (this time spiritual) to symbolize the transformation from adolescence to adulthood.The ritual journey of boys into manhood has always been important to societies, especially traditional ones. The boy that becomes the man also becomes protector and provider. In hunting and gathering tribal societies he became a hunter. His boyhood couldn’t go on forever. Thus ritual was used to help separate him from it. He would leave the nurturing feminine realm of his mother (where his sisters would remain to become nurturers themselves someday) to become self-sufficient and independent by acquiring survival skills.Walkabout is all about this from the Aboriginal point of view in Australia. The land is hard and harsh. It’s dry, sparse, arid desert, hot by day, cold by night. It’s also dangerous. Survival alone in it depends on patience, ingenuity, courage and endurance. The boy who leaves the tribe at 15 or 16 to gain his manhood may or may not come back after five or six months. If he does, he returns a man. If he doesn’t, he’s lost to the tribe, but in a way he won’t be missed, as the tribe’s survival itself depends on the strength of its men. It’s how it’s been for over 50,000 years in the Australian Outback, a time-tested formula that works.The Aboriginal boy on walkabout, his ritual and actual journey, is not seen immediately in the film. Instead from the start we see modern European Australia. It’s presented to the eye in disjointed, random fashion, rapid cutting between dislocated activities: traffic jams and car horns, faceless pedestrians scurrying like L.S. Lowry stick figures to and from work, a butcher chopping kangaroo meat in a shop, girls in an all-girls’ school reciting their musical scales to the teacher, a young boy in the crowd on the playground in his school uniform and cap, a father in his drab and melancholy suburban flat who’s lost in thought. Not a pretty picture, and one meant to feel emotionally unsettling.The shift to the Outback from cityscapes is thus also jarring — at least initially. But then the camera begins to settle down, panning across vistas that stretch out before us, and we realise our journey will take place here, not in the city. Yet we enter this alien landscape with all our civilised baggage in tow. We see it through the eyes of the disaffected father, troubled by something unexpressed to us, perhaps something as simple and disturbing as ennui, utter boredom with the futility and pointlessness of life. He travels into this forbidding land in his VW bug with his two children: the musical schoolgirl, aged perhaps 16, and the young schoolboy son, aged no more than 8 or 9. Ostensibly they have travelled this far from the city to have a picnic. The girl spreads out a blanket on the desert sand. On it are fresh fruits, sandwiches, beverages. The boy plays with his toys at a nearby rock outcrop — action figures, army men. He stages imaginary battles with them, lost in his own world of toil and conflict. In fact, they all seem lost in their own worlds. The man sits in the car examining maps. The girl prepares the picnic. The boy plays. A family in name, but not in harmony, its members preoccupied with private endeavours.A shot rings out. Incredibly, bullets strike the fruit on the picnic blanket, scattering them to bits. The girl runs to the boy, sheltering him behind the rock outcrop. Bullets fly and ricochet near them. The father’s aim is bad. He has drawn no blood. His children crawl unharmed through the bush, away from him and the car. Soon the car is in flames. The father has doused it with gasoline and set it alight. Then he turns the gun on himself and fires. The suicide pact the children did not know they were part of fails — at least for them. But Dad is gone now and so is the car, so they are on their own. Their journey begins here. Their school uniforms are neat and clean. They are upright English schoolchildren, properly tutored and educated, the residue of Empire, the future of civilisation. They wander into the wilderness. With them they carry a satchel, some food and water, a radio. For the boy the outing is further adventure, for the girl desperation. She must lead them out of this wilderness somehow. But how? Where to begin? Where to go when all points in it look the same?We are struck by the pristine beauty of the place. It looks untouched, undisturbed, pure. This is illusion of course, but compared to the frenetic activity of the city it seems so. There are no people here, or none they have seen. Instead, rock, sand, mountains, dry river beds, sky, vistas, horizons, wind, stars, silence, plants, scrub trees, birds and land animals: lizards, snakes, scorpions, insects. Where is the water? The boy says he’s thirsty. The girl is too. They are parched. They’ve been walking for two or three days and their water has run out. They were careful with their rationing of it, but careful is not good enough anymore. She knows, if he doesn’t, that they will die in a day or two unless they find water.They do. A small oasis appears. A lone fruit tree blossoms in a small water hole. They eat the fruit, sharing it with birds, and drink the water. They are saved, if temporarily. They stay. Here they wash and sleep in the shade. Here the girl also buys time, trying to work out what to do next. By now the boy has understood some things too. They’re lost, he says, and Dad is dead. The girl says nothing and by this the boy knows he has uttered the truth.The water hole runs dry. Wet red earth remains. On a hill in the distance a figure appears. It’s the shape of a person. The boy reflexively cries “Dad!” to it. But it isn’t Dad. Dad is dead. It is the boy, the coal-black Aboriginal boy on his walkabout, on his journey of survival.In the beginning, while Dad lived, they were three. Then they were two. Now they are three again. The girl pleads with the Aboriginal boy for water. She does so in English, in sounds he cannot understand. She, in turn, cannot understand him. The young schoolboy breaks the deadlock. He points to his mouth, gurgles, says “water”. The Aboriginal boy laughs and says the word for “water” in his own language. He sucks water from the ground beneath the water hole. He uses a reed to bring it up. They all drink from it, a small but great act of survival that bonds them. They leave the water hole as a group, a team of three, and they’ll remain together for the duration of their journey through the Outback. The walkabout was always a test of individual strength and endurance. But now the Aboriginal boy’s strength and endurance will provide for three, not one.We see him at work. He carries with him sticks, spears, a boomerang. He fells prey with these weapons: lizards, snakes, kangaroos, dingos. He also carries with him a wooden dowel and bowl. With them he makes fire. At night he sings to himself in the Dreamtime, sings songs that follow the songlines, the ways mapped out for him on the land by the voices of his ancestors. Alone but never alone, the land haunted by these voices, but a benevolent haunting that reassures and protects. He is not lost in this land. He’s at home in it. The English children see and understand this. They come to trust and respect him. He is their leader, their protector and provider, their own father replaced by a better, more capable man.All is implied and subconscious. The children needn’t think about it. They simply follow, and by doing so survive. Among the two English children the boy is the more adaptable. He is open, untamed, less conditioned and civilised. He’s also curious, willing to learn. The girl is strait-laced, stiff upper-lipped, English and sure of what it means to be this. By virtue of condescension she is superior because her world has taught her to be so. Even now when present circumstances suggest otherwise, she clings to this for sustenance and identity. She needs it. She is more fully formed than her little brother. He might go native yet because he can, whereas she never will.But in many ways she’s the most interesting person, complicated and conflicted as she is. The boys are simpler, the Aboriginal boy fixed in a world of myth and ritual 50,000 years in the making, the English schoolboy innocent and simple by virtue of his youth. The remnants of Empire and colonialism have a small and slight hold on his mind and imagination, not as they do on the mind of his teenaged sister. She is the in-betweener, the persona on which history enacts its cultural forces, frictions and conflicts. She enchants and interests us because of this. We can’t take our eyes off her. But there is something else that causes this. She is young, lithe, beautiful and healthy, a girl on the cusp of womanhood with all that this entails and implies.I have said she is uptight, old fashioned and by the book. It’s true. She will be moulded into the model Western woman because her world decrees it so. But she is no longer in that world now and little by little its rules cease to matter and apply. The Aboriginal boy is naked apart from a loin cloth. Little brother is shirtless most of the time. Eventually she lets her hair down too. Her shirt comes off. A brassiere remains, but not always. The three wanderers come upon a massive deep-water spring. It becomes their swimming hole. They swim naked in it, and there for the first time we see the girl’s imminent womanhood. Stripped bare, naked and exposed, all the pretenses and posturing of civilisation disappear from her. And — dare we say it — she looks joyous, carefree, liberated, peaceful. She has let go entirely.The Aboriginal boy notices. In this world of his, in fact, nothing escapes his notice. The girl’s beauty registers. We see a change regarding her come over him. Thereafter he sometimes carries her on his back. He does it because he wants to. It makes him feel good, and by her laughter we see she feels good too. The young boy, little brother, is happy as well, good tidings being infectious. Paradise is temporary, as always, but it’s also real while it lasts. They are happy. They have come through danger and are free.But we surmise where all this is due to lead. Industrial civilisation and ancient myth are not designed to live happily together. So we are not surprised when paradise is eventually lost.They are rescued, they survive, these English children, rescued by a boy who became a man on his native walkabout. They know it. But he could not save himself. His body survived the ordeal, but not his heart which was broken by it.Years later we see the girl, though a girl no longer. She stands in the kitchen of her modern suburban home, a modern suburban housewife now. She chops meat at the chopping board. Is it kangaroo, a remnant of her past, a meat she often ate in the bush? Her husband comes home from work and enters the kitchen. He embraces her, his back to us. We see her face. It’s blank and unsmiling. The husband speaks: the stuff of work, a potential promotion, holidaying on the Gold Coast within a year or two. But she doesn’t hear this. It’s white noise to her ears. In her mind we see a flashback, the same one she sees. She’s swimming again in a swimming hole in the bush. She’s naked with the naked Aboriginal boy. They swim, laugh and frolic. She sees him, this strong and wise man. It happened to her. She didn’t imagine it. And in those blank eyes we see what she sees and has lost.

Walkabout is an unusual film in that it has both an intriguing story, thought provoking and good wide-angle shots of the outback flora, fauna and landscape . A little dated in that the I hope things have now improved between the indigenous Australian people (aborigines) and the 'recent' white visitors. Films of this nature and time period (mid-late 20th century) do remind the viewer of the ingrained fear and prodigiousness of the recent past . This mistrust surfaces when the aborigine boy meets the two abandoned children (abandoned by there father - reasons unknown) and no-doubt saving ultimately their lives by providing food and water (both physically and by training the two to find food and water for themselves) in addition to leading them to safety. The fear/mistrust surfaces on multiple occasions throughout the film. Some of these reasons for mistrust are explained and some unexplained. Whilst on other occasions this mistrust appears to be (on the surface) non-existent as the language barrier/communication improves after the passage of time. This distrust is predominantly between the aborigine (currently on the male-right of passage trek in the wilderness ) and the girl, with the younger boy just being interested and friendly. In fact acting as the bridge in communication on multiple occasions. This film also leaves the viewer with some unknowns, specifically in what happens off camera (if anything) between the older two members of the trio (Aborigine and the Girl). Is there some attraction/ perhaps general curiosity between the two sexes/ teenagers? with the added complication of the two individuals coming from two separated worlds/ limited communication and unusual stressful scenario. The actual level of any such attraction / interpretation and how far it actually goes, could be affected by the personal viewers experience of films of this type-which the film carefully 'plays to' and allows the viewer to decide. No black or white answers given just occasional suggestions. The film jumps from moments of joy, happiness to the harsh realties of culture clash and surviving in a hostile environment. Also eluded too, is the difference between the aborigine way of life (working with the environment - only taking what you need to survive) and the 'white-mans' view (stereotypical I know) of exploiting nature.One key question that was left unanswered (no visual clue) was why/and indeed how the aborigine ends his life. Was it self-inflicted or did something else/someone else cause his death. Films (ones that do not initially provide all of the answers) always intrigue me and deserve multiple viewings ( at least 6 months apart) to see if you (the viewer) have missed any subtle clues.No sequel (just some additional footage at the end - personal memory? of Marys at the end). So any answers need to be provide from your own imagination. I have watched the film three times and I personally do not have the definitive answers. My rent the book from the library or download a kindle copy but I am currently unsure of which book/version to read, as there appears to be published books ,multiple titles of the same story with slightly different scenarios i.e. the two children are plane crash survivors (walkabout - James Vance Marshall). I still do not know which came first the film of the book I suspect the book. I need to locate the original publication.