At first glance, Walkabout looks like a simple survival adventure, but Nicolas Roeg has much more on his mind. His first solo film after co-directing Performance (1970) with Donald Cammell, it is a visually hypnotic, thematically rich cinematic experience that feels unlike almost anything else from its era.
Walkabout, a loose adaptation of James Vance Marshall’s 1959 novel of the same name, begins with a middle-class father (John Meillon) taking his 16-year-old teenage daughter (Jenny Agutter) and 6-year-old son (Luc Roeg) on a picnic from Sydney to the Australian outback. Out of nowhere, he takes out his revolver and attempts to shoot his kids before killing himself and setting fire to the car. Now, the boy and the girl are faced with a terrible ordeal as they struggle to survive in the harsh desert and find their way home. The area is barren, with little or no food or water, as they wander until they come upon a young Aboriginal man (David Gulpilil) on his Walkabout, a coming-of-age ritual in which 16-year-old boys must venture into the wilderness alone to prove they can fend for themselves. He helps the siblings and teaches them important survival techniques, but he cannot understand their language. He builds a close nonverbal bond with them until tragedy strikes, leaving them to face an irreversible loss.
The first five minutes demonstrate how little Roeg needs conventional dialogue to establish his world. He builds the opening almost entirely through texture, sound, and visual juxtapositions, letting the images do the talking. It begins with images of rock textures that give way to a brick wall before the camera pans right to reveal the streets and architecture of Sydney. Another pan takes us from the built environment to the emptiness of the Australian outback. That brick wall acts as a striking visual bridge between the two worlds; its hard, artificial surface contrasts with the openness of the landscape, while Stockhausen’s static, a French croupier’s call, and a pulsing didgeridoo collide with urban noise and school drills.
Through fast-paced editing, Roeg and his editors, Anthony Gibbs and Alan Pattillo, take us from the crowded city streets to a father’s emotional disconnection as he moves through the city, then to the children’s regimented school life, and finally to a home scene where the mother cooks, the children are confined to the pool, and the father watches from the gallery with a drink in hand. The father, girl, and boy first appear as disconnected figures, already unnamed and somewhat detached from one another and their surroundings. Here, the editing creates meaning through collision and rhythm rather than cause-and-effect storytelling. So, by the time the father takes his two children on a picnic, we’ve already gotten a sense of the film’s themes, including confinement and artificial order, failing human connection, the thinness of civilization, and cultural disconnect.
The film is a masterclass in visual storytelling: the narrative is intentionally sparse, the dialog is minimal, the characters are unnamed, and Roeg avoids conventional exposition or psychological explanation, resulting in an experience that feels more like a sensory, almost psychedelic journey than a linear adventure. The reason I said the film feels like a hallucinatory experience is largely due to the cinematography of Nicolas Roeg (who served as cinematographer on films like Fahrenheit 451 and Far from the Madding Crowd). He doesn’t just use the outback as a backdrop. In those wide shots of the bleached sky, red earth, and sparse vegetation, the landscape feels almost like another character, beautiful but also alien, oppressive, and strangely alive. Then he cuts to close-ups of lizards, insects, snakes, birds, and all kinds of other wildlife. These shots aren’t there just to make the place look exotic. They remind us that this world was here long before humans arrived and will carry on perfectly well without them.
The editing is wonderfully experimental, jumping between cross-cutting and non-chronological fragments to give the film its hazy, dreamlike quality. One of the best examples is the parallel editing between the Aboriginal boy hunting with skill and respect and the white men hunting purely for sport, leaving a trail of needless slaughter behind them. Similarly, downtown Sydney is frequently intercut with desert imagery, while brief flash-forwards and a reverse-motion clip of the father’s suicide (in which he appears to ascend) disrupt linear progression, implying a dreamlike state of recollection in which past, present, and imagined experiences coexist. In addition, John Barry’s poetic and melancholic score, along with the inventive layering of diegetic and non-diegetic sounds, contributes to the film’s dreamlike atmosphere and makes the outback feel enigmatic and almost transcendent.
What makes Walkabout so powerful is how much it says without ever feeling like it is lecturing us. The film sets civilization and nature against each other, moving from the rigid architecture of Sydney to the brutal but strangely beautiful openness of the outback, and quietly asking what human progress has cost us. Its white characters are alienated from nature and, in many ways, from one another, while the communication gap between the Aboriginal boy and the girl becomes something deeper than a simple language barrier. They share food, danger, space, and even moments of tenderness but find it difficult to bridge the gap of their cultural differences.
Above all, the film is about innocence slipping away. The children step into the outback still protected by the little world they came from, and slowly that protection falls away as they encounter death, sexuality, danger, and the realities of survival. Then the film jumps forward, and the girl is back in the city, living an entirely different life. The outback is now somewhere she can only visit in her memory, where that brief, almost dreamlike period of innocence remains frozen in time.
Jenny Agutter gives “the girl” a wonderful adolescent awkwardness beneath her growing resilience. There’s a quiet self-consciousness to her performance, but she also has a screen presence that is impossible to ignore. David Gulpilil, meanwhile, does extraordinary work with almost nothing but his body and face. His eyes and gestures tell us everything about the Aboriginal boy: his competence, curiosity, compassion, isolation, and the feelings he cannot put into words. Walkabout is undoubtedly one of Australia’s finest films, and few movies demonstrate the emotional power of visual storytelling quite like it.
Walkabout movie links: Letterboxd, IMDb, Wikipedia
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