By Jon Hewitt
Walkabout (1972) is a freaked-out, elliptical, and deliriously bizarre wonder that director/cinematographer, Nic Roeg, sandwiched between his debut outing with Donald Cammell, Performance, and the spookily psychopathological Don’t Look Now (1973). Talk about a narrative flip-out – Walkabout comes from that exhilarating early 1970s window when “art film” was not a pejorative term in mainstream moviemaking, and the burgeoning script “industry” had yet to spread its three-act, hero’s journey, what-makes-a-good-script narrative cancer through most English-language screenwriting.
Probably financed due to the “lost in the wilderness” genre that burned bright in the early 1970s, Walkabout is the story of two English schoolkids (Jenny Agutter and Luc Roeg, the son of Nicolas Roeg) stranded in the Australian desert after their old man (John Meillon in a brief but disturbing cameo) tries to kill them before blowing his brains out (yeah, it happened back then as well). The lost and endangered kids eventually hook up with an adolescent Aboriginal boy (David Gulpilil in his first role) and go on a journey full of surrealism, living-off-the-land ultra-violence, unrepressed (though unrequited) teen carnality, and bizarre asides to other seemingly unconnected storylines.
Nic the photographer loves a good frame, and some of the best lensing of our flora and fauna can be found here. Jenny Agutter and David Gulpilil, meanwhile, are gloriously pubescent, and Nic the perve makes full use of their youthful flesh, with nakedness and body parts in shameless close-up, and much lolling around in nature’s fecundity. The film is dementedly, shamelessly, unrelentingly symbolic, and is a sobering reminder (boy, do we need it right now!) that film is a visual medium and not just a vehicle for dialogue-driven exposition.
A justified international cult favourite today, Walkabout is best known in Australia as the film that introduced the world to David Gulpilil, who went on to become Australia’s most celebrated Aboriginal film star, with subsequent performances in Peter Weir’s The Last Wave, Crocodile Dundee, Rabbit-Proof Fence, The Tracker, Charlie’s Country, The Proposition, Australia, and this week’s Goldstone. “It’s very difficult to tell you about Gulpilil,” director, Peter Weir, told American journalist, Judith M. Kaas, of the actor, for whom he had specifically written a principal role in his 1979 thriller, The Last Wave. “I know very little about the man. He’s enigmatic; he’s an actor, a dancer, a musician. He’s a tribal man, initiated in the tribal ways, but he was found by Nicolas Roeg at a very early age and put into an international movie. Roeg took him on publicity trips to Europe and the States. He has a foot in both cultures. It’s an enormous strain on the man.”
Gulpilil’s relationship with the film industry has always been an uneasy one, and his fame constantly put him at odds with his community in Ramingining in The Northern Territory. “I was brought up in a tin shed,” Gulpilil told The Age in 2002. “I wandered all over the world – Paris, New York – and now I’m back in a tin shed. How come I don’t have a house? I’d like to know. I travel the world. I come home; there’s no home. All the world thinks that I’m living in a luxury house right now. This community forgot me. People say to me, ‘You’re a big name. You have money. Why don’t you buy yourself a house, and get out of Ramingining?’ But this is my country. I belong here, and I’m broke.” David Gulpilil remains, however, a great and continuing source of inspiration in Australia’s filmmaking community, and in Australia in general. “When I was growing up, Walkabout and Storm Boy were touchstone films,” director, Catriona McKenzie – who cast Gulpilil as a wise grandfather in her 2012 coming of age drama, Satellite Boy – told FilmInk. “There are shots in Satellite Boy that pay homage to Walkabout. It was a lovely act of coming full circle. David is a fifteen-year-old-boy in Walkabout, and in Satellite Boy, he’s now the grandfather.”
