Walkabout: Roeg's Erotic Coming-of-Age in the Outback

Edward Bond’s screenplay for Walkabout is famously about fourteen pages long. Nicolas Roeg shot it in the Australian desert in 1970, photographed it himself, cast his own son in one of the three parts, and came back with a film that competed at Cannes in 1971 and has been quietly demolishing viewers ever since. It was his first solo feature — he had co-directed Performance with Donald Cammell before it, though the release order put that one out afterwards.

A teenage girl and her small brother are stranded in the outback. An Aboriginal boy on his walkabout, the ritual months alone in the wilderness that mark the passage into manhood, finds them and keeps them alive. That is the plot. Everything that matters in the film happens in the gaps between those three people, and the gaps are where Roeg lives.

What Roeg does with fourteen pages

The short script is the point. A conventional screenplay would have supplied dialogue, and dialogue would have destroyed the film, because Walkabout is about the impossibility of two of these people ever telling each other anything. Jenny Agutter’s girl speaks English. David Gulpilil’s boy speaks Yolŋu Matha. Neither understands a syllable of the other. Roeg’s small brother — played by Luc Roeg, credited as Lucien John — is the only one who communicates with anybody, because he is young enough not to know that he should not be able to.

That casting decision does more work than any line could. The child moves between the two worlds by mime and by cheerful indifference to the barrier, and the film uses him as the control in an experiment about what adults have lost. Gulpilil, in his first film, is astonishing: an actual dancer, moving through the country with an authority the camera simply records. Agutter, sixteen at the time of shooting, plays the girl with a stiffness that is the performance rather than a limitation. Her school uniform stays on. She keeps the manners. She is doing suburbia in a desert, and Roeg lets that go on so long it becomes unbearable.

The mechanics — why it works

Roeg was a cinematographer before he was a director, and Walkabout is a film shot by a man who knows exactly what a lens can lie about. He alternates two visual grammars. The desert material is long, patient, wide, in natural light: land first, people small. The intercut material — flashes of the city, of a butcher’s shop, of a weather balloon, of scientists in the desert measuring things — is fast, clipped and ugly.

The cutting between them is the argument. Roeg will place a shot of the boy hunting a kangaroo directly against a shot of a butcher jointing meat behind glass. The comparison is unmistakable and it is never spoken. He does it again with the scientists, who are in the same desert doing something incomprehensible with instruments, and whose presence tells you that the wilderness the children are lost in has a road through it about a mile away. That single intercut reframes the entire film: they are a mile from help and a lifetime from knowing how to see.

The sound is the other half. John Barry’s score is romantic to the point of ache, and Roeg lays it over material that ranges from idyllic to horrifying, which produces exactly the instability he wants. Underneath the score is the desert itself — insects, wind, the extraordinary density of the sound design in the still passages. The film keeps you constantly aware that the emptiness is full.

And Roeg’s editing of time is the thing that would define the rest of his career: the flash-forward, the flash-sideways, the shot that belongs to a scene you have not reached yet. He built that grammar here and refined it in Don’t Look Now. I traced the whole method in Nicolas Roeg: the fractured image, and Walkabout is where it first stands upright.

The eroticism, handled honestly

The film’s reputation carries the word erotic, and it should be addressed plainly rather than around. Roeg photographs Agutter’s body with an attention the film does not extend to anyone else, including in a long swimming sequence, and she was sixteen. That is a real problem and modern viewers are right to flag it; Agutter herself has spoken about the shoot at various points over the decades and the picture’s own defenders have never pretended the issue away.

What the film is doing with it is a separate question from whether it should have done it. The desire in Walkabout runs one way and lands nowhere. The boy’s courtship is expressed in the only register he has — hunting, provision, dance — and the girl reads none of it, because her grammar for being wanted involves things that do not exist within a thousand miles. The tragedy is a translation failure with a body count. Roeg films the attraction so that the audience can see what the girl cannot, and the ache of the film is the ache of watching someone miss the only offer she will ever get.

The ancestor

Walkabout is habitually filed with the Australian New Wave, and it predates most of it — Picnic at Hanging Rock is four years later, and I wrote about that one in Picnic at Hanging Rock: the vanishing that refuses to resolve. Roeg’s film is a British production shot in Australia, and the wave that followed is surveyed in The Ozploitation boom and the films Australia disowned. Whether it belongs to that story at all is arguable; what is not arguable is that Gulpilil’s career began here and ran through most of the wave that followed.

The real ancestor is L’Avventura (1960). Antonioni’s film also strands people in a landscape, also refuses to resolve its central disappearance, and also discovers that the terrain is more articulate than the characters. The formal move is identical — hold the shot until the geography starts to mean something, and let the human business go unfinished. Roeg swaps a Sicilian island for the Western Australian desert and adds a child who can still see.

There is a second, stranger ancestor: the anthropological film. Roeg’s scientists-with-instruments footage is a direct needle at the tradition of Western observers arriving in country with clipboards, and the film’s interest in ritual — the walkabout itself, the girl’s suburban rituals, the brother’s games — is the anthropologist’s interest turned on everybody at once, including the people holding the camera.

The case against

The intercutting is sometimes crude. The butcher’s shop is a good idea used more than once, and by the third or fourth ironic juxtaposition the film has started explaining itself. Roeg’s confidence in his own images is total, and occasionally it should not have been.

The Aboriginal boy has no interiority. He is superbly played and beautifully filmed and he functions, structurally, as nature’s ambassador — a role that has a long and unhappy history. The film is far more curious about what the white girl fails to perceive than about what the boy actually is, and the imbalance is baked into the premise. Gulpilil’s presence is what rescues it; the writing does not.

The framing of the parents’ situation at the start is abrupt to the point of arbitrary, and the film never returns to it. Some viewers find that a masterstroke. Others find it a script that ran out of pages, and both readings are supportable, which is the trouble with fourteen pages.

The verdict

Walkabout is one of the most beautiful films ever made about the failure to understand another person, and its beauty is inseparable from its cruelty — Roeg photographs an unbridgeable gap in gorgeous light and refuses to bridge it. The film’s greatness sits in a single sustained perception: that the desert will keep the girl alive, and that surviving it unchanged is the mortal danger.

It has aged into difficulty on the question of how it films its lead, and that difficulty is legitimate and permanent. It has also aged into relevance on almost everything else — the ecological grief, the sense of a country in which a road runs a mile from where you are lost, the suspicion that a civilisation can teach you everything except how to accept a gift.

Start here for Roeg, then go to Performance for the co-directed film that made his name and to Don’t Look Now for the same editing grammar at full power. Restored editions circulate widely and the film needs one; on a poor transfer the desert goes to mud and the whole picture collapses.

Spoilers below

The film opens with the father driving the children into the desert, opening fire on them, setting the car alight and killing himself. Roeg stages it with no build and no explanation, in a few shots, and then simply proceeds. Nothing in the remaining ninety minutes refers back to it. The girl tells her brother that the car is broken and that they will walk, and the lie holds for the rest of the film. The most violent thing in the picture happens in the first five minutes and is then buried under English manners, which is Roeg’s thesis stated before the credits have settled.

The boy’s courtship comes at the end of the journey. Having brought them within reach of a road and a house, he paints himself and dances outside the shelter, all night, in the ritual form — the offer made in the only language he has. The girl bolts the door and will not look. In the morning he is dead in a tree. The film gives you no certainty about the cause and does not need to; the sequence is one of the most devastating in British cinema precisely because the failure is so small and so total. She did not refuse him. She never knew she had been asked.

Then the coda, which is the reason the film is a masterpiece rather than an idyll. Years later, the girl is a woman in a kitchen in a city, married, being talked at by a husband recounting a promotion in the flattest possible domestic register. Roeg cuts to the waterhole. The three of them are swimming, naked, laughing, in a sequence that never happened in the film you have just watched. A.E. Housman comes up on the soundtrack — the lines about the blue remembered hills and the happy highways where I went and cannot come again.

The memory is false and she is keeping it anyway. That is the cruellest and most generous ending Roeg ever filmed: the desert gets remembered as paradise by the person who could not live in it for a week, and the poem tells you she knows.