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Walkabout (1971, UK/Australia)
In Nicolas Roeg's haunting directorial solo debut film:
- in the shocking opening scene, suicidal Australian
businessman (John Meillon) tried to murder his teen-aged,
14 year-old schoolgirl daughter (17 year-old Jenny Agutter in her
film debut) and six-year-old son (Lucien John) in the bush during
a picnic and then committed suicide in front of them
- the two were forced to struggle and adapt to the
blazing hot and hostile climate of the Australian outback and its
terrain. They
were fortunately saved when aided by a teenaged adolescent Aboriginal
Black Boy (David Gumpilil), who was involved in his ritualistic
'walkabout' (to prove his manhood and mark his entrance into adulthood)
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Struggling to Survive in the Outback
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- after overcoming self-consciousness and civilization's
social conventions, the Girl engaged in a lengthy nude swim (an awe-inspiring
natural scene) in a natural lagoon pond (with non-gratuitous full
frontal nudity) - a symbol of her sexual awakening, although this
would lead to tragic circumstances for the older aboriginal boy
- during the native aborigine's 'walkabout' - with a
painted skeleton on his body - he performed a silent, ritualistic
mating dance for the civilized, repressed girl at a deserted farmhouse,
where he glimpsed her half-undressed
The Boy's Rejected Mating Dance
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The Aborigine Boy's Pursuit of Girl
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- she ignored and resisted
his (and her own) sexual rite of passage, by continuing to treat
him as a detached servant -- with disastrous results. After the
aboriginal danced all night and became saddened and weary (with tears
in his eyes), she found him the next morning hanging dead in a mango
tree, and she barely reacted to his death
- the film ended years later with the young girl now
married and returned to civilization, living in a high-rise apartment
complex. She was wistfully daydreaming back to her idyllic days
in the outback when she happily swam naked with the aborigine and
her young brother. They were long-gone days of paradise lost, reflected
in a voice-over quote from Part 40 of A.E. Housman's 'A Shropshire
Lad':
Into my heart an air that kills From yon far country
blows: What are those blue-remembered hills, What spires, what
farms are those? That is the land of lost content, I see it shining
plain, The happy highways where I went And cannot come again.
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Suicide of Businessman Father
Mating Dance - With Disastrous Consequences
Girl's (Jenny Agutter) Recollections of the Outback in the
Film's Conclusion
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