"…perhaps still [Roeg's] most moving, humane film … a mature commentary on the discontents of civilization under the guise of a children's adventure"

Neil Sinyard The Films of Nicolas Roeg
[Letts]

As befits its timeless narrative, Walkabout has become a timeless classic.

Made after the unique Pandora's Box of Performance (but conceived as Roeg's directorial debut - thwarted by finance), Walkabout is as deceptively sparse and iconic as its Outback setting, and yet one of Roeg's most eloquent meditations on 'strangers in a strange land'

It charts the journey of brother and sister - abandoned in the Australian interior by their father after his unexplained suicide - back to city life with the help of an Aborigine boy.
The film's minimal cast features David Gumpilil (most recently seen in Rabbit Proof Fence), Jenny Agutter and Roeg's own son Lucien John (now Luc Roeg, with an impressive producer's portfolio). Roeg was so intrigued by his son's day-to-day experience of film-making, that his exploits became the subject of the unfinished Luko's Diary.

All three give memorable performances, and the striking balance of wilderness and 'civilization' that ekes from every frame seems as pertinent today as 1971, when it became a staple of makeshift church film-clubs.

It's easy to overlook the conjunction of talent that lays behind Walkabout.

The bare yet precise script is by Edward Bond at the zenith of what seems his most successfully creative period (Royal Court successes like Saved appeared shortly thereafter) .

The score features a multitude of perfect 'found' music, from Stockhausen to Rod Stewart, beside one of John Barry's most achingly beautiful works.

The principal camerawork is all Roeg's own, and consistently inventive and beautiful : more than most Roeg works, Walkabout demonstrates his fascination with film as time-machine in action (watch the sequence when poachers encroach on the Outback eden).

Years later, Paul Theroux wrote a touching paean to Walkabout as a masterwork of Australian culture :

"In a seemingly modest way, it encompasses the whole of Australia, nearly all its landscape, its incomparable light, its drunks and desperadoes, all its bugs, from its most beautiful city to its red centre."

Lose (and find) yourself in its landscape.

* from the novel by James Vance Marshall
1970 GB/Australia 100 mins