Walkabout

10/24/2021

_**Arty flick about survival in the Outback and coming-of-age**_ A teenage girl (Jenny Agutter) and her little brother get stuck in the Outback, but receive assistance by an aboriginal boy (David Gulpilil) on a ‘walkabout,’ a rite of passage into manhood. Directed by Nicolas Roeg, “Walkabout” (1971) is an arty cult flick that plays like a Terrence Malick film and no doubt influenced his style (since it came out two years before Malick’s feature film debut with “Badlands”). Agutter was only 16 during shooting while her character is 14, according to Roeg. The themes about the beauty of nature vs. man-made desecration and the clash of the primitive with the ‘cultured’ & the problems of communication thereof were probably fresh at the time but are obvious and old hat now. "Dances With

7/13/2026

"We are all one blood. No matter where we are from, we are all one blood, the same." —David Gulpilil Summary: 7/10: Uneven direction cannot diminish the landmark debut of David Gulpilil, whose grace and intelligence anchor a film that's really about the colonial destruction of wilderness and the particular genius of what was lost. Walkabout marks the screen debut of one of the most luminous talents cinema has known. David Gulpilil was sixteen years old when British director Nicolas Roeg discovered him in Arnhem Land, a Yolngu boy who could barely speak English but was already an accomplished hunter, tracker, and ceremonial dancer. Over the next fifty years, Gulpilil would become Australia's greatest actor, leading a dance company for a decade, winning awards for his performances on