Walkabout (1971)

Walkabout movie storyline. A privileged British family consisting of a mother, a geologist father and an adolescent daughter and son, live in Sydney, Australia. Out of circumstance, the siblings, not knowing exactly where they are, get stranded in the Outback by themselves while on a picnic. They only have with them the clothes on their backs – their school uniforms – some meagre rations of nonperishable food, a battery-powered transistor radio, the son’s satchel primarily containing his toys, and a small piece of cloth they used as their picnic drop-cloth.

While they walk through the Outback, sometimes looking as though near death, they come across an Australian boy who is on his walkabout, a rite of passage into manhood where he spends months on end on his own living off the land. Their largest problem is not being able to verbally communicate. The boy does help them to survive, but doesn’t understand their need to return to civilization, which may or may not happen based on what the Australian boy ends up doing.

Walkabout is a 1971 British-Australian survival film directed by Nicolas Roeg and starring Jenny Agutter, Luc Roeg, and David Gulpilil. Edward Bond wrote the screenplay, which is loosely based on the 1959 novel Walkabout by James Vance Marshall. Set in the Australian outback, it centres on two white schoolchildren who are left to fend for themselves in the Australian outback and who come across a teenage Aboriginal boy who helps them to survive.

One of the first films in the Australian New Wave cinema movement, it received positive reviews despite being a commercial failure. Alongside Wake in Fright, it was one of two Australian films entered in competition for the Grand Prix du Festival at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival.[3] It is also held to be one of Roeg’s masterpieces, along with Performance (1970), Don’t Look Now (1973), and The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976). In 2005, the British Film Institute included it in their list of the “50 films you should see by the age of 14”.

Directed by: Nicolas Roeg
Starring: Jenny Agutter, David Gulpilil, Luc Roeg, John Meillon, Robert McDarra, Peter Carver, John Illingsworth, Hilary Bamberger, Barry Donnelly, Noeline Brown, Carlo Manchini
Screenplay by: Edward Bond
Production Design by: Brian Eatwell
Cinematography by: Nicolas Roeg
Film Editing by: Antony Gibbs, Alan Pattillo
Art Direction by: Terry Gough
Makeup Department: Linda Richmond
Music by: John Barry
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: 20th Century Fox
Release Date: July 1, 1971