by Colin Marshall
None of us really think about it anymore, especially if we grew up in Crocodile Dundee’s pop-cultural heyday, but… how weird is Australia? This land mass, just large enough to qualify for continent status, hanging out by itself underneath Asia? Starkly arid and desolate, for the most part, between its eastern and western edges? Ten thousand miles from England, yet full (in a sense) of Brits? Without a doubt, Australia makes the short list of countries that can freak you out if you think hard enough about them. It doesn’t sit at the top — stiff competition from Turkmenistan, Paraguay, and North Korea — but which filmmakers bother to actively engage with it? The Mad Max pictures grew more grotesque as they went along, but in a speculatively flamboyant way that didn’t really engage the actual weirdness. Baz Luhrmann seems to hold a grasp on some of his homeland’s deep askewness, but his movies tend to convert it into mere eccentricity.
But if we’re keeping it to high international profiles, we’ve got to talk about Nicolas Roeg. Despite suffering the apparent disadvantage of growing up in London and not, say, Alice Springs, he nevertheless managed, in his solo directorial debut Walkabout, to deliver an Australia never seen before — or, for that matter, since. More specifically, he delivers an Australian outback, and a drama in it, never seen before or since, dropping a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl and her six-year-old brother right into the thick of it. Cinephiles, or even enthusiasts of modern myth, know the rest of the story: the uniformed, near-albinistically white siblings — credited only as “Girl” and “White Boy” — just about succumb to dehydration when they come across a young Aboriginal tribesman — “Black Boy” — who ultimately leads them back to their civilization, though only after a series of fatal failures to communicate.
That plot opens up a minefield of potential cinematic embarrassments, including but not limited to telling the story with a standard “survival” movie or, worse, telling it with a standard “noble savage” movie. The Girl and the White Boy owe their lives to the Black Boy, true, but Roeg doesn’t convey it with a broadside against Western civilization, colonial arrogance, excessive whiteness, or what have you, even though those seem like tacks the film has to take. I’d dragged my feet on seeing it for the first time because of my fear that Roeg, who had become one of my favorite filmmakers immediately after I saw The Man Who Fell to Earth, would succumb to obvious moralistic clichés. How foolish of me; watching any given Roeg film should assure you that, even when he uses time-worn components of plot or character — and he usually does — he fits them together with a box of tools all of his own cockeyed invention.
How do we know Walkabout won’t put us through a typical plodding spectacle of uptight urbanites reluctantly chomping down on sticks, leaves, and bugs at the urging of cautious but giving sun-browned natives brimming with simple wisdom from generations of close communion with Mother Earth? The signs come early and often, starting with the way the brother and sister wind up stranded so far into the outback in the first place. We see their buttoned-down father express squinting, frowny displeasure at his job, home, and family, and it feels like the brim of a very old hat indeed — until he drives the kids out into the country, tells them to set up a picnic, and then pulls out his revolver and opens fire on them. They run; he keeps missing, perhaps deliberately. By the time he’s set fire to the car and done himself in, the Girl and the White Boy have nowhere to go but away, as far and as fast as they can manage.
Read more »
