Walkabout

Louis Nowra

• Publisher: Currency Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781921429088
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Radio

Playwright, novelist and screenwriter Louis Nowra says Walkabout 'destroyed the cliché of the dead heart and made us Australians see it from a unique perspective'.

Introduction

Because I have written screenplays and have been involved in the process of making films I suppose it’s only natural that this monograph concentrates on the process, from the novel to the preparation to the filming and, then, reception of the film. Although Walkabout was Roeg’s first solo effort as director it remains a template for his themes, obsessions and interests. The film is one of those works of art where another sensibility, or several really, have interpreted Australia and as an Australian I’m interested in seeing us reflected in someone else’s mirror. It is also obvious, I hope, that I regard Roeg as a marvellous filmmaker, a director shamefully unappreciated in his own country.

Having worked in films, I know the vital contribution of everyone involved, from screenwriters, actors, designers and editors, but I have concentrated on Roeg because of his tenacious desire to film the novel, his inspired direction and extraordinary photography. Despite Edward Bond’s contribution as screenwriter (and it was considerable), it is Roeg’s vision that permeates practically every frame.

Even after thirty years Walkabout has the feeling and look of something remarkable and unique. Roeg has shown Australians, for a brief moment, another way of looking at our country and our interdependence with Aborigines. He gave the Outback a singular poetry and sensuousness and created a extraordinary fable.

1

There are some films that change the way you see things. Walkabout is one. This is especially true for an Australian like myself because Australians seem to be born with an iconic sense of the Outback. For most of us the images are remarkably resilient and unchanging: the brutal sun, barren land, baked earth, the cloudless, intensely blue sky, dried creek beds, stunted harsh grass, severe rocky outcrops, totemic Aborigines, corrugated iron shacks, flocks of mad galahs, lizards and, of course, snakes. It doesn’t matter if you have ventured there or not, because the Outback is always present in our poetry, novels, paintings and tourist shop calendars. A forbidding place because of its emptiness and forlorn lack of hope, the Outback is still sometimes called the Dead Heart. Its lack of water and life are often portrayed as the epitome of infertility, even though, in reality, it comes vividly alive with a profusion of flowers and birdlife after infrequent rains. It seems to Australians that only the stoic survive its rigours and they do so merely by enduring, not by trying to impose their will on the land. The Outback is both a real place and a crucial part of Australian mythology.

Two films featuring the Outback were released in 1971, both directed by non-Australians. Wake in Fright (also called Outback), directed by the Canadian Ted Kotcheff, was the nightmarish tale of a young schoolteacher cracking up in a remote Outback community, a story of human degradation and corruption centred on people brutalised by a harsh environment. The other was Walkabout by English director, Nicolas (Nic) Roeg.

Let’s pause a moment and put Roeg’s movie into an Australian context. It was a different cinematic world then. Our movie industry seemed as barren as the cliché of the Dead Heart. In fact there was no movie industry. Occasional films—spasmodic interruptions to the general lethargy—weren’t popular and many Australians avoided them. By 1970 I think I had only seen one Australian movie, Smiley Gets a Gun, a children’s film set in a cosy Outback town, directed by Englishman Anthony Kimmins. The once flourishing Australian film industry had petered out decades before. The 1969 documentary The Pictures that Moved was, Eric Reade wrote in his history of Australian cinema, History and Heartburn, ‘a grim reminder of past film achievements’. Films produced in Australia were not just infrequent but they were mostly made by foreigners. Stanley Kramer’s On the Beach, for instance, and The Sundowners, Fred Zinnemann’s cornball mix of family saga, sheep and soporific acting. Michael Powell’s marvellous career ended rather untidily in Australia when he made two films based on Australian novels, They’re a Weird Mob and his penultimate film Age of Consent, with James Mason playing a glum painter entranced by the young and, need one say, sexy Helen Mirren. In 1969 local director Tim Burstall attempted to portray a deliberately different Australia with 2000 Weeks, a film set in an urban environment, but it was a dismal failure both commercially and critically. It seemed that our moribund industry would never spring to life again and that Australia would simply offer story fodder or an exotic location for overseas directors such as Tony Richardson’s Ned Kelly in which an epicene Mick Jagger played the notorious bushranger as if he were a prancing Nijinsky in an iron mask.

During my university years in the early 1970s, I devoured the films of Sternberg, Welles, Losey and even Jerry Lewis, but I knew nothing of pioneering Australian directors like Ken G. Hall (On Our Selection) or Charles Chauvel (Jedda, Forty Thousand Horsemen). I had not heard of Roeg either, but I went to see Walkabout because the script was written by one of my favourite English playwrights, Edward Bond. It is probably one of the few times I have gone to see a movie because of the screenwriter.

Judging by the posters (one a silhouette of an Aboriginal in iconic pose on a ridge, holding a spear, one leg drawn up, and the other—the sexy version—a naked teenage white girl swimming in a billabong), I assumed that the film would confirm all the Outback stereotypes, especially since it had been directed by an Englishman. My heart sank when I settled in my seat. I was one of only three people in the cinema that matinée. But from its violent opening to its ambiguous conclusion I was stunned. The images of the Outback were of an almost hallucinogenic intensity. Instead of the desert and bush being infused with a dull monotony, everything seemed acute, shrill and incandescent. The Outback was beautiful and haunting. It didn’t matter that some of the animals were incongruous to the location, and the countryside was at times absurdly out of sync with the actual terrain traversed. The setting sun was a richer red than I ever thought possible, the solitary quandong tree in the middle of the desert had the mysterious visual potency of a Byzantine icon, the animals had a fairytale brightness, and the Aboriginal boy’s dance seemed one of the strangest yet most beautiful expressions of yearning I had ever seen. The visual splendour mocked my stereotype of the Outback. Never before had I entertained the notion that our landscape could be so romantic, so glorious both in its potent dangers and beauty.

The gorgeous images seemed in keeping with the simple, fable-like story, which is easy to sum up: two white children, a teenage girl and her young brother, find themselves lost in the desert after their father, who has attempted to kill them, commits suicide. The children look like dying but a teenage Aboriginal boy, going walkabout during his initiation year, comes upon them and helps them survive. The trio undertake a great journey through the desert but once they near civilisation the love-struck Aboriginal boy is rejected by the girl and he commits suicide. The film ends a few years later in the city with the girl now married to a boring businessman. As he talks to her of mundane things her thoughts are faraway, recalling her journey through an Austral Eden.

It’s a simple story with strange perspectives to it; a result, perhaps, of its curious genesis. First published in 1959 as The Children, its title was changed to Walkabout when it was republished in 1961. James Vance Marshall, the named author, was born in 1887 and was a friend of Henry Lawson, whose stories did much to consolidate the mythology of the grim Outback. Fervently left wing, Marshall was gaoled in the First World War for his anti-conscription activities and wrote pamphlets about his prison experiences. He also wrote some ordinary poems and sketches. The Children was his first novel. Yet did he actually write it? The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature says it was ‘apparently written by an (anonymous) English author who collaborated with Marshall in that he used, with his consent, Marshall’s notes on outback life deriving from his period as a sandalwood-cutter in the Northern Territory’. Novels continued to be published under Marshall’s name even after he died in 1964. Yet while Walkabout’s author was thought to be English, the pseudonym was subsequently used by a New Zealander. A note in the 1970 novel, A Walk to the Hills of the Dreamtime, claimed that Marshall’s name has been used ‘by permission of his family’. The three novels since his death, it said, ‘are in no way works of collaboration—although use has been made of Mr Marshall’s notes on the Outback—but are wholly original to Donald Payne, their hitherto pseudonymous New Zealand author who helped Mr Marshall in the last years of his life’. There are curious parallels between A Walk to the Hills of the Dreamtime and Walkabout. In the former, two half-caste children, Sarah and Joey, after surviving a truck accident where the driver is killed, undertake a journey of eight hundred miles in order to return home to Melville Island.

Knowing that an Englishman wrote Walkabout explains many odd things about it. Whether or not Roeg knew the writer was a compatriot doesn’t much matter except that the author’s sensibility probably explained part of its appeal for him. Certainly the perspective of the novel showed Australia through an English romanticisation of the Outback.

The book differs in significant ways from the film. In the novel, a white brother and a sister are the only survivors of a plane crash in the Sturt Desert, in the middle of the Northern Territory. Mary is thirteen, Peter is eight. They are from Charleston, South Carolina and it is the first time they have been to Australia. They have an uncle in Adelaide and decide to walk there not knowing it is 1400 miles away. Before long they are starving and thirsty and an Aboriginal boy about Mary’s age saves them. Called the ‘bush boy’ he is in the process of going walkabout which, in the novel, is described as a six- to eight-month test to see if a boy can survive in the desert alone and unaided. If he does, he returns to the tribe as a man. The bush boy (or ‘darkie’ as Peter refers to him) has never seen a white person before but he helps the brother and sister on their journey. Along the way he begins to believe that Mary has seen ‘The Spirit of Death’ in him. This belief is reinforced when he catches Peter’s cold and, unused to white diseases, succumbs to it. Before dying he instructs Peter how to find food and water on their journey. A few days later the duo come upon an Aboriginal family who look at Mary’s clay drawing of a home and point them in the direction of a house. Peter and Mary set off knowing that white society is only two days away.

As an outline, the story is simplicity itself but there are many peculiar aspects to the telling of it. Peter takes to the Aboriginal boy almost immediately but the golden-haired Mary finds his nakedness horrifying and when he moves to touch her it starts off a racial panic: ‘The idea of being manhandled by a naked black boy appalled her: struck at the root of one of the basic principles of her civilised code. It was terrifying: revolting, obscene. Back in Charlestown it would have got the darkie lynched’. For Mary there was a ‘distance of more than a hundred thousand years’ between them, for she and Peter ‘were products of the highest strata of human evolution’.¹

In order to cover up his nakedness Mary cajoles the bush boy into wearing her frilly panties. Amused at how silly he looks, the Aboriginal boy bursts into a dance that causes the panties to tear and fall off. Mary is so disturbed by the Aborigine that she constantly keeps her distance. Peter, though, begins to learn his language and skills. Her brother’s closeness to the Aborigine disgusts her. When the bush boy wants their help something primal rises up in Mary and she questions why she and her brother ‘should be forced to run to help a Negro’.

For his part, the Aboriginal treats Mary ‘like a lubra’. She has to carry the food and walk behind the males. Part of her personal journey is to discover that the bush boy is a real person. Even though she suspects he has erotic inclinations towards her, she has none for him. The only time she touches him is when she cradles him as he dies.

The journey partly liberates Mary from normal social conventions, so much so that when she ends up naked near the completion of her trek she doesn’t care. Her character though is defined by notions of a woman’s role. Peter is active, whereas Mary takes ‘a woman’s oldest line of action: passivity’. While her attitudes towards Aborigines may well change, Mary’s still defined by her limitations as a woman. So when Peter does rock drawings of the animals he has seen (‘symbols of the new life’), Mary draws girls’ faces with glamorous Vogue-like hairstyles and a house. Ironically, though, it is this image of the house that helps an Aboriginal family they encounter to give them directions. At the conclusion of the book we sense that Mary...