Walkabout

"A boy and girl face the challenge of the world's last frontier."

1971 1h 35m EN

👍

7.3

SOLID

★7.3TMDB · 478

AdventureDrama

Synopsis

Spoiler shield

Under the pretense of having a picnic, a geologist takes his teenage daughter and 6-year-old son into the Australian outback and attempts to shoot them. When he fails, he turns the gun on himself, and the two city-bred children must contend with harsh wilderness alone. They are saved by a chance encounter with an Aboriginal boy who shows them how to survive, and in the process underscores the disharmony between nature and modern life.

“A boy and girl face the challenge of the world's last frontier.”

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Cast

Jenny Agutter
Girl
Luc Roeg
White Boy
David Gulpilil
Black Boy
John Meillon
Man
Robert McDarra
Man
Peter Carver
No Hoper
John Illingsworth
Young Man
Hilary Bamberger
Woman

Credits

Behind the camera

Director: Nicolas Roeg
Writers: Edward Bond, Nicolas Roeg
Languages: English
Countries: United States of America

Want more? Switch to Cinephile mode in the header for DP, composer, budget, box office, production companies, keywords, and release history.

Did you know?

Fun facts 🍿

1 / 8

MONEY

Did you know

Shot for just $1.0M — micro-budget by Hollywood standards.

MoodPlayr · trivia#01

2 / 8

ERA

Did you know

55 years old — a genuine piece of film history.

MoodPlayr · trivia#02

3 / 8

DIRECTOR

Did you know

Directed by Nicolas Roeg, shot by Nicolas Roeg. Note their partnership — DPs and directors often return to each other across a career.

MoodPlayr · trivia#03

4 / 8

DIRECTOR

Did you know

Original score by John Barry. Worth a dedicated listen after — most great films lose half their impact without the score.

MoodPlayr · trivia#04

5 / 8

DIRECTOR

Did you know

Editor Antony Gibbs shaped the rhythm. On an edit-heavy film, the editor does more to control your pulse than the director.

MoodPlayr · trivia#05

6 / 8

CAST

Did you know

Jenny Agutter and Luc Roeg and David Gulpilil carry the top of the cast.

MoodPlayr · trivia#06

7 / 8

FACT

Did you know

Marketing tagline: "A boy and girl face the challenge of the world's last frontier.".

MoodPlayr · trivia#07

8 / 8

WILD

Did you know

IMDB entry: tt0067959 — still the authoritative cross-reference for credits and trivia.

MoodPlayr · trivia#08

Cinephile deep dive

The take

Nicolas Roeg directs. Nicolas Roeg behind the camera. John Barry scores. Antony Gibbs cuts. Runs lean at under 100 minutes. Produced in United States of America. Dialogue in English.

Trivia

Things worth knowing

1Shot for just $1.0M — micro-budget by Hollywood standards.
255 years old — a genuine piece of film history.
3Directed by Nicolas Roeg, shot by Nicolas Roeg. Note their partnership — DPs and directors often return to each other across a career.
4Original score by John Barry. Worth a dedicated listen after — most great films lose half their impact without the score.
5Editor Antony Gibbs shaped the rhythm. On an edit-heavy film, the editor does more to control your pulse than the director.
6Jenny Agutter and Luc Roeg and David Gulpilil carry the top of the cast.
7Marketing tagline: "A boy and girl face the challenge of the world's last frontier.".
8IMDB entry: tt0067959 — still the authoritative cross-reference for credits and trivia.
9Classified under 19 themes, including "australia", "suicide", "sibling relationship", "based on novel or book".

The technical file

Cinematography: Nicolas Roeg
Original score: John Barry
Editing: Antony Gibbs
Production design: Brian Eatwell
Makeup / hair: Linda Richmond
Sound: Gerry Humphreys
Runtime: 95 min · 1h 35m
Aspect ratio (typical): 1.37:1 (Academy)
Status: Released
Budget: $1,000,000
Original language: EN
Certification (US): PG
IMDB: Walkabout (1971)

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Nicolas Roeg

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Community reviews

What people are saying

Wuchak2021-10-24
★ 7/10
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 Wolves" tackled the same issues almost 20 years later. Still, this is an artistic piece with loads of awesome nature footage, plus it’s interesting to see Agutter so young in the bush. It’s a must if you appreciate movies like “Picnic at Hanging Rock” (1975) or anything by Terrence Malick. David Gulpilil went on to appear in such notable flicks as “Crocodile Dundee” (1986) and “Australia” (2008). The film runs 1 hour, 40 minutes, and was shot in Sydney, Finders mountain range, the red desert surrounding Alice Springs and (supposedly) areas never traveled by Caucasians up to that point. GRADE: B
badelf2026-07-13
★ 7/10
"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 stage and screen, and writing two volumes of children's stories that preserve Yolngu folklore for future generations. In this first role, he shows us everything he would become: the physical grace, the emotional intelligence, the capacity to communicate across the chasm of language through movement and presence alone. Girl and White Boy (Jenny Agutter and Luc Roeg) are equally fine in their roles, particularly in conveying the terror and bewilderment of children stranded without skills or understanding in country that seems determined to kill them. But this is Gulpilil's film, and his Black Boy is its beating heart. Some critics read Walkabout as a parable of Eden, innocence lost to experience. I see something far more political and far more urgent. This is a film about the destruction of wilderness by white colonizers, and the particular methods by which that destruction has always proceeded. Early in the film, we watch the land provide everything needed for survival and well-being: water, food, shelter, knowledge. Gulpilil's character moves through this landscape with the confidence of someone who belongs to it, who knows its rhythms and requirements. He saves the white children not through domination but through intimate understanding. Then come the white men with their rifles, shooting animals for sport and leaving carcasses to rot in the sun. It's the same genocidal logic that drove Buffalo Bill and the U.S. Army in the American West, where an estimated sixty to seventy million buffalo were slaughtered down to a few thousand between 1850-1900, not for food, not for necessity, but as deliberate policy to starve Indigenous peoples into submission. The strategy was explicit: kill the resource, kill the culture, kill the people. The film's final images linger with me. Girl, now a woman in a cramped city apartment, married to a man who likely doesn't earn enough, stares into middle distance and remembers: swimming naked in clear water, food appearing as if by magic (though it was knowledge, not magic), life moving at the pace of calm rather than desperation. Everything the land offered freely has been replaced by scarcity, by walls, by the grinding machinery of "civilization." Director Roeg's editing and structural choices sometimes fog the narrative when clarity would serve the story better; the film occasionally mistakes obliqueness for profundity or art. But these are quibbles against a work that understands something essential about what was lost when the colonizers arrived with their certainty that wilderness existed to be tamed, that Indigenous knowledge was primitive superstition, that the only valuable relationship to land was extraction and ownership. Gulpilil's performance transcends these occasional missteps. Watch how he moves, how he reads the landscape, how he protects these lost children even as he recognizes, in ways the film only partly articulates, that they represent the culture that will destroy his own. His final ceremonial dance is an elegy performed for an audience that cannot comprehend what they're witnessing. We are all one blood, Gulpilil insisted throughout his life. The tragedy of Walkabout is that it took a sixteen-year-old Yolngu boy to show us what we refused to see: that the land knew how to provide, that Indigenous peoples understood what colonizers could not, that what we called progress was often just destruction by another name.