“He didn’t say goodbye to us.”

A teenage Aboriginal boy stumbles upon a teenage white girl and her younger brother near a dried-up watering hole. He leads them on a journey through the sweltering, dull red sands of the Australian outback as they try to make their way back home. The terrain is desolate and inhospitable — vultures watch them from the trees above and lizards snarl at them from below their ankles. Not knowing where to go in this wilderness, and having almost given up in the heat on their own, the brother and sister follow him blindly. Neither speaks the other’s language. There is miscommunication from the start.

Once he provides her with food and water, the Aboriginal boy becomes the girl’s fixation; her gaze objectifies him. We catch her overt glances in close-up shots of her face, and then point-of-view shots focus on his body as they walk through the desert. She’s never seen anyone like him before.

The younger brother, meanwhile, is oblivious to his sister’s newfound curiosity; he sees this all as one great, heroic adventure. His gaze enthusiastically searches their surroundings for exciting novelties. He becomes fixated on a caravan of camels in the distance; the creatures march parallel to the humans under the blinding light of the mid-day desert sun. Once the camels pass out of his view, his imagination takes over; he envisions cowboys riding camels across the outback. We see these visions superimposed over images of the desert terrain. The trio then marches on to new territory — but not before we are abruptly shown stark images of the broken, decaying remains of dead camels baking in the sun, covered in flies.

The carcasses look like they’re screaming.

These three visions of nature — reality, fantasy, and brutality — are all explored in various ways throughout Walkabout.

The film follows the teenage girl and young boy on a journey through the Australian outback after their father kills himself and abandons them in the middle of nowhere. They are rescued by the Aboriginal teen in the midst of his “walkabout,” which the movie’s opening title card describes as a journey that all Aboriginal sixteen-year-old males must take, to “live from [the land]. Sleep on it. Eat of its fruits and flesh. Stay alive. Even if it means killing his fellow creatures,” for several months.

The story begins and ends with lyrical, dreamlike montages that visually draw parallels between conflicting physical, emotional, and developmental settings: urban vs. rural, confinement vs. freedom, adulthood vs. childhood / adolescence. The story that plays out in between is bookended by graphic tragedies — a pair of suicides — that are greeted with disturbing detachment from the teenage girl and her younger brother. Like much of Walkabout, these devastating moments play out with a surreal quality emblematic of dreams, and the tragedies speak to larger themes: the father’s suicide in the outback marks the forced start of his children’s independence via abandonment, and the Aboriginal teen’s suicide serves as a symbol of the girl’s rejection of a spontaneous, exotic, adventurous life in favor of an orderly, safe, known existence.

The similarities and differences between these two worlds — outback vs. city — are explored from the very start of Walkabout. Images of cracked mud and rocks appear onscreen as the opening titles first appear; on the soundtrack, we hear static and snippets of conversation from a tuning radio. Then, the screen is filled with an image of a brick wall; as the camera tilts down and tracks right to reveal the hustle and bustle of downtown Sydney, a musical score commences with the pulsing sound of a didgeridoo.

The teenage girl and her younger brother are introduced amidst an ensuing montage of imagery that showcases urban textures, crowds, and a blasé attitude toward white-collar work. Skyscrapers loom over all of the characters; even as the boy walks through the grassy fields of a park, we see the city skyline in the distance. Not even an enormous tree can block it out. As these urban images rapidly unfold one right after another, the didgeridoo plays on.

At the end of this establishing montage, an image of a brick wall fills the frame once again, but when the camera tilts down and tracks right, it reveals not the hustle and bustle of Sydney, but the wide open desert of the outback. The father’s car is parked far from any road. The teenage girl, unimpressed by her surroundings, turns on a portable radio to stay entertained. Her father shuts it off. The children set up a picnic lunch for themselves by a patch of rocks; flies flutter and buzz around them and their food. The girl turns the radio back on — like our phones today, it keeps her connected to the “civilized” world, and she does not like to be without it.

The symbols and metaphors that open the film establish its themes. Then, violence sets the story in motion.

“Bang, bang!” the boy shouts, squirting water out of a neon green water pistol.

Suddenly, real bullets ricochet off of the rocks; the girl tackles her brother to the ground, and they crawl to safety.

Before we know it, their car is ablaze and their father is dead. Oblivious to what just happened, the boy continues to shoot his water gun. His innocent playtime serves as a disturbing mirror for the brutality of the adult reality on the other side of those barren rocks. Ants swarm over the remains of their picnic lunch as they sloppily take what they can and run into the wild. The girl assumes responsibility for leading them to safety, but it is not clear that she will be able to keep them alive if they have to fend for themselves in the wilderness for too long.

She does not have the skills needed to survive. At one point, the girl earnestly pleads, “The water hole has dried up; where do they keep the water?” as if the wilderness has a water tower at its disposal.

The Aboriginal teen is their lifesaver, but he doesn’t teach them how to survive in the wild so much as he takes care of them; he hunts and cooks their food, digs into the ground to source their water, and shows them the best places to seek shelter for the night.

The worlds that they come from are vastly different. Throughout their journey, director Nicolas Roeg draws parallels between their opposing worlds — privilege and survival — via intercut sequences. In one such sequence, a scene of the Aboriginal boy massacring a kangaroo in the wilderness for food is frequently interrupted by flashes of footage of a clean-cut city butcher methodically slashing kangaroo ribs with a meat cleaver. The savagery needed to maintain sustenance is the same in both settings, but in the privileged world, the consumer is shielded from this necessary brutality.

The girl and her brother become complacent; they rely on him to guide them and keep them alive. They are perpetually out of place in the outback and do nothing to adapt to their surroundings. This is communicated not just by their attitudes, but through their clothing — they come into the desert wearing fancy prep school uniforms and never trade these for outfits that would be more appropriate for their setting.

The movie is about their self-discovery, but the characters are hardly self-aware. These privileged children act less as active survivors and more as tourists in this land.

This is best embodied in a scene in which the girl swims in a natural pool surrounded by an idyllic grove of trees and rocks. A stirring, symphonic score plays on the soundtrack as she wades through the water. It is sensual, peaceful. But intercut with this serene footage are scenes of the Aboriginal teen throwing boomerangs at kangaroos, spearing lizards, building a fire, and roasting dead animals; their guts pour out of their bodies as they burn.

The girl relishes in and becomes one with the beauty of nature while being shielded from its brutality, yet she thinks that her experience is profound and holistic.

This clash between cultures is further explored as the main story is interrupted with scenes of outsiders. There is a general vulgarity to the people we meet — they are either exploitative, like the farmer who enlists a tribe of Aboriginal people to create souvenirs for tourists (presumably cheaply or for free); unsympathetic, like the man in the trailer who refuses to help the girl and her brother; or self-absorbed and insufferable. The most famous scene shining a light on the insufferable and self-absorbed focuses on a team of scientists in the outback; they play cards and prep weather balloons together. The team has one woman and a half-dozen men on it, each of whom try to seduce that one woman. Their aggressive gazes, desperate dialogue, and props (risqué playing cards, cigarettes propped up suggestively) come across as comically vulgar.

It’s not just the privileged folk, however, who seemingly make no effort to find common ground with the opposing culture. In one scene, the girl swings upside down from a tree alongside the Aboriginal boy; this footage is intercut with scenes of a tribe of Aboriginal people playing inside of and on top of the burnt wreckage of the children’s car and moving their father’s corpse to a nearby tree. In both scenes, all of the characters laugh — they’re all having a jolly good time. But the actions of the Aboriginal people in this scene feel macabre, from our point of view.

All of these brief glimpses of outsiders serve to offer us perspective — to make the teenagers seem innocent.

But in the end, the girl’s inability to communicate with — and disinterest in understanding — the Aboriginal teen leads to tragedy, and that illusion of innocence is shattered.

It is unclear why he ultimately chooses to die. In an earlier scene, we see white men with rifles take down herds of water buffalo with ease and leave the corpses to decay in the sun; footage of them senselessly killing for sport is intercut with close-ups of the Aboriginal boy gazing forward in despair. Does he feel inept that he cannot kill as efficiently as the colonial hunters can with their guns? Or, as he sits among the numerous shattered water buffalo skulls, is he unable to cope with the savagery of the outside world — that they kill not for food but for sport?

Or, is it simply because his mating dance is met with fear, and then with scorn?

Regardless, his lifestyle is rejected, and the final few scenes make for an uncomfortable, frantic finale.

The boy and girl do not seem to care. They are more confused than upset, and do not linger. The boy merely remarks, “he didn’t say goodbye to us,” and then they move on. The siblings escape the outback and return home.

The film ends with a coda; the girl is greeted at home in the future by her husband, who engages her in banal conversation about his pending corporate promotion and the salary increase that will come with it. Bored, her focus drifts back to a whitewashed memory — or dream — of her, her brother, and the Aboriginal teen swimming freely in an idyllic pond; they smile and laugh and play without a care in the world. In the present, she smiles, fondly remembering a time that never happened and never will be.

She reflects back on this period of self-discovery through rose-colored glasses. We are left to assume that she’ll continue carrying on with her now-boring-by-contrast life, without regret for the damage that her cultural tourism had caused.

Bricks and rocks again fill the screen before we see the young ones diving into the pool in this dream… and then the film ends with a static shot of their prep school uniforms on spikes.

Throughout the movie, these bold, aesthetic montages effortlessly communicate more than words ever could — and they make Walkabout a unique, compelling, and thoughtful piece of cinematic storytelling.