Walkabout (1971): Lost and Found in the Australian Outback.

Few films have captured the Australian landscape — and its haunting psychological terrain — quite like Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout. Released in 1971, the film remains one of cinema’s most poetic explorations of culture, survival, and the fragile boundaries between civilization and nature.

At its core, Walkabout tells a simple story: two white children, abandoned in the harsh outback after a shocking act of violence, are guided back to safety by a young Aboriginal boy on his own coming-of-age journey. But beneath its sparse dialogue and dreamlike imagery lies something much deeper — a meditation on the clash between two worlds, and the innocence lost when they collide.

Roeg, an English cinematographer turned auteur, uses the Australian landscape not as a backdrop, but as a living force — vast, unforgiving, and strangely beautiful. The camera lingers on shimmering heat, skeletal trees, and the rhythms of the desert with a reverence bordering on the spiritual. The result is both ethereal and unsettling; nature here is neither friend nor foe, but something that simply is.

David Gulpilil, in his breakout role as the unnamed Aboriginal youth, delivers a performance of quiet brilliance. Barely speaking a word, he radiates confidence, dignity, and an almost supernatural connection to the land. His presence contrasts sharply with the British children’s fragility and confusion — a dynamic that subtly critiques colonial attitudes toward Aboriginal knowledge and humanity.

What makes Walkabout endure is its ambiguity. It’s not a survival adventure, nor a romantic fable, but a cinematic poem — open to interpretation, rich in symbolism. The children’s journey becomes a metaphor for modern alienation: the disconnection from land, culture, and each other. The tragedy of misunderstanding — between people, between worlds — hangs over every frame.

More than five decades on, Walkabout remains a masterwork of Australian cinema and a timeless examination of what it means to be human in a world that has forgotten its place in nature. Beautiful, unsettling, and utterly unique, it’s a film that speaks as powerfully today as it did in 1971 — perhaps even more so.