The film is about a brother and sister whose father takes them on a picnic in the Australian outback and for some inexplicable reason attempts to shoot them. When he fails to accomplish this, the father kills himself and destroys his vehicle so that the children are stranded in the outback.

The children wonder through the outback in an attempt to reach civilization. At first the daughter (played by the beautiful Jenny Agutter) attempts to maintain an illusion of control and civilized behavior. Despite the fact that she and her brother are now in a natural environment with its own requirements, she compels him to wear his blazer and school hat.

Eventually, they meet and are rescued by a young aborigine who is surviving in the outback on his own as a rite of passage. This rite is called the walkabout--hence the title of the film. As time passes, the children literally and symbolically shed their social garb. They dress with little or no clothing and attune themselves to the wild. The teenaged sister develops physical relations with the aborigine while the younger brother (who is still a child) begins to learn his language.

Eventually the party reaches an outcrop of civilization and the story comes to its climactic end. The sister immediately resumes her civilized identity and distances herself from the aborigine. Tragically, the aborigine chooses this moment to court her according to the custom of his people. Where this might have been acceptable to the sister in the outback it merely repulses her in civilization. The aborigine hangs himself and the sister dresses her brother in his hat and blazer and continues toward on to civilization. At the end of the film she is married and living in her parents' former apartment. Her husband comes home to tell her about his new promotion at work, but her mind is occupied with recollections of life in the outback.

The film operates on several levels. On one level, it is a story of paradise found and then relinquished. On another level the film explores how subjective "normalcy" is. In one scene the aborigine shoots and chops up a kangaroo. The image is grisly until the film mixes it with shots of a uniformed butcher chopping meat. The scene suggests that beneath our layers we all have the same basic needs and are operating on the same level. But far from arguing about the universal quality of all things, the film demonstrates how the environment is the determining factor of human behavior. The children cannot survive the outback unless they adapt to it, which is something the aborigine teaches them to do. The aborigine cannot survive in civilization unless he changes who and what he is.

Ultimately, while people can adapt to new environments in this film, they cannot shed their original identities. The film ends with a note of sadness and a lack of completion.

I admire the movie for not overly sentimentalizing the case- there are flies in Eden, and they eat lizards and kangaroo tails burned in a fire. But at the same time, without getting preachy, Roeg shows us how alienated from nature we are in civilization.

The movie has a deliberate pace, so it's best to approach it with a patient mind. I don't think there's a wasted second in it, but it is totally unlike the MTV-influenced movies coming out today. It's a beautiful, strange film. END