Sandra K. Friday
Another film that juxtaposes the urban world and wilderness is
Walkabout
, set in the '50's Australia, a place as distant as can be from New Haven. The plot concerns a teen-age aboriginal boy engaged in his right of passage from boyhood to manhood, on his "walkabout" in the Australian Outback, encounters a Euro-Australian urban eight-year old boy and his thirteen-year old sister who have lost their way in what is for them a totally hostile landscape, the Outback, and who have never laid eyes on a naked black boy. This film is based on the novella
Walkabout
by James Vance Marshall. However, in the opening scenes, the film does not follow the novella, where the children from the suburbs of South Carolina are the only survivors of a cargo plane crash in the Outback. Instead, it shows their father driving them from an urban Australian city into the
edge
of the Outback, ostensibly for a picnic, but in fact he tries to kill them, and ends up committing suicide. This leaves them to fend for themselves as they wander into the wilderness. Like the opening of the film
Emerald Forest,
where the rainforest is first seen objectively, from a distance, in the novella
Walkabout
, the urban, American children have flown thousands of feet over the Outback, a geography that is just an area on a map to them. The movie,
Walkabout
, juxtaposes a brick wall representing the city, with the desert, which represents the unmapped Outback, just beyond. While the opening of the film and novella are significantly different, both explore how we identify geography effectively as
place
or
space
, depending on our direct and indirect experience with it. Both novella and film also explore issues of racial prejudice, which is especially apparent in the novella where the children are from a suburb in South Carolina in the '50's.
The film effectively juxtaposes the Aborigine boy, stalking and spearing a kangaroo and killing it by clubbing it with a rock, against a butcher in urban Australia chopping a side of kangaroo ribs with a meat cleaver in a butcher shop that advertises kangaroo meat. In fact, the film makes a lot of the bush boy stalking, killing, and roasting, in an open fire, various small mammals and reptiles, for their sustenance. Against this necessity, the bush boy (and the viewer) watches Australian hunters with high-powered rifles driving around in a jeep, slaughtering water buffalo for sport, and leaving the carcasses to rot. The viewer also watches the bush boy's profound grief at the sight of this wanton slaughter. This is an opportunity to question to what extent these hunters are objectifying these animals as merely theirs for the shooting. In this sense, do they consider the Outback as merely a
place
that they use and then abandon to their urban
space.
Is this, in some way, related to what the white man did to the buffalo herds that sustained Native Americans?
Another important difference between the film and the novella is the handling of the bush boy's death. The novella is clear in pointing out that Aborigines are capable of, and susceptible to, "mental euthanasia," willing themselves to die. In the novella, it is shocking but believable that the bush boy, mistaking Mary's terror of him, thinks he sees the Spirit of Death in her eyes, and resigns himself to prepare for his death. Marshall explains in the novella that, though the Aborigines are physically tough, they have no resistance to this concept of the Spirit of Death. In the film, the bush boy, after delivering them back to the edge of civilization, decorates his body with feathers and white dye, does a ritual dance that frightens Mary even more than before, and hangs himself in a tree. In the film, Mary merely brushes a couple of ants from his chest when they find him dead in the tree, and then they hike to the paved road that symbolizes their return to modern civilization. In the following section, I discuss the deeply moving and very different scene, in the novella, in which the bush boy dies.
Comparing the film
Walkabout
with the novella
Walkabout
on which it is based
The students will read the novella
Walkabout
by James Vance Marshall
before they watch and study the movie, to compare the film with the literature. In the preceding section, I have identified some of the distinct differences between the novella and the film, such as, the children in the novella being from the suburbs of Charlotte, South Carolina while, in the film, they are from urban Australia. In the novella, Mary attempts to reassure Peter that they will simply walk the rest of the way to Adelaide, not realizing that they are some 1,400 miles from it. It soon becomes apparent that the children are no match for the unforgiving wilderness. But to their great fortune, they meet up with a thirteen or fourteen year-old Aborgine boy on his walkabout. He has never laid eyes on white children, and they, being from South Carolina in the '50's have never seen a naked black boy. While Mary, being thirteen and female, struggles with the horror of this phenomenon, both children quickly realize that the bush boy is their only hope for survival.
Learning to communicate and cooperate, the three children undertake their own walkabout together, the bush boy breaking his tribal law by including the children in his journey, knowing that they would perish without his help. At the outset of the novella, Mary, Peter's big sister, is Peter's protector because in South Carolina that was her role. But, gradually, in the Outback, eight year-old Peter, who is less inhibited than his thirteen year-old sister, adapts more quickly and is less offended by the bush boy's blackness and nakedness. In fact, as the journey unfolds, it is Peter who gradually becomes Mary's protector. It is curious, exuberant Peter who learns survival skills from the bush boy. Both children learned to live as if they were shadows of the bush boy and because they are children, they adapt to the desert, well enough to survive.
If ever there were a dichotomy between subjective
space,
the suburbs of
South Carolina
,
and the objective
place
, the Australian Outback, that the children have been dropped into, it is this. And they must adapt to this new place and make it their
space
or die.
Meanwhile, the bush boy misreads Mary's fear of him as something the Aborigine understands as the Spirit of Death. In the novella, confronted with what he thinks is the Spirit of Death, the bush boy
wills
himself to die, instead of hanging himself. In both the novella and the film, the impact of Mary and Peter's presence in the bush boy's walkabout brings about the end of his life.
The gradual adaptation of Mary and Peter to the Outback is represented in several ways in the novella. Gradually, the children shed their clothing, until both are basically naked, just as the bush boy is naked. Gradually, Peter learns the bush boy's language, because as Marshall says, it is far more useful than the French that Mary "is so proud of." Peter systematically picks up hunting and food gathering skills from the bush boy. The children learn to sleep in the open next to a fire. And finally, when Mary cradles the bush boy's head in her lap as he lies, dying, she experiences an epiphany when she comes to see the world as one and that the bush boy is as they are, and not to be feared. "Then very gently she eased the bush boy's head onto her lap; very softly she began to run her fingers over and across his forehead. . . . .And in that moment of truth all her fears and inhibitions were sponged away, and she saw that the world, which she had thought was split in two, was one" (
Walkabout
, p. 123).
Socially and geographically, Mary and Peter are about as far removed as is possible from their original subjective
space
. Their world, as they knew it, disappeared. Food they have been accustomed to eat, shelter they have relied upon, clothing they expect to wear, water available on tap, language they have employed to communicate, even the learned assumption that Mary the elder of the two is in charge, and the learned prejudice of racial superiority of whites, all evaporate in the Outback. Unless they are able to make this foreign
place
their
space
, and abide by its standards, they will perish.