"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.
