You have navigated with raging soul far from
the paternal home, passing beyond the sea’s double rocks, and now you inhabit a
foreign land.
Euripides, Medea
“Hey,
so we were taking earlier,” one of the ladies from Milwaukee said to me, “and
we decided: this is your rite of passage.”
“You
think so?” I looked up and asked, having just crammed into my backpack 35
pounds of food, water, clothes, and other miscellaneous, life-saving supplies I
have been carrying with me for the past four days.
“Yeah,”
she replied in a verifying tone, “this is how you become a man.”
Despite
having readied myself entirely—bootlaces fastidiously
fastened, map carefully examined, bandana neatly folded and tied across my
brow—I sat on a wooden bench in the shelter’s bunkroom for a few minutes,
thinking eagerly about her words. I wondered just what the verb become really meant: what it had to do
with the five days I had spent in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, the 30
miles I had walked over roaring rivers and mountain tops, the manhood two
Midwestern mothers had claimed I had achieved. That conversation put the last
day of my hike in a curious mood, and with 13 miles to go and three more peaks
to summit, I took to the trail with the usual hiker’s mentation: simultaneously
in awe of the sublime landscapes and lost in thought inside of my head. I
discussed my journey’s purpose with myself. I wasn’t running errands in the
woods for status, nor was I looking to wave a flag of masculinity from the
barren peaks of mountains. I was looking for myself and nothing else. Having
graduated high school one day prior to setting out for the hills, I did have
something to prove, but this time it was an internal
demonstration. In a word, I was on a walkabout.
The
term comes from Australian Aborigine culture and represents the six-month
journey every Aboriginal young man must take as a rite of passage into manhood.
In that time, he must survive with little more than his skills alone, proving
to Mother Nature herself that he can withstand the unforgiving Outback
wilderness (Gibbs, par. 2). This odyssey into adulthood was best captured by British
New Wave film director Nicholas Roeg in 1971, when he created a film that bears
the selfsame term as its title.
When
the opening shots of Walkabout—glimpses
of quotidian city life in Australia—subside, a dicey and hazardous narrative
unfolds. An English family drives into the scorching Outback to have a picnic.
Yet behind the innocent meal lurks some malice; the father, who Roeg depicts as
tragically ignoring his young son and perversely aware of his teenage daughter,
suddenly draws a pistol on both of his two children. While the young ones do
manage to find cover behind nearby rocks and brush, the following frame ensures
us that the father had a similar fate in store for himself: it shows the car,
having been ignited in flames, and the father, having shot himself in the head
(Roeg).
From
that point on, the two children—played by actors Jenny Agutter and Lucien
Roeg—are fatherless and abandoned. They are left to their own devices under the
scorching sun with little more than their school uniforms, a battery-powered
radio, and the contents of a picnic basket. What follows is their dramatic and
desperate attempt at surviving the inhospitable. They seem to fair well for a
day or two, even managing to find a desert oasis; that is, until they wake up
the next morning to find their precious water source dried up entirely. At this
point in the film, the viewer can easily assume that doom has found its mark.
Luckily for them, however, a young Aboriginal boy, played by indigenous
Australian actor David Gulpilil, comes into frame. With his skills and
knowledge of the land, the Aborigine teaches the two to drink water from the
same ground they believed had dried up, and takes them under his wing as he
journeys across the desert landscape (Roeg). It is clear, at this point, that
the two children have a destination: the civilized world from which they came.
Yet plenty of viewers ask the same question of the Aborigine. As the movie’s
title suggests, he too is on a walkabout.
As
I watched the Aborigine in his pointed and communal interactions with
nature—his effortful and modest hunting with wooden spears, his use of animal
blood as a remedy for the young boy’s sunburn, his sense of navigation that
borders on second-nature—I felt the same inspiration that came to me during my
own rite of passage through the woods of New England. I must concede that the
Aborigine’s walkabout is of a more serious and urgent nature, and his terrain
far more unforgiving than mine. Still, beyond the physical and procedural, a
deeper idea lies in the subtext, further connecting him and me: both of our
excursions were opportunities to traverse and transcend the realities we take
for granted, to show us a side of humanity and its world that we had previously
never acknowledged.
My
journey into the mountains showed me more than the flipside of nature; it elucidated
the flipside of humankind. The Midwesterners with whom I spoke on that
Wednesday morning in June were just two of the dozens of people I met on the
sides of trails, on the summits of mountains, and in the quiet of shelters.
With each new person I met, with each new way of life they showed me, I was
exposed to a new mode of human interaction. It was a new kind of
friendship—immediately formed in that unlikely meeting place—that would reveal
to me some aspect of what it means to be human so starkly, I automatically cast
away the separation that civilized strangers unknowingly hide behind. The
whirlwind nature of my interactions with these people made them unforgettable
to me; after that night in the shelter had ended, or that water break on the
cliff had grown too cold in the breeze, it was a near guarantee that I would
never see them again.
Yet
this iconoclastic awakening brings about so much more from the perspective of
the Aborigine; his departure from his rite of passage was totally unlike my own.
My jolt of enlightenment carried less of a shock than his. As their narrative
progresses, the three protagonists each develop differently, and each get a
jolt of their own. The Boy grows calm, and through his curiosity of the events,
he attempts adaptation. The Girl, however, keeps her blinders set on her return
to civilization. Still, Roeg’s depictions of her interaction with nature—her adjustment,
her efforts to relax and find solace in her predicament—contrast with his
depictions of the Aborigine.
As
critic James Berardinelli so aptly put it, “Walkabout
is about the never-ending conflict between civilization and nature, and how the
two constantly work to destroy one another” (Berardinelli, par. 4). His
observation shines through as the film nears its end. In directing the film,
Roeg had an opportunity to reconcile the injurious relationship of civilization
and nature via the interactions of the Aborigine and The Girl, but he resolves
to do the opposite. The Aborigine slowly grows enamored of the teenage girl,
and this attraction comes to a head when he dances for her. The raucous tone of
the didgeridoo, an Australian instrument, underscores the situation: she
becomes intimidated by his advances, ultimately rejecting him. And the morning
after these hijinks, the two British children wake to find their native guide
dead, having hung himself the night before (Roeg).
The
Aborigine’s death is something to be mourned in every aspect; Roeg condemns the
relationship between civilization and nature when he cast the native young man
into the absurd. Overwhelmed and crestfallen by this view of the world, the
Aborigine became yet another martyr. Watching that scene, I couldn’t help but realize
my fortunate circumstances: my journey of self-discovery showed me a new part
of myself and the world in which I live that gave me hope for the future. It showed
me the exigencies of life, a world’s worth of competing forces, but revealed
them to me in a luckily benevolent light.
Still,
the Aborigine will not go unavenged in my mind; as he fell victim to the great
conflict of society and nature, he revealed to the world, in 1971, the true
situation. The civilized world is not deserving of an unmitigated conquest over
nature. I learned this on my own terms too, when I saw just how capable nature
is of retaliation. My walk in the woods forced me to come to terms with violent
storms, unrelenting winds, and the crippling cold. It gave me the same feeling Walkabout should bestow upon any
attentive viewer: a humble urge to approach nature in peace and only peace.
Works
Cited
Berardinelli,
James. "Review for Walkabout (1971)." IMDb. IMDb.com, 1997. Web. 01
Mar. 2017.
Ebert,
Roger. "Walkabout Movie Review & Film Summary." RogerEbert.com.
N.p., 13 Apr. 1997. Web. 02 Mar. 2017.
Euripides.
"Medea." The Internet Classics Archive. Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, n.d. Web. 03 Mar. 2017.
Gibbs,
Patrick. "Walkabout, Original 1971 Review: 'beautiful'." The
Telegraph. Telegraph Media Group, 08 Nov. 2014. Web. 04 Mar. 2017.
Walkabout.
Dir. Nicolas Roeg. Perf. Jenny Agutter and David Gulpilil. Twentieth Century
Fox, 1971. Online.
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