BACK TO NATURE

It seemed that the 1960s and 1970s marked the beginning of a re-evaluation of traditional British values and the colonial legacy of empire. Both Peter Brook’s film adaptation of William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies and Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout invert the familiar narrative of civilising foreign lands by mere virtue of being British.

While both films challenge colonial assumptions, their protagonists' journeys reflect distinct paths of transformation. The Lord of the Flies famously explores the collapse of order into anarchy among a group of English schoolboys who, without the framework of an organised society, revert to barbarism—exposing the fragility of their illusion of civilisation. Walkabout, by contrast, examines the parallel rites of passage of an Aboriginal teenager (the "Walkabout") and an English girl (played by Jenny Agutter) as they traverse the same sun-baked landscape. They pass like satellites in the night sky—two cultures orbiting the same world yet sharing no true connection, assimilation, or understanding. Here, Roeg presents a more realistic, unsentimental (non-colonial and non-utopian) vision of cross-cultural encounters.

If Golding’s schoolboys are thrust from order into chaos, then the girl's journey in Walkabout is more one of violent displacement—from innocence into experience. After surviving a shocking act of familial collapse (her father shoots himself after attempting to kill his children in the outback), she is forced to evolve from sister to surrogate mother, responsible for her younger brother’s survival in a harsh, unfamiliar world.

In Roeg's movie, the young Westerners are utterly dependent on the Aboriginal boy in order to survive in the desert, and their vulnerabilities are clearly exposed. Of course, they’re young, but they are also part of a new generation increasingly untethered from their cultural past—reborn into an age where former sins are absolved through an acute awareness of no longer being the conquerors of foreign peoples.

Still, amidst the disequilibrium of their odyssey through the outback, there is one idyllic moment that recalls the dream of Britain’s Victorian past—most notably, the scene in which the girl swims naked amidst the rocks while the boy on walkabout hunts wild animals for food. It echoes scenes from literary classics such as Robinson Crusoe, The Water-Babies, The Swiss Family Robinson, and The Coral Island.

This now-famous swimming montage has become retrospectively controversial due to Jenny Agutter’s discomfort with having filmed the scene at such a young age, and because of its potential for exploitation by less civilised observers. Strangely, it was just two years earlier that Michael Powell made his own Australian film, Age of Consent (1969), in which a young Helen Mirren (24 at the time of filming) spends much of her screen time swimming naked in Australia's Great Barrier Reef, while a washed-up artist played by James Mason finds inspiration in her as his watery muse.

Perhaps there was something in the air—or in the water. Australia was a perfect landscape to meditate on these potent themes of the old world and the new, which may explain the cinematic boom of that decade, including other cult films like Wake in Fright and Picnic at Hanging Rock.

Personally, I don’t believe Roeg had anything other than purely artistic intentions when he shot the waterhole scene in Walkabout. I see it as a necessary visual contrast to the many parched, unforgiving scenes of the inhospitable desert. It is cathartic in one sense, though it also contrasts with the brutal reality of the boy’s hunting—which includes his precision spearing of lizards (perentie), birds, and kangaroos.

The perfectly cut montage simply presents the idea that, for all the Millais-style, life-giving beauty of the pool, there is a reality of death behind it—a basic requirement for survival that their protector, the Walkabout boy, innately understands.

In its pictorial transcendence, one might even see this oasis as a brief, hidden Eden, free of the stresses and neuroses of the 20th century—a return to a simpler plane of existence, far removed from whatever drove the girl’s father to suffer a nervous breakdown and take his own life. This ‘Eve’ has returned to the garden to rediscover innocence among nature, before re-entering an industrialised world where she will once again be constrained by domestic expectations, though forever changed.

This balance between beauty and horror is, to some extent, later echoed in scenes from Malick’s Badlands (1973), when Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek make their home in the woods while on the run after killing her father—and, to a lesser extent, in Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun, where Christian Bale’s character, marooned in his family’s palatial house in Shanghai, is, like Agutter and her brother in Walkabout, completely at the mercy of fate, without any parental guidance to help him survive.

Special mention should also go to John Barry's dreamy, otherworldly score especially the main theme recalled in back to nature which evokes a brief moment of paradise amidst a cruel, unforgiving environment.

Sitting in my local café this lunchtime, playing the music from the Walkabout soundtrack while watching the sunlight illuminate the green succulents on the windowsill, I found myself in a Walkabout-style reverie—dreaming of escaping the madness of the modern world and wondering if there's still time for me to become a walkabout.

But first, tennis!