A Rhode Island Walkabout

The Hike That Australians Built

One of the upsides of being sick a few weeks ago was the license to watch tons of movies while eating simple carbohydrates. And one of the most spellbinding films I watched was Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout. Released in 1971 to much acclaim, only to be more or less forgotten in the decades since, Walkabout follows a pair of middle class children who―through shocking events which I won’t spoil here—suddenly find themselves stranded in the middle of Australia’s Outback. With barely a lick of water and minimal supplies, the kids set off into the desert searching for salvation. Their journey starts to resemble the Indigenous Australian custom of Walkabout, in which an adolescent embarks on a solo six-month foot journey through Outback, living off of the land. This takes on a new layer of meaning when the two kids happen upon a teenage Indigenous boy, who pretty much saves them and becomes a companion.

Now I know what you might be thinking: Sheltered children jettisoned from western society discover a beautiful new world through the eyes of an Indigenous boy? Been there, done that. Cringe. But Walkabout is not that kind of movie. The kids never really succeed in communicating with each other, which keeps them at a distance, despite their shared tribulations and discoveries in the dessert. Here’s what the late, great Roger Ebert had to say. “[Walkabout] is deeply pessimistic. It suggests that we all develop specific skills and talents in response to our environment, but cannot easily function across a broader range….that all of us are the captives of environment and programming: That there is a wide range of experiment and experience that remains forever invisible to us, because it falls in a spectrum we simply cannot see.”

Why do I bring this up? Because in the musky woods of western Rhode Island, there’s another story with Australian roots that illustrates what Ebert is talking about. Sort of.