History Film / Walkabout

* EiffelTowerEffect: Possibly the first film the use the Sydney Opera House (which was still under construction at the time) this way. It's glimpsed in the distance as the girl walks home from school at the start of the film.

* PaterFamilicide: The father drives himself and his two children into the desert, where he pulls a gun and attempts to shoot the kids. When they escape, he sets fire to the car and then shoots himself. By destroying the car, he probably believed he was killing them anyway, as they would have been stranded in the desert with no way out. Even if he hadn't torched the car, a shot of the car's dashboard shows they're on reserve fuel, and even with the gas can (And the fact that they drove out in a VW Beetle, notable for its gas milage,) they'd have been hard pressed to get too many places with so little fuel, and in an unfamiliar area.

* WiseBeyondTheirYears: The brother is seven years old and has that level of maturity, but also seems quite perceptive and often comprehends things much faster than his sister, as famously illustrated when they first meet the Aborigine. She tries to talk to him in English and is thrown for a loss when he doesn't understand her. The brother realizes that they can break the LanguageBarrier with BodyLanguage and mimes drinking water, which the Aborigine picks up on immediately. As they go along the brother and the Aborigine develop a whole series of nonverbal cues to communicate with each other.

* AxeCrazy: [[spoiler: The father takes his daughter and son out into the outback, ostensibly for a picnic meal. Without warning, he pulls a gun and attempts to shoot them to death. He then calmly tells them to come back, within visual range, so he can shoot them both. When the kids evade him, he pulls a can of gas out of the VW Beetle, douses the beetle, torches it, and kills himself, stranding them to face a potentially worse death from exposure in the Australian outback.]]

** The father kills himself for no obvious reason, although the ThousandYardStare he often displays hints at some disturbance in his life. [[spoiler: Even worse, he attempts to make it a murder/suicide by trying to shoot the kids before dousing the VW Beetle they traveled in with gas and torching it, essentially stranding them in the outback to face a worse death from potential exposure.]]

* {{Foreshadowing}}: [[spoiler: Very little. Literally the only clues the audience gets that the father is planning to hurt the kids is his thousand-yard stare, and a quick shot of the VW Beetle's gas gauge, which shows that the car is nearly out of fuel.]]

* MoodWhiplash: Enough whiplash to almost break your neck. In the opening, we cut between the boy playing with his toys on the rocks, the girl setting out the picnic meal and calling everyone ever, and the father calmly sitting in the Volkswagen Beetle. The sequence couldn't be more mundane. Then we cut back to the boy on the rocks [[spoiler: and out of nowhere, some of his toys are obliterated by a bullet as we cut back to the father and see that he's got a gun in his hand and is ACTIVELY TRYING TO MURDER HIS CHILDREN. Even worse, the boy thinks dad is playing and starts shooting back at him with his squirt gun before the sister intervenes to save his life.]]

* ThoseTwoGuys: Both the father (John Meillon) and the Aboriginal boy (David Gulpilil) Later co-starred together in an entirely different genre, as allies of Mick Dundee in the "Crocodile Dundee" films.

** The father kills himself for no obvious reason, although the ThousandYardStare he often displays hints at some disturbance in his life.

* MoodWhiplash: Enough whiplash to almost break your neck. In the opening, we cut between the boy playing with his toys on the rocks, the girls setting out the picnic meal and calling everyone ever, and the father calmly sitting in the Volkswagen Beetle. The sequence couldn't be more mundane. Then we cut back to the boy on the rocks [[spoiler: and out of nowhere, some of his toys are obliterated by a bullet as we cut back to the father and see that he's got a gun in his hand and is ACTIVELY TRYING TO MURDER HIS CHILDREN. Even worse, the boy thinks dad is playing and starts shooting back at him with his squirt gun before the sister intervenes to save his life.]]

* PaterFamilicide: The father drives himself and his two children into the desert, where he pulls a gun and attempts to shoot the kids. When they escape, he sets fire to the car and then shoots himself. By destroying the car, he probably believed he was killing them anyway, as they would have been stranded in the desert with no way out.

[[quoteright:350:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/lzl2ztm.jpg]]

The movie gets even weirder from there. Has a place on the RogerEbertGreatMoviesList.

* {{Fanservice}}: Jenny Agutter's prolonged nude scene in which her character goes skinny-dipping.

The girl leads her little brother on a hike through the desert. In short order they are in desperate straits, with the girl forced to carry her little brother while both suffer from dehydration. They find a small watering hole and drink, but the next morning the water has dried up. Unable to think of anything else, the girl elects to wait at the watering hole. They appear to be doomed to die of thirst until they are met by an Aborigine teenaged boy (Gulpilil) on a walkabout. The boy saves their lives, drawing water from under the ground with a reed, and then takes them along with him for his walkabout through the outback.

An Australian man takes his teenage daughter and much younger son (Agutter and Luc Roeg) out into the Australian outback for a picnic. He drives until his car runs out of gas. As the little boy is playing with his toys and the girl is setting up the picnic blanket, the father, who has been reading work papers, suddenly pulls out a pistol and starts shooting at his kids. After the daughter takes the little boy and hides behind some rocks, the father sets the car on fire and then kills himself.

''Walkabout'' is a 1971 British film set in Australia, directed by Creator/NicolasRoeg and starring Creator/JennyAgutter, Luc Roeg (Nicolas' son, here credited as Lucien John), and David Gulpilil. It is based off the book of the same name by Donald G. Payne.

* ShoutOut: At the end a narrator reads [[http://web.archive.org/web/20021104035233/http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=HouShro.sgm&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=41&division=div1 Poem 40]] from Creator/AEHousman's ''A Shropshire Lad'', which is about remembering a pastoral scene from one's youth that one can't return to.

* MatingDance: A literal example, apparently, in which the Aborigine boy takes off his loincloth, elaborately paints himself, and dances for the girl, who is inside an abandoned house. When she rejects him, by shutting the door and hiding within the house, he kills himself.

** The Aborigine boy hangs himself. Whether that's due to the girl rejecting his courtship dance, or the sight of the white hunters killing the buffalo, or both, is not clear.
*** It is notable that ''neither'' one of these two characters commit suicide in the book. The father simply isn't present; the Aborigine boy dies from the flu.
* DullSurprise: The girl is quick to hide but otherwise seems unaffected when her father whips out a gun and starts shooting. She is similarly unmoved when she finds the Aborigine boy hanging from a tree.

* PaterFamilicide: The father drives himself and his two children into the desert, where he pulls a gun and attempts to shoot the kids. When they escape, he sets fire to the car and then shoot himself. By destroying the car, he probably believed he was killing them anyway, as they would have been stranded in the desert with no way out.

* RealLifeWritesThePlot: Luc Roeg really did get a bad sunburn on his back during shooting, and David Gulpilil suggested using fat from a nearby dead animal to soothe it. This got incorporated into the film.

* {{Bowdlerise}}: The original American release cut out Jenny Agutter's nude scenes.

*** It is notable that ''neither'' one of these two characters commit suicide in the book. The father simply isn't present, and the Aborigine boy dies from the flu.

* {{Skinnydipping}}: Jenny Agutter's character has quite a long scene in which she goes swimming nude. The last shot of the film is the girl's memory (or fantasy?) of her, her brother, and the Aborigine boy all skinny dipping together.