Walkabout

Walkabout is a novel written by James Vance Marshall (a pseudonym for Donald G. Payne), first published in 1959 as The Children. It is about two children, a teenage sister and her younger brother, who get lost in the Australian Outback and are helped by an Indigenous Australian teenage boy on his walkabout. A film based on the book, with the same title came out in 1971, but deviated from the original plot. Plot summary Two American siblings, Peter and Mary, are stranded by a gully in the Australian outback following a plane crash. Peter says they should seek out their uncle, who lives in Adelaide; Mary agrees and they begin walking across the desert, but they fail to realize that Adelaide is on the other side of the continent. They are without food save for a small piece of stick candy, and while falling asleep under a quandong tree they have a nightmare about how the captain got them to danger, only to be killed in a blast when he attempted to kill the navigator. The next day, they keep walking and searching for food but their efforts are in vain. While atop a bluff, Peter thinks he has found water but Mary makes him turn away to prevent him from becoming delirious, as she knows the silver pools are the salt pans of the outback. Suddenly, an Aboriginal teen of about Mary's age (referred to within the text as the "bush boy") appears and startles them, mostly due to his nudity. Hoping to make him leave, Mary glares at him. This proves ineffective. Hoping to find out about the strangers, he inspects both of them but finds nothing of interest, so he leaves. Peter and Mary, shocked at potentially losing their only hope for survival, follow him. Peter attempts to communicate with him through gestures of eating and drinking, and the bush boy quickly comes to comprehend their plight. He indicates that they should follow him, which they do. He arrives at a waterhole where the children drink their fill. Then, the bush boy prepares food for the hungry children. After this, he begins to lead the children to the next waterhole. The bush boy misinterprets Mary's look of disgust at his nakedness as her having seen the spirit of death, and falls into a mental euthanasia. While the children are resting, the bush boy withdraws to reflect on the situation, as this has unwittingly placed him in an ethical and moral quandary. He had been on his walkabout, or test of manhood, prior to crossing paths with the white children.