Nicolas Roeg gets lost in the Outback in WALKABOUT, on Blu-ray from Umbrella Entertainment.

One sunny day, a British company man (Picture Show Man's John Meillon) drives his teenage daughter (Jenny Agutter, DOMINIQUE) and younger son (director Nicolas Roeg's son Luc Roeg, billed as "Lucien John") out of Adelaide to the Outback for a picnic. While the girl is listening to the radio and the boy is running around with his toy soldiers, their father suddenly pulls out a gun and opens fire on them. The pair takes shelter, with the boy believing that they are playing a game, but the daughter realizes that they are on their own when she sees her father torch their car and turn the gun on himself. She grabs what she can from the remains of the picnic – immediately set upon by ants – and the siblings head off into the Outback with the girl telling her brother that they are supposed to meet their father back in the city. Their trek seems to take them farther and farther from signs of human life, and they are on the verge of dying of thirst when they meet an Aboriginal boy (David Gulpilil, THE LAST WAVE) on walkabout. The girl is frustrated by her inability to communicate with him, but her brother is able to convey their need of sustenance and he shows them how to dig for water and feeds them from the animals he has hunted down with only a spear. The journey in search of "civilization" changes all three of them, but not in the ways one would expect…

Based on a novel by Donald G. Payne (THE ISLAND AT THE TOP OF THE WORLD) and adapted as a fourteen-page initial draft by playwright – scripter of the English dialogue for the screenplay of BLOW-UP – WALKABOUT has adolescent protagonists but it is not a children's film or even a family film. It is not the story of characters enlightened by stepping out (or being forced out) of everything familiar; rather, it is a despairing portrait of thwarted communication and the fear of other worlds. The girl cannot drop her cultivated civility – she is introduced as a private school girl in a music class taking voice lessons that seems to start at rudimentary syllables – to try to convey her need of water ("You must understand. Anyone can understand that. We want to drink. I can't make it any simpler") while the boy can only relate to the Aboriginal boy as another child. The Aboriginal boy speaks but his dialogue is never subtitled – indeed, the screenplay designates his dialogue as "XXXXX" without any importance as to what the character may be trying to get across to them – and the glimpses we see along the way of "civilization" are characterized by sex – cutaways to a German (cold), Italian (hot-blooded), and white Australian (aloof) group of scientists setting up weather balloons, with all of the men's attention drawn to the open shirt of the expedition's sole woman (Noeline Brown) or – and violence in the form of a pair of poachers who the Aboriginal boy witnesses shooting down kangaroos. It seems as much this act of violence as much as the girl's shunning the overtures of his mating dance that leads to the film's tragic climax and the bittersweet ending.

Former cinematographer Roeg also photographed the film himself – with special macro photography shot by Anthony B. Richmond who had worked under Roeg on FAHRENHEIT 451 and FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD and would later shoot DON’T LOOK NOW and THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH – and creates much of the undertone of sexual awakening with shots of bare tree limbs (sometimes seen from within the tree seemingly splayed open towards the camera) with the trio hanging on them like children clinging to their mother's leg, and works with his editors achieve moments of spatial dislocation in which something familiar turns up in unfamiliar terrain while John Barry (OUT OF AFRICA) alternates digeridoo and electronic music pieces in the city scenes and more "traditional" accompaniment in the desert from string music to children's songs like "Who Killed Cock Robin", and long after the batteries of the girl's radio must have died, the action is underscored with songs like Rod Stewart's "Gasoline Alley" and Warren Marley's "Los Angeles" as seeming reminders of how far away the world of the white siblings seems from where they are. Agutter went on to become a British actress of note while the junior Roeg has since become a producer with credits like Cronenberg's SPIDER and WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN, and Gulpilil has been a major Aboriginal presence in Australian cinema. In spite of his outsider role here, Meillon has elsewhere represented the dark side of the Outback in WAKE IN FRIGHT and INN OF THE DAMNED and its lighter side in CROCODILE DUNDEE AND CROCODILE DUNDEE II.

Released theatrically in the US by Twentieth Century Fox, WALKABOUT was more heard of than seen during the early video age, with a widescreen VHS from Home Vision coinciding with the Criterion Collection laserdisc. In the DVD era, Criterion put out their first edition in 1998 also featuring a non-anamorphic transfer but porting the Roeg/Agutter commentary from their laserdisc. New extras accompanied their 2010 Blu-ray edition from a 2K scan of a 35mm preservation interpositive with grading approved by Roeg, and that master has been used for Umbrella Entertainment's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.78:1 (including the Janus Films logo). Since then a newer 4K master appeared on Blu-ray in the U.K. from Second Sight and the results certainly were certainly gorgeous with a vibrant color palette richer fine detail although the grading could look quite different at times from the Roeg-approved master (fans might want both editions for the alternative viewing option and the exclusive extras). The original mono mix is presented here in a lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 track with clear dialogue and effects, and effectively rendering of the scoring and song choices. There are no subtitles (the Aboriginal dialogue was never subtitled or even scripted).

Although there is no menu screen, the uncredited audio commentary by Roeg and Agutter (recorded separately) from the Criterion set is accessible via your remote's audio button. Roeg reveals that Fox was responsible for adding the opening text defining the term "walkabout" before going into the project's long gestation (during which he was offered some high-profile projects like A CLOCKWORK ORANGE) which resulted in fifty-to-sixty page script (expanded from Edward Bond's original 14-page draft) that the Australian local crew thought was a short film. Agutter recalls being only fourteen when Roeg first considered her for the film, and she was drawn to the project more because Apple was involved at the time and she wanted to meet The Beatles. In the interim, Roeg's other son aged out of the running for the role and younger son Lucien was cast, and the two recall working with the boy and the director's preference for his performers not so much acting as "just doing things."