Walkabout Essay -- Australia Aborigines Literature Essays

Walkabout This story is about two children who are stranded in the Australian outback after a plane crash. By chance they meet an Aborigine boy who is on his walkabout. From these two different groups of people meeting each other, it shows the reader how much people can learn from others and how different we all are. Mary’s first inclination is to mother Peter. She feels responsible for him and he depends on her. But she feels inadequate in this new environment. ‘Always she had protected Peter, had smoothed things out and made them easy for him – molly-coddled him like an anxious hen, her father had once said. But how could she protect him now?’ Then the bush boy comes across their path and things become tense between the children and aborigine. The very first thing Mary notices about the Aborigine is that he is very black and naked. She finds this very disturbing, ‘The thing that she couldn’t accept, the thing that seemed to her shockingly and indecently wrong, was the fact that the boy was naked.’ As the two cultures confront each other they just stare at each other in disbelief and wonder, ‘Between them the distance was less than the spread of an outstretched arm, but more than a hundred thousand years.’ ‘They had climbed a long way up the ladder of progress; they had climbed so far, in fact, that they had forgotten how their climb had started’ They had had everything provided for them and had never had to fend for themselves. ‘It was very different with the Aboriginal way of life. He knew what reality was. Their lives were unbelievably simple compared to the aborigine. They had no homes, no crops, no clothes, no possessions. The few things they had they shared: food and wives; children and l... ...least offended by it. Peter and Mary mix very naturally with these Aborigine strangers. The women swim together and share food and Peter as been drawn to a particular man within the tribe. The man looks at the drawings they had done earlier of a house and realises that they need to find civilisation. He draws them a map, which ends in a house so they know where to go. Before they leave Peter takes in the beauty of their surroundings he ‘knew in that moment that every detail of what he’d seen in the last two weeks he’d remember for he rest of his life.’ He then leads the way via the map to civilisation and Mary follows. It makes you hope that they will take back with them into their ‘civilised’ culture all they have learned from the Aboriginal people and their strange ways of life with their fantasy lands, spiritual gods and there true sense of belonging.