Word: walkabout
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...ship there or welcoming with royal flourish some visiting head of state). Elizabeth, Prince Philip and their brood have tried hard to give the impression that it is not all a big bore (see PEOPLE, page 42). Elizabeth herself, for instance, periodically goes on what palace aides call a "walkabout," strolling among crowds of her subjects, chatting casually with whomever she bumps into. She has become considerably sophisticated in the years since her coronation when, as one court observer puts it, she appeared to be a "terribly stiff, cardboard figure." On a visit to Stirling University in Scotland...
Lost Souls. This imaginary fraudulent creature has animated a great deal of escape fiction, from Robinson Crusoe to Little Big Man. Taken lightly, he is an object of literary curiosity. Written about seriously, he is preposterous. Walkabout makes the disastrous mistake of treating an aborigine...
Meantime, a bushman (an authentic one named David Gumpilil) fearlessly traverses the country-the sky his ceiling, the air his blanket-boomeranging lizards and kangaroos in order to eat. Stumbling upon the lost souls, this natural man guides them through his Eden. Walkabout suddenly becomes a lyric travelogue, assaulting the harsh Flinders mountain ranges, trailing the little camels of the red desert near Alice Springs, mooning under the blooming quandong tree. Director Nicolas Roeg, who made his reputation as a cinematographer (Fahrenheit 451, Far from the Madding Crowd. Petulia), shows a precise and delicate Down Understanding. But give him anything...
...savage as anything but an improbably heroic amalgam of Friday, Chingachgook and St. Francis. A pity. The cast are an attractive lot and, as some lyrically nude bathing scenes demonstrate, Miss Agutter possesses one of the lithest, blithest young bodies on public view. Were the eye the only judge, Walkabout might be considered a treat. But no, Roeg and his scenarist Edward Bond (BlowUp) aim for the mind and miss wildly. Their preachy, anti-intellectual Natural Mannerisms are neither convincing...
...question census form and a language guide in eight tongues as disparate as Serbo-Croatian and Maltese. When they dealt with the "abos" -Australia's bug-eating, boomerang-throwing aborigines-census takers had to use sign language after they had finally discovered their quarry in mid-"walkabout." Abos, after all, spend their lives on the prowl in the wastes beyond the Great Dividing Range, running down witchetty grubs and wallabies from Birdsville to Alice Springs. When intercepted, the abos tended to be surly, not because of any contempt for civilized counting procedures, but because a 1901 constitutional amendment demands...