Walkabout [Paperback]

A plane crashes in the vast Northern Territory of Australia, and the only survivors are two children from Charleston, South Carolina, on their way to visit their uncle in Adelaide. Mary and her younger brother, Peter, set out on foot, lost in the vast, hot Australian outback. They are saved by a chance meeting with an unnamed Aboriginal boy on walkabout. He looks after the two strange white children and shows them how to find food and water in the wilderness, and yet, for all that, Mary is filled with distrust.

On the surfaceWalkaboutis an adventure story, but darker themes lie beneath. Peter’s innocent friendship with the boy met in the desert throws into relief Mary’s half-adult anxieties, and the book as a whole raises questions about what is lost—and may be saved—when different worlds meet. And in reading Marshall’s extraordinary evocations of the beautiful yet forbidding landscape of the Australian desert, perhaps the most striking presence of all in this small, perfect book, we realize that this tale—a deep yet disturbing story in the spirit of Adalbert Stifter’sRock Crystaland Richard Hughes’sA High Wind in Jamaica—is also a reckoning with the mysteriously regenerative powers of death.“A haunting little idyl in the same vein asA High Wind in JamaicaandGreen Mansionstells of two children, a boy and a girl, sole survivors of a plane crash in the Australian bush. Their fragile veneer of modern culture clashes with the primitive soul of a black bush boy who is making his tribal ‘walkabout’ –a half-year’s solitary journey in the wilderness to test his fitness to be a member of his tribe.” —Time

“A small classic, pared down to the bare bones. Many will not only enjoy it, but long remember it.” —New York Times
 
“[Walkabout] is to Australians whatRobinson Crulc