Walkabout Soundtrack: The Country Beneath the Score

Before John Barry's first melody settles over Walkabout, the country has already begun to sound: insects, radio static, breath, stone, Stockhausen, a didgeridoo across an uncertain distance. The orchestra enters late and spends the rest of the film learning what cannot belong to it.

There is a radio in Walkabout that goes on talking after talk has lost its ordinary purpose, carrying instructions, songs, received opinions and the patient grammar of metropolitan life while its batteries weaken among abandoned walls and nobody answers. The voice persists, reduced to one more vibration in the heat. Roeg treats the radio as a remnant of settlement, a portable jurisdiction, and the girl protects its dwindling charge because it keeps a line open, however frail, to the order she has been expelled from. Through it the city reaches the interior in small, absurd parcels: educational programmes, popular music, announcements detached from consequence. The machine knows nothing of thirst and cannot read the ground.

Barry's score lives in the same interval between transmission and place. His music comes from elsewhere. It has been carried in, the way a settler carries seed corn unsuited to the soil it is given.

I. A country assembled in the cutting room

The Australian interior in Walkabout has no single geographical body. Roeg and his crew filmed around Alice Springs, in Arnhem Land, the Flinders Ranges, at Lake Eyre and in the industrial country around Iron Knob and Whyalla, before returning to Sydney for the urban sequences. Places separated by immense distances were joined in the edit until they formed one apparently continuous passage. Red earth gives way to salt, escarpments rise behind country belonging to another region entirely, tropical vegetation enters the path and disappears. The children travel through an atlas folded by memory, and Barry supplies part of the fold.

His recurring melody carries an emotional climate from one location to the next and lends continuity to terrain that resists it, the strings drawing a line through separate geologies, the woodwind giving human scale to distances that have none. A phrase returns, and the viewer accepts that these scattered tracts belong to one inward journey. The land beneath the edit stays plural. It was never the vacant totality the colonial word wilderness proposes; each location had histories, custodians, names and systems of movement long before Roeg set his camera down. The geography may look continuous; the cultural ground is not, and this matters most whenever the score begins to sound universal, since no melody can gather such a country without leaving something outside its embrace.

II. Before melody

The opening soundscape withholds the comfort Barry will later offer. A fragment of Karlheinz Stockhausen's Hymnendrags the machinery of the century into the first minutes, and a didgeridoo follows. Animal calls, engines, schoolroom voices and city noise continue the passage, so that modernist composition, Indigenous sound, commercial radio and environmental noise share one unstable field before melody is allowed to arrive.

Barry therefore arrives late. His music cannot claim to reveal a silent continent, because the continent has already spoken in registers the orchestra cannot absorb: clicks, drones, rasps, calls across distance. Into this Barry brings his unmistakable gift for lyrical order, and the order now carries the faint embarrassment of a visitor laying linen over rough ground.

The theme is among the loveliest he wrote. Divided strings rise and fall in long arcs, a restrained pulse keeps the music moving without hurrying it, and wind instruments appear like figures sighted far off, briefly legible against a larger expanse. Barry gives the melody enough breadth to meet Roeg's horizons and draws it back before grandeur can turn into possession. Its tenderness is European all the same, and belongs to a culture trained to find inward states in scenery and keep them as art.

III. The old nursery enters the heat

The title of "The Children" has a history of its own. James Vance Marshall's novel, the film's source, first appeared in 1959 as The Children, about two American children lost after a plane crash; Roeg and his screenwriter Edward Bond made them English and invented the father's suicide. The cue sets words from "Who Killed Cock Robin?", the English nursery rhyme whose catalogue of creatures gathers around a death. In Barry's arrangement the chorus follows the insects and reptiles that witness the father's body, and the rhyme, carried across oceans from an English childhood, reaches a place where its old pastoral menagerie acquires flesh. Flies attend the corpse, birds cross the scorched air, lizards wait in the open.

The rhyme's antiquity once made death manageable by ritualising it. Mortality enters childhood through repetition, in a procession small enough to remember, and Barry retrieves that old scaffolding for a scene in which paternal order has collapsed with no ceremony to receive it.

Roeg's animals keep none of the obedience the rhyme asks of its creatures. They eat, mate, kill and decompose, their lives running beside the human catastrophe with an attention entirely their own, and the old pastoral passes among them, unable to explain what it has come to witness.

IV. A storybook exposed to the sun

"Stranded", "Survival Test" and "The Journey" make up the score's most openly narrative stretch, titles that suggest an adventure seen from the safe distance of an album sleeve. In the film that safety has already burned away. Barry writes here from something close to the younger child's scale of perception, with traces of expedition, curiosity and even play, a melody giving direction to movement where the images offer only exposure. The boy asks questions, names things, keeps turning terror into incident, because a story is one of the few instruments childhood has against what it cannot yet survive by other means.

Roeg sets this near-fable beside dead animals, industrial labour, failed communication and the bodily facts of thirst, and the friction is where the score's unease lives. Barry's music faithfully preserves the children's inherited way of misreading the country: the assumption that a journey has stages, that danger precedes rescue, that a guide will appear once hope runs out. Such patterns come from schoolbooks and imperial adventure tales, from a long European literature of children lost beyond the edge of settlement, and Walkabout lets the pattern run its course before leaving its assumptions exposed under the white sun.

David Gulpilil's character arrives at the point where such stories expect providence. He finds water, gathers food and reads signs the children cannot see, and the film gives him grace, humour and physical intelligence through Gulpilil's own presence, while confining him in a role built by outsiders: the unnamed "Black Boy", a figure of traditional knowledge apparently untouched by modern life. Gulpilil spent much of his later career complicating that stereotype. He was a Yolŋu actor, dancer, painter and storyteller from Arnhem Land, whose screen presence changed Australian cinema even when his early films gave him identities narrower than his own.

The tension survives quietly in the soundtrack. The white children receive the interiority of Barry's orchestra, fear, tenderness and future nostalgia, all given harmonic development. Gulpilil's character is reached more often through rhythm, gesture and bodily skill, through sounds treated as environment; his knowledge enters the film as action, his sorrow arrives as movement, and the orchestra mourns the encounter mostly from the vantage of those who will survive to remember it. No late cue corrects it.

V. Three figures at sunset

"The Three of Us" and "Together at Sunset" hold the briefest possibility of another arrangement. For a while the children travel as a small improvised company. Water is found, food passes between hands, and though words stay insufficient, play and imitation begin to close some of the distance. Barry's music warms without announcing reconciliation. His phrases seem to shelter the three figures for a few minutes, giving their movement a domestic contour and the terrain the outline of a home that cannot last.

Roeg saves his colour for sunset. In the hard white hours of noon the country has little patience for human sentiment; at dusk its surfaces change, rock takes on colour, bodies become silhouettes, and distance softens just enough for a European eye to mistake beauty for welcome. Here Barry's orchestra flourishes most, the strings drawing the evening inward and turning geography into recollection before the journey has ended, as though the music already knew that each shared gesture was passing into the past as it happened.

This is where the score comes closest to pastoral proper. The form has rarely described rural life faithfully; its office has been to provide distance from labour, power and the city, so that social conflict can appear as weather, song, courtship and seasonal loss. Barry inherits its elegiac branch. His country holds no shepherds, yet the music arranges the travellers as figures in a scene whose harmony is possible only because the future has already drawn its sting. A pastoral displaced from England has taken up residence in Australia, and its foreignness gives the music its ache, a cultivated plant set down in fierce soil, living long enough to flower, carrying somewhere in its structure the memory of rain from another hemisphere.

VI. The album rescued from absence

For decades the original recording of Walkabout survived mainly through the film and later re-recordings, until the Melbourne label The Roundtable issued the album in November 2016: twelve tracks produced by Phil Ramone and conducted by Barry.

The album is a different work in small ways. Away from Roeg's editing the score lives in an acoustic world with far fewer interruptions. The insects retreat, the radio no longer contradicts the strings, the geography loses its local resistance, and what remains is a compact suite of pastoral melancholy, psychedelic residue and childhood unease.

The sitar-like colour, studio manipulation and unstable pulse of "Electronic Dance" belong to the moment when commercial recording had begun absorbing the procedures of the electronic avant-garde without giving up pleasure, and beside Barry's finely proportioned themes it sounds like heat getting into magnetic tape, form buckling under a climate it was never built for. "Los Angeles" opens yet another elsewhere, bright and remote, a song named for an American city travelling through an Australian landscape inside a British film. Place circulates here as recorded fantasy, the radio having made every territory capable of haunting every other. London writes Australia. Los Angeles arrives by song. An English nursery rhyme attends a death under foreign stars, Arnhem Land, Lake Eyre and the Flinders Ranges are joined into one imagined interior, and for all its wealth of places the soundtrack has few that truly coincide.

VII. The future memory

On first hearing, the score seems to belong to the present tense. By the end we understand that much of its tenderness has been travelling backwards all along, from the girl's adult life, so that Barry is composing the future memory of the experience, what remains once heat, shame, fear and responsibility have been worn smooth by years. Roeg's fractured editing works the same way: images return before their meaning has settled, a gesture gains significance long after it happened, and the film remembers itself while it is still going on. Barry gives that unstable memory a melody able to outlast it, and the melody's beauty is itself a moral difficulty. The listener wants to enter it, and the film keeps asking, gently, what entering would require us to forget.

VIII. The land of lost content

In the final sequence the girl is a married woman in a Sydney kitchen, her husband talking about work, domestic life closed round her with the quiet efficiency of a room furnished before she arrived. Then memory opens. She sees the water again, three young bodies moving through it, free of fatigue, misunderstanding and death. The image is too perfect for Roeg to claim it happened in quite this form. Longing has remade it.

Barry's theme returns under lines from A. E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad, with its "blue remembered hills", its "land of lost content" and its roads that cannot be travelled again. An English poem of rural estrangement supplies the last language through which an Australian journey enters memory, Shropshire passing over the Outback like a late shadow. Roeg places Housman's mechanism, a country loved from afar, inside the girl's recollection and turns Australia into her private Shropshire, luminous because it is lost, innocent because the dead can no longer correct the memory. Barry's theme completes the conversion. Its rising strings build the form in which the country's absence can be endured, and they take her nowhere near the country itself, while the Aboriginal youth survives elsewhere only as an image inside someone else's nostalgia.

Knowing this does not diminish the melody. The score grows more powerful once its limits are heard, a work of exceptional tenderness that is also, unmistakably, the sound of a European consciousness arranging an encounter after the fact and gathering its scattered guilt into pastoral elegy.

Beneath that elegy lies another country, and it was never silent.

The insects continue past the final cadence. Rock holds its heat long after the orchestra has stopped. Voices travel through territories whose names the film never gives. The radio fails somewhere among the walls, and memory begins its long work of selection.

Nicolas Roeg :: Walkabout

Last revised: July 2026