Character Analysis
(Avoiding Spoilers)
Living… up until now with her father (a geologist), mother, and six-year-old brother. They lived in a high-rise apartment building in an Australian city where she enjoyed playing with her brother in the swimming pool. The girl attended a school that required the students to wear uniforms and taught them how to speak properly. Unfortunately, those skills are not helpful to her now.
Visiting… the Australian Outback. The girl’s father packed up the family in their Volkswagon and took them there for what he said would be a picnic – but it was anything but. After they were done eating, he took out a gun and started shooting at them. The girl saves herself and her brother by hiding behind a ridge, but their mother was killed when the car burst into flames. And after their father shot himself, they are left to fend for themselves in the wild with only their clothes, a battery-powered radio, and the leftover food in the picnic basket. They end up meeting an aborigine boy who helps guide them through the dangerous terrain.
Relationship Status… single. At fourteen, she is just discovering her heightened sexual awareness, which creates tension between her and the aborigine youth she meets. But considering their vastly different backgrounds, a relationship between them would be very difficult. They can’t even speak to each other. The girl insists on speaking English to him, and she can’t fathom why he can’t understand her.
Challenge… getting her and her brother back home to civilization. Lost in the Outback, the girl’s first priority is to survive. She leads her brother around the desert looking for water and a sign of civilization, equipped only with the useless knowledge from school and some anecdotes from her uncle’s military training stories.
Personality… strong, innocent, and anxious. The girl shows signs of bravery, protecting her brother and pulling him from harm’s way. But as they wander the wilderness, she clings to her speech exercises and her school uniform she wears, which still tie her to civilization. Coming of age is not easy for any teenager, but she is forced to do it without any adults to support her among lizards, scorpions, and snakes.
Get to Know her in...
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A teenage girl and her young brother are stranded in the Australian outback and are forced to cope on their own. They meet an Aborigine on "walkabout": a ritualistic banishment from his tribe
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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 surface Walkabout is 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’s Rock Crystal and Richard Hughes’s A High Wind in Jamaica—is also a reckoning with the mysteriously regenerative powers of death.
