long walk

I don't know why I'm making the following admission of idiocy but I guess I found it kind of funny.

On my first watch of this film, and until I read the synopsis, I totally didn't register that the aborigine boy (guess he's called Black Boy) was also on his literal walkabout. I was paying too much attention to the metaphor of the unintended walkabout that Girl and Boy were on that I just thought he was on a long walk!

I mean, I don't want to wholly chalk this up to Western ignorance, but when they first encounter Black Boy, we don't know how far he is from home. It's only when it takes days and he hasn't taken them back to his village that, I suppose, we're supposed to fully infer that he's on his walkabout. But I just thought he was playing & hunting quite far from his house, and that for an aborigine, your backyard so to speak might extend a couple hundred miles, and that your parents wouldn't worry about it if you didn't show up for a while!

#mymistake