The Myth of Walkabout

This story was given to me by my mother. She grew up on a sheep station in Western Queensland and while her father was by all accounts kind, intelligent, supportive, hard-working, law-abiding and, for his time, quite the feminist, he shared one prejudice with other white men of his day. He refused to hire Aboriginal workers because they were unreliable. This was passed down to me then, contained in small ideas buried in the stories of a childhood spent with dirt floors, shearers and pet kangaroos: the idea of Walkabout.

Since James Vance Marshall’s 1959 novel ‘Walkabout’ was made into a movie of the same name, the romantic notion of the Walkabout has entered popular culture and general Australian parlance. Implicit in the term is the assumption that Walkabout is a cultural artefact of the traditionally-aimless nomadic lifestyle of the Australian Aborigine. While the Walkabout in Marshall’s novel is specifically a young Aboriginal male’s rite of passage, the term has evolved to signify a kind of wandering off: aimless, often purposeless and geographically-unconstrained.

Perceived as a kind of ‘travel for travel’s sake’, the ‘Walkabout’ is one of the most mythologised aspects of Australian Aboriginal behaviour and was usually alluded to by station managers to explain their workers’ sudden disappearance and re-appearance. This mobility, rendered mysterious by cultural differences, communication difficulties and a general lack of interest in understanding Aboriginal behavioural motivations, was endowed by non-Aboriginal Australians with the characteristics of laziness, non-productivity and unreliability. The belief that Aboriginal people still feel the need to ‘wander’ underpins arguments to avoid employing them just as it did on my Grandfather’s sheep station in 1950s Western Queensland.

Europeans, upon encountering Aboriginal people for the first time, assumed that groups of people wandered across the entire continent in search of food, unconstrained by land ownership or borders. ‘Walkabout’ encompasses these assumptions as it signifies both a wandering that has no boundary but also a homogenised Aboriginality that never really existed.

Human mobility, in any society, is in itself merely a response to a number of features affecting the daily lives of any group. Before colonisation, seasonal movement was necessary for survival and varied considerably based on the environment in which a group lived. There is a direct correlation between rainfall and the level of mobility (or conversely sendentarism) adopted by regional Aboriginal groups. Coastal populations were more sedentary with higher population density, while those in more arid regions, such as the Central Desert, had a much lower population density and moved frequently sometimes over long distances. These economic realities impacted every part of the regional group’s economic, social, political and spiritual lives and, arguably, underpin the considerable differences in culture, language and religion that characterises those people we lump under the term “Aboriginal Australian”.

Each group, regardless of the terminology you use to describe it, conducted this seasonal mobility within well-defined geographical areas, over which they had unambiguous and uncontested ownership. Knowledge of Country was evidence of ownership of Country, so knowledge was a tightly-controlled commodity only given where earned by birth, cultural contribution and, in many cases, age and gender. Movement was also necessary for ceremonial purposes, including Sorry Business (funerals), reconnecting with kin in other groups, trading, and finding appropriate marriage partners; all motives that underpin Indigenous mobility today.

In contemporary terms this “constrained mobility” is identified by most commentators as being primarily defined by the distribution of kin, a term that is defined much more broadly in Indigenous Australia. Under a classificatory kinship system, ‘kin’ includes blood relatives, those who are classified as kin under the kinship system, adopted relatives or even friends. In a traditional context, an Australian Aboriginal person would have been classified as being related to every person they ever met and maintaining links to these people was very important. Cultural responsibilities to kin can be considerable and, in the case of Sorry Business, unexpected.

Despite improvements in work-life balance in workplaces in recent years, many Aboriginal people still find it nearly impossible to negotiate work absences to fulfil their cultural responsibilities and, in the past, were often forced to simply leave work in order to undertake ceremonial or other roles that are compulsory if they are to retain their position in Aboriginal society.

Understanding mobility beyond the mythological construct of ‘Walkabout’ also has considerable importance for policy areas as it highlights the challenges of servicing a changing population and the poor housing, health and education outcomes of frequently moving individuals. Mainstream service delivery practices, such as for housing, health and education, have been developed to cater to relatively settled existences and a greater understanding Indigenous mobility is necessary for more effective service delivery, particularly in remote and regional areas.

As a non-Indigenous Australian, I like to think of myself as being sedentary, yet I've moved around extensively over the years. My “usual residence” in each location is fixed while I’m there but changes every few years. In contrast, an Indigenous person may not have a usual residence but, if not displaced by Colonialism, their Country remains unchanged for them, their Ancestors and their descendents over many years. How can we say then, that “they” have a greater predisposition to wander? It’s time we relegated the myth of Walkabout to the past and began a discussion on mobility for the future.

Adapted from my forthcoming research project for my Post-Graduate Diploma in Indigenous Knowledges. This piece originally appeared on my personal blog at http://www.littlereddave.blogspot.com/ and has been deliberated backdated to reflect its true publication date.

I am indebted to the following sources, among others, for this piece and would recommend further reading around these references:

Bourke, C and Edwards, B 1994, ‘Family and Kin’, in Bourke, Bourke & Edwards (eds), Aboriginal Australia, An Introductory Reader in Aboriginal Studies, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, Queensland, pp85-101.

Dosset, L 2002, AusAnthrop: Australian Aboriginal kinship and social organisation, viewed 24 March 2008, www.ausanthrop.net/research/kinship/kinship2.php.

Gostin, O & Chong, A 1994, ‘Living Wisdom: Aborigines and the Environment’, in Bourke, Bourke & Edwards (eds), Aboriginal Australia: An Introductory Reader in Aboriginal Studies, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, Queensland, pp123-139.

Keen, I 2004, Aboriginal Economy and Society: Australia at the Threshold of Colonisation, Oxford University Press, Victoria.

Peterson, N., 2004, ‘Myth of the walkabout: movement in the Aboriginal domain’, in Taylor, J., and Bell, M., (eds.) Population mobility and Indigenous peoples in Australasia and North American. Routledge, London, 223-238.

Young, E., and Doohan, K., 1989, Mobility for survival: a process analysis of Aboriginal population movement in Central Australia, Australian National University North Australia Research Unit, Darwin.