How The Two White Children Survive In Walkabout

497 Words1 Page

How The Two White Children Survive In Walkabout

There are many reasons as to how the two white children (Peter and

Mary) survived in 'Walkabout'. Some of these reasons were due to

elements of luck, others were by making the right critical decisions,

whilst having physical and mental strength and determination and how

they adopted to their alienated environment.

To summarise briefly Peter and Mary were two white children who were

heading from Charleston to Adelaide when unexpectedly the plane they

were travelling in crashed. Due to their inexperience as children,

they left the site of the plane and walked onwards towards the plains

of the forest.

To set the scene James Vance Marshall, the author of 'Walkabout',

already is starting to give a description of the characters, and is

already aiming to develop the characters in terms of their survival.

He straight away takes advantage of Peter and Mary's inexperience with

survival when they made a critical mistake by not staying with the

plane where it landed. It was not ironic that if the children had had

their survival techniques shown near the end of the novel then they

would have stayed at the site of the wreckage.

Arguably the main reason the two children stayed alive was an

unexpected crossing with an aboriginal male, who 'was ebony black and

quite naked'. From appearance the aboriginal knew that the two white

children "were harmless as a pair of tail-less kangaroos", so the bush

boy decided to help Peter and Mary, because "not only were they

freakish in appearance and clumsy in movement, they were also

amazingly helpless: untaught unskilled, utterly incapable of fending

for themselves."

The Bush Boy kept Peter and Mary alive by various methods of catching

food ('yeemara') and water ('arkaloola') that only an aboriginal would

know how.

These methods included that you scooped the water from the bottom of

the pool when you drank, so the water tasted cold; or used a tube like

instrument to drink clear water from the bottom of a murky pool, how

Open Document