The boy from the Outback who enchanted cinemagoers everywhere
Jenny Agutter talks to Tim Robey about her pioneering ‘Walkabout’ co-star, who died this week aged 68
D‘He may have gone through difficult times, but he was a wonderful person’
avid Dalaithngu might never have appeared on any cinema screens if his tribal dancing as a 16-year-old boy hadn’t caught the attention of a young Nicolas Roeg.
In 1969, Roeg was locationscouting in Arnhem Land for his Outback drama Walkabout (1971), and needed to cast an Aboriginal performer to play one of the three main roles – the teenage tracker who helps two white siblings survive in the desert, after their father’s suicide.
The dancing clinched it, but Dalaithngu’s ability to perform on camera proved amazingly natural, and quickly unforgettable. By Yolngu tradition, that’s the late star’s preferred name – though he was credited differently in the dozens of film and TV roles that Walkabout
unlocked, including Peter Weir’s supernatural thriller The Last Wave (1977), Crocodile Dundee (1986) and Rabbit-proof Fence (2002). The vigour and intelligence he brought to every screen appearance unquestionably helped inform perceptions of Aboriginal culture across the globe.
Jenny Agutter, his Walkabout co-star, was a well-known child actress by that point, and had very little in common with Dalaithngu except also being 16. She remembers overcoming their “completely different circumstances” and forging a warm, mutually curious bond throughout the shoot.
“He wasn’t like the boy in Walkabout,”
Agutter reflects. “He spoke perfect English, and was an extraordinarily communicative person.
“My memories are of sitting and chatting – we would talk about ‘dream time’, and a lot of it went over my head because I hadn’t yet invested enough in discovering that whole world.” Agutter was especially impressed, given her several years of acting experience, that “he seemed to have an exactly equal sense of what we were doing”. “All he’d seen were westerns – he loved outdoor movies. So he was extraordinarily visually aware of the picture that was being created, all the time. Once, I was placed in a doorway so that light would reflect on to his skin, in a kind of a rainbow effect. He asked me to move over, because he knew exactly where the light needed to fall.” Dalaithngu’s later career would bring him major acclaim, including two Best Actor awards from AACTA (the Australian Oscars) for leading roles given to him by the Dutch-australian filmmaker Rolf de Heer, on The Tracker (2002) and Charlie’s Country (2014). His later life was not without struggle and notoriety. He reverted to living in a tin shed in the village of Ramingining, partly to avoid the temptations of alcohol and drugs – chronic addictions he picked up from Dennis Hopper on the set of the 1976 outlaw flick Mad Dog Morgan. In 2011, he was jailed for an assault on his wife Miriam that broke her arm.
Agutter says it was many, many years since they’d last spoken, but she followed him through his work, and remarks on the “extraordinary legacy” he left behind on film. “He was an extraordinary spokesman, who very much represented his tribe.” On Walkabout, she remembers his skill with the didgeridoo between takes.
She adds: “[Dalaithngu] may have gone through difficult times, but what he came to produce, as a person from his particular culture, was wonderful. He would present all those traditions and reach out to the world beyond his own. A fairly magical character, really.”