Talk:Walkabout (disambiguation)

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(In fact most Aboriginal cultures required people to visit certain sites at certain times and to engage in ceremonial meetings of many thousands of years standing. That this process could be dismissed as 'walkabout' is an indication of the unsophisticated approach non-indigenous Australians took to indigenous cultures and also perhaps the sense of humour of the Aborigines who coined the phrase.)

Does that even make sense?

If the Aborigines coined the phrase, how could the non-Aborigines be unsophisticated by utilising the term? That would only make sense if the non-Aborigines coined the term in the first place.

When I was a boy growing up in the 50s and 60s in the northeastern US I came to have the impression that "he's gone walkabout" was meant to imply that the native labor hadn't shown up for work with the implication both that they didn't have a grasp of a real work ethic, and that their closeness to nature gave them the occasional irresistible urge to go out into the wilderness. This manages to be both romanticising of the natural state while dismissing it as primitive. It also brings the whole behavior pattern into the labor/capital debate so prevalent in the 20th century. So you could use it either in a dismissive, almost racist tone, or you could use it in a manner that implied a respect for the loyalty of the one who had gone walkabout to his muse. Thus when used the term was marvellously ambiguous.

Walkabout belief
Walkabout is an Australian pidgin (or perhaps quasi-pidgin) term referring to the belief that Australian Aborigines "go walkabout" at the age of thirteen in the wilderness for six months as a rite of passage.

This doesn't tell us: (a) who believes this (Aborigines themselves?), and (b) whether this belief is actually true, or if it's just a folk myth. 217.155.20.163 19:43, 27 May 2007 (UTC)