James Vance Marshall's fable of a girl and her brother marooned by a plane crash in the Australian Outback throws into sharp relief the adaptability and resilience of children, at least in the pre-video game age. The siblings are mostly helpless and hopeless until they meet an Aboriginal boy on his walkabout, the test of survival that all young males must complete or die trying. The Westerners learn to communicate with him, and survive, in a landscape that is both forbidding and wondrous. Marshall tells his story simply, with a minimum of philosophical and religious gloss. He leaves that for the reader to supply.
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