The Currency Press’s series ‘Australian Screen Classics’ is off to a good start. With playwright Louis Nowra’s Walkabout, thorough in its production, analysis and reception mode, novelist Christos Tsiolkas’s The Devil’s Playground, a study in personal enchantment, an Age film reviewer Adrian Martin’s The Mad Max Movies, an action fan’s impassioned response to the trilogy, the series makes clear that it will not be settling for a predictable template.

For anyone who has not seen Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout (1971) for some years, Nowra’s study will evoke it with clarity and, because the book is also at times provocative, make another viewing essential. Nowra makes his intentions clear from the outset: he plans to trace ‘the process from the novel, to the preparation, to the filming and then, reception of the film’, and the structure of the book follows this blueprint. His admiration for the film is palpable, though this doesn’t stop him from criticising effects he finds too obvious.