Walkabout
The book Walkabout is set in the Australian desert, so geography plays a huge role in this story. While in the Australian desert, many issues are present. For one thing, food and water are precious, so the characters need to use what they know to find these resources, and to properly prepare it.
The perspective of the author is a 13 year old girl named Mary. This is very important to the story, and important to show how humans act. Mary takes charge when she and Peter, her little brother, are stranded in the Australian desert. Mary sees that she is older, and Peter doesn’t know any better, so she needs to take charge and ensure that they both survive. However, when an Aboriginal boy comes along, she is skeptical, and doesn’t trust him, as is human nature. She meets someone new, she isn’t quick to trust him, and at first she doesn’t want to follow him, because she doesn’t know him. But in the end, she ends up following him, because Mary knows that this Aboriginal boy is their only lifeline.
There are hardly any cultural patterns/issues present, because it is all explained through narration. According to this book, the Aboriginal travel through the Australian desert at a young age to prove whether or not they are fit to live. If they die, they are clearly not meant to live. The Aboriginal boy taking Peter and Mary to where they need to be realizes that Mary is the reason that he was not meant to live. He accepts his fate, and continues onward, as he assumes he was meant to. When the Aboriginal boy realizes it is his time to die, he lies down and accepts it. The boy hopes Peter and Mary know how to display his body, high up on a stand so the dark spirits cannot reach for his body and take him down into the ground. The main barrier in this situation is the language barrier, which stops the Aboriginal boy from telling Peter and Mary all of this. The boy has to use signs and gestures to tell them anything, which proves to be problematic, but Peter and...