From the outset Walkabout styled itself on the qualities of a geographic magazine, and natural history was to play a significant role in realizing this objective. That natural history is broadly educative made it key to one of Walkabout 's aims of bringing a people home to the land in which they dwelt. As David Lowenthal explains:

Throughout the middle decades of the twentieth century Walkabout helped overcome the notion of a hollow, lifeless centre, of inhospitable remote regions and of inland dreariness, through bringing to light the floral and faunal richness of these regions and, as we have shown elsewhere (see Chapter 3), through peopling these regions with vibrant Aboriginal cultures too. Walkabout helped settlers apprehend not only inland Australia, but rural, regional and remote Australia, and parried urban fears that these regions were ‘omen[s] of menace’.

In doing this Walkabout helped transform the vast space of Australia – mostly unknown to its readership – into place. Hence it was complicit in the process of ‘secur[ing] the land emotionally and spiritually for the settler society’. Yet Walkabout did not imagine possession to be exclusionary, but informed and inclusionary. In discussing the ‘anxious proximities’ that are characteristic of settler societies and the reverberations of their literary preoccupations, Alan Lawson warns how critics