PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK (1975)

After watching this dreamy classic in my formative years, I believed it was based on historic events. It seems I wasn’t alone in my delusion, and the story has since infiltrated Australian folklore. Enthusiasts entertain each other by putting forward alternative theories about what really happened. But none of it really happened. It’s a tribute to filmmaker Peter Weir’s immersive and lyrical treatment of Joan Lindsay’s original, highly evocative novel of 1967 that a story as mysterious and elusive as Picnic at Hanging Rock has sunk so deeply into public consciousness.

This is partly due to an opening statement in the book that is echoed as the first frame of the film that doesn’t explicitly say, but implies, the story was based on a real happening: “On Saturday 14th February 1900, a party of schoolgirls from Appleyard College picnicked at Hanging Rock near Mt. Macedon in the state of Victoria. During the afternoon several members of the party disappeared without trace…”

This also derails expectations of a neat solution to the mystery that’s about to unfold. We are told, unequivocally, there was no trace of the girls. In other words, no one knows what happened to them. Yet, by the time we approach the climax, we will forget this and, without any rational evidence, we will entertain many ideas and theories about what could’ve happened. Along the way, there are plenty of tantalising clues and implications. In the end, though, we realise that this ungraspable enigma has, indeed, gripped us and refuses to let go even as the seductively shot, languidly paced narrative draws to a close… but without closure.

The opening shots of the imposing rock formation appearing out of the clouds, while remaining visually detached from the ground by a band of mist, is a mysterious and other-worldly image. Ominous and foreboding but at the same time floating and insubstantial, partly shrouded in mysterious mist. In Celtic lore this would be considered a Mist Gate—an atmospheric phenomenon which in folktales can be portals from our realm of Abred to the underworld fairy realm of Annwn. So, right off the bat, Peter Weir’s hinting at some overlap between worlds.

The idea of different planes of existence pervades the myths and religions of many cultures around the world and is analogous with the Aboriginal Dreamtime. I’m no expert on such ancient antipodean lore, but as I understand, great spirits live in the realm of the sky, and the land is but a shadow, or reflection, of that infinite sky world. Perhaps a metaphor for this would be the flat surface of a mirror which reflects an insubstantial facsimile of the ‘real’ world. Likewise, their belief system suggests that the realm of the stars is more real than the shadow it casts over the land. In a similar way, dreaming is real life, whilst our waking hours are a reflection of our dreams. Hence, the Aboriginal ‘Dreamtime’ is their primary state of existence.

Something to do with the Dreamtime comes into most interpretations. Which may be surprising as any mention of the indigenous folk or their mystical beliefs is deliberately avoided. They are not present in the narrative, just as they were no longer present within their ancestral landscape…

The misty metaphor of transition between two worlds, and two states of being, is reinforced as the camera moves across the parched golden grasses of the land until we cross the clearly defined boundary of the Appleyard College grounds with its green tended lawns and shrubbery. It seems a fragment of an alien world somehow landed in what should be the outback. Of course, white settlers were the aliens.

The title sequence includes plenty of lyrical and symbolic imagery. We see young women waking in their dormitories and going about their morning ablutions while opening St Valentine’s Day cards and reading snippets of poetry. A line of four girls lace up and tighten each other’s corsets, visually commenting on the societal control of women which they also tighten by such consensual conformity. They are also accepting and attempting to fit within an idealised female form. Because we have just seen them contemplating their St Valentine’s Day messages, we know what may be in their thoughts. So, the scene takes on a sensual aspect, perhaps with some subtle sapphic undertones. Later, those corsets will be loosened or discarded in a bid for an ultimate freedom.

The central cast of young actresses were selected for their youthful vitality, innocence and radiance. Most of them had to be dubbed by voice actors in post-production because Peter Weir was interested in their naturalistic spontaneity which might be lost with too much rehearsal or emphasis on precise performance. The film is filled with symbolism of transient beauty and fleeting youth. These were obsessions of the Victorian era that itself was transitioning at the turn of the millennium—the 64th and last year of Queen Victoria’s reign.

One of the girls preserves a flower using a small flower-press and it is at this moment that the director chose to have his credit appear on screen. Just as the flower is being fixed in time, so the film is fixing its cast in time. Youth and beauty, people and places, will be timelessly preserved. Another key motif in Victorian art—the transitory moment stopped, a flower pressed, a butterfly pinned, the beauty of youth captured in oils… beauty denying age and death their dominion.

These are about as concrete as the clues get in a narrative that deploys many tropes of the mystery thriller, almost becoming a whodunnit. It has a decidedly proto-giallo aesthetic, reminiscent of Narciso Ibáñez Serrador’s psychological Spanish horror La Residencia / The Finishing School (1969), and there’s even a mention of Jack the Ripper to put the viewer in mind of another famous unsolved mystery.

After an introduction to some of the girls and staff the group set off for, you guessed it, a picnic at Hanging Rock. Uptight headmistress, Mrs Appleyard (Rachel Roberts) warns the girls against any “tomboy foolishness”, forbidding them to explore the higher slopes of the rocks but, being such a warm day, does grant them permission to remove their gloves once outside the town limits. Such prophetic remarks imply she may know something about the strangeness of the site, and also the likelihood that the girls will be removing more than their gloves when its influence asserts itself.

The staff accompanying the girls are the French mistress, Mlle. de Poitiers (Helen Morse) and the sternly intellectual Miss McCraw (Vivean Gray) along with Mr Hussey (Martin Vaughan) the coachman, who notices that his watch has stopped at noon and when Miss McCraw checks hers, she too, finds it’s stopped at noon. She comments on the coincidence explaining that her timepiece had never failed her before. This is our first hint that something is amiss and that there may be an unexplained localised phenomenon.

After sharing the sickly sweet heart-shaped cake, before ants infest the leftovers, four of the girls leave the group to measure some features of the rock formation for their geology report. Miranda (Anne-Louise Lambert), as Mlle. de Poitiers comments, resembles one of Botticelli’s angels—one of many references to the idealised world of art sprinkled through the narrative. She’s joined by Marion (Jane Vallis), and Irma (Karen Robson), with the plain Edith (Christine Schuler), who is prone to complain, grudgingly invited to tag along. Edith will be the only girl who returns to the picnicking group, traumatised by something she can’t recall.

Once the girls are reported missing, a search is mounted involving police, local soldiers, and bloodhounds. When Sergeant Bumpher (Wyn Roberts) quizzes Michael Fitzhubert (Dominic Guard) who was on the rock picnicking with his parents, he recounts seeing the girls crossing a stream on their way up to higher ground. If this were a plot-driven murder mystery, his slightly confused statement would position him as a prime suspect, especially as we know that he’d slipped away to share a bottle with his stableman, Albert (John Jarratt) at the time and they’d discussed the girls in a ‘manly’ fashion.

Michael becomes obsessed with helping to solve the mystery and after receiving a vision in which Miranda appears to him in a ghostly manner and seems to become a swan—which is a recurring motif. Days after the disappearance, he sets out to trace the path he saw them following. He’s also affected by a disorientating supernatural force but finally finds Irma, still alive, barely. However, as with Edith, she will have no recollection of events that occurred during the lost time. The mystery only deepens and begins to affect everyone it has touched in different ways and there will be two suicides before the end credits roll.

A 10-minute short, inspired by the novel, had already been filmed as Picnic at Hanging Rock: The Day of Saint Valentine (1969) by Anthony Ingram, who was a 14-year-old at the time. Not a lot’s known about this project except it was made with the author’s blessing and perhaps played a part in hurrying along the sale of film rights to Australian TV actress Patricia Lovell in 1973, her first venture producing for feature films. She’d optioned the rights for a period of three months, with extension depending on the package for which Lindsay retained power of veto.

Peter Weir was hired to oversee the project along with the twins, Hal and Jim McElroy as co-producers who had already worked with Weir on his first two films, Homesdale (1971) and The Cars That Ate Paris (1974) which were both darkly satirical in tone. Lindsay considered herself a literary novelist and didn’t want to adapt her own book for the screen but approved Cliff Green for the task on the strength of his first draft. Cliff Green’s previous experience had been mainly writing for ABC television including a few popular crime series. Perhaps this is the reason Picnic at Hanging Rock feels like a crime mystery. Though a big portion of that mystery would be the suspense of working out what, if any, crime happens at all.

The strength of the film rests with its engrossing beauty tinged with a sinister fascination achieved through several factors that work together like the brushstrokes of a great painting. There’s meticulous attention to the mise-en-scène with plenty of relevant and period-correct details. These include references to the art that informed the production design, compositions and cinematography.

Cinematographer Russell Boyd, like many of the core crew, was transitioning from television work, having shot just two previous features, the drama Between Wars (1974) and the Jimmy Wang Yu martial arts vehicle The Man from Hong Kong (1975). He would go on to repeatedly collaborate with Peter Weir and win several prestigious accolades together including a ‘Best Cinematography’ BAFTA for Picnic at Hanging Rock, an accolade he later won again for Peter Weir’s Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003) for which he also won the Academy Award for ‘Cinematography’.

Drawing inspiration from the Australian impressionist painters of the Heidelberg School—particularly the work of Frederick McCubbin—taking cues from the colour palette, the softness of the brushwork and a certain idealised and sentimental response to the landscape. The paintings often included pioneer types or young men and women languishing in the shade of trees, sheltering from the blaze of sunlight that drains the landscape beyond of bold colours or hard-edged definition. Many of the paintings suggest narratives, which due to the nature of the medium remain unresolved. Some suggest something strange with figures occupying the same space, yet with a distance between them that implies they’re detached and perhaps unaware of each other. Maybe in different worlds or times while inhabiting the same landscape.

Another major painterly influence was “Flaming June”, considered a masterpiece of Victorian allegorical art, painted by Frederic Lord Leighton in 1895. A print of “Flaming June”—which in the period setting was the most popular and widely reproduced painting throughout the Commonwealth—is given a shot of its own at a narratively significant moment. The image shows a young woman wearing a flame orange, diaphanous gown, sound asleep and presumably dreaming in the brightness of a midsummer’s day. Its languid eroticism celebrates the beauty of feminine womanhood in its prime, unfettered by corsetry, her voluminous hair unbound.

Joan Lindsay, author of the source material, said that the core of the book presented itself one restless night as she lay in bed, drifting between sleep and wakefulness, between dream and reality. She wrote the first rough draft in one sitting the next day. Which goes some way to account for the consistent use of dream-logic in the narrative.

Picnic at Hanging Rock could be interpreted as the dream of a nation trying to heal a schism between the notion of a cultural self-image and the constraints of colonial-era Victorian society. Also grappling with its relationship to the vast and ancient landscape that still holds suppressed memories of an indigenous population disappeared from the land along with their ancient knowledge of its mysteries.

The absence of Aboriginal people is echoed by the disappearance of the girls. Hanging Rock has spiritual connections with Aboriginal culture, but the tribes who lived there and may have revered it as a significant site were removed by the colonial settlers. Even the indigenous name for the place has been lost in time, as if the history of Australia only began with the arrival of white settlers.

The excised final chapter of Joan Lindsay’s original manuscript plays more explicitly with the notion of a space between moments where time doesn’t exist. On the suggestion of her publisher, the final chapter was left out as the explanation was considered too strained in its attempt to provide closure or explain the events that surrounded the disappearances. The author recognised this as the stroke of genius it was and reworked some passages earlier in the text to subtly foreshadow the dénouement more poetically. The ‘lost’ chapter 18 was later revealed in the book The Secret of Hanging Rock, published in 1987 with analysis and commentaries by John Taylor, Yvonne Rousseau and Mudrooroo. It seems that Peter Weir may have had access to it though, as he visually quotes much of its imagery in the sequence when Irma reappears.

The finale is full of folk horror foreboding and its influence lingers in Robert Wynne-Simmons outstanding and similarly elusive, The Outcasts (1982), which relies on similarly ambiguous imagery and a haunting dénouement. Which, for me was much better conceived, without seeming as contrived, as the ending originally written by Lindsay for her novel.

The costumes in Picnic at Hanging Rock are period-authentic but when the outer, buttoned-up-tight outer garments are shed, then the linen lace and loose hair also channel the hippy vibe of the late-1960s when the book was written and the ’70s when the film was made. Perhaps a comment on changing times and modern values that still had plenty of room for improvement in terms of class and gender prejudices.

The impeccably curated music is a powerful tool used to create and maintain atmosphere and the dramatic score by Bruce Smeaton is deployed sparingly and comes in at opportune moments, notably during the ascent of the rock. There are also some classical pieces performed on the organ by Jenő Jandó. But the most haunting are the pan-pipe compositions written and performed by Romanian folk musician Gheorghe Zamfir, which weave through the dreamlike iconography of the movie.

Picnic at Hanging Rock is perhaps best approached as a profundo work of metafiction. The girls are trapped in a fixed moment that doesn’t change or end, like an insect trapped in amber, like a character trapped with the pages of a book. Or to extend that metaphor, the characters trapped in patterns of light and dark printed into the frames of a film that record sounds and movements that always play out the same way. A spiral slice of time replaying, ad infinitum.

We are left with a delectable and compelling mystery, often misunderstood but not easily forgotten. I am reminded of an old Sufi aphorism, quoted by Idries Shah in his influential book The Dermis Probe, published in 1970:

“A solved problem is as useful to the human mind as a broken sword on the battlefield.”

Following her death in 1984, Joan Lindsay was revered and valued enough as an author to have Mulberry Hill, her home where Picnic at Hanging Rock was dreamt of and written, preserved by the National Trust as a museum where personal effects and her writing room are on public display along with the art of her late husband Sir Ernest Daryl Lindsay.

In 1996, Picnic at Hanging Rock was voted the best Australian film of all time by a prestigious committee comprising members of the Australian Film Institute and the National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA), plus representatives of industry guilds and unions, film reviewers, critics, academics and media teachers. To celebrate Queen Elizabeth’s Platinum Jubilee in 2022, Joan Lindsay’s novel was included on the list of 70 books representing the best literature by Commonwealth authors.

AUSTRALIA | 1975 | 107 MINUTES (DIRECTOR’S CUT) • 115 MINUTES (THEATRICAL CUT) | 1.66:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

director: Peter Weir.
writer: Cliff Green (based on the novel by Joan Lindsay).
starring: Rachel Roberts, Vivean Gray, Helen Morse, Anne-Louise Lambert, Jane Vallis, Karen Robson, Christine Schuler & Dominic Guard.