Once voted the best Australian film of all time, Picnic at Hanging Rock, Peter Weir’s 1975 film adaptation of the 1967 novel by Joan Lindsey, might seem, on the surface, an unconventional choice for a cinematic national treasure. Light on plot and vague in its explanations, it’s a film of woozy, art-house strangeness. But the dream-like imagery and the mystery at its core cast a spell over viewers, and it became a key film of Australian New Wave cinema, helping drive forward a postwar cinematic boom. Fifty years on, both the novel and its cinematic sibling endure. Echoes of the film’s distinct style can be found in everything from the films of Sofia Coppola to the fashion of Valentino, and even Gen Z’s ultra-feminine “coquette” fashion trend.
Set in 1900 at an elite girls’ boarding school in a remote corner of Australia, the story feels both specific and strangely timeless: a glimpse into a fleeting moment long gone, when Australia was still new to its colonisers and the larger world had so much to be discovered. Opening on Valentine’s Day, the pupils at the school – an anachronistic, grand Victorian manor set in the outback – are dizzy with excitement at the prospect of a picnic on nearby natural monolith Hanging Rock. But this excitement is short-lived when three of the girls, and teacher Miss McCraw, mysteriously vanish while exploring. Though one, Irma, is later discovered alive by local boys Albert and Mike, their disappearances begin a chain of tragic events.
Lindsay’s book is brilliant in its weirdness. From the start, it envelops the reader with an all-knowing atmosphere of impending doom, inviting us to accept that there are mysteries we cannot comprehend. The film is one of those rare adaptations that remains uncannily faithful to the book, without being reductive. It’s unusual to find the atmosphere of a novel captured onscreen; dialogue is lifted almost verbatim, and reading it after watching the film makes it difficult to entangle what has been seen, and what has been read on the page. It’s only towards the end of the novel where book and film diverge, with the novel ramping up the tragedy and melodrama and pulling the threads of various subplots together. The film prefers to say less, to keep things simple.
The “exquisite languor” the novel describes, the textures on the page, translate perfectly to the screen – the film has lingered in our cultural imaginations in no small part due to its seductive aesthetic, its iconic visual language. The opening scenes are a riot of young girls lacing themselves into white corsets, surrounded by surfaces laden with trinkets. Miranda, one of the young women who goes missing, is described lovingly as a “Botticelli angel”. They’re almost smothered with girlish stuff – roses and cards and pressed flowers, all tastefully soft-lit. Yet under it all, there’s a menacing sense of simmering passion. There’s something febrile in the way the girls flock around each other, the unselfconsciousness with which tragic young orphan Sara Waybourne recites a love poem for Miranda. Modesty might dictate that they can only remove their gloves, due to the heat, once they’ve passed through the nearest town, but there’s no placidity here, under the layers of frippery.
Light floods every scene (until, in some of the grim final scenes, it doesn’t). Golden and diffuse, deceptively gentle at times, it has a painterly quality. This isn’t surprising, given the cinematography takes inspiration from the Australian impressionists of the late 1800s such as Arthur Streeton and Tom Roberts, who portrayed the same kinds of surroundings that the girls would have moved through in hazy, shimmering brushstrokes. Corsets and long skirts, stockings and boots are woefully inadequate for an Australian summer, but shots of the girls lounging on baking rocks, or half-hidden by luscious ferns, are visually startling and lovely as well as historically accurate.
As in many of these pictures, the contrast between these artificial refinements, and the landscape they’re placed in, is jarring. Beyond the school and the surroundings of the rock are lawn parties, where a band plays “God Save the Queen” and the guests drink champagne. These colonial trappings seem more than faintly absurd in the arid and mysterious surroundings. Meanwhile, back at the rock they cut into a heart-shaped Valentine’s Day cake that would seem more at home at a child’s birthday party, iced exuberantly and bursting at the seams. It is soon forgotten, swarmed by ants. Symbolism like this abounds: nature, despite attempts to colonise and tame it, is full of mysteries we can’t even imagine – and arrogance can only lead to a downfall.
The strange mix of unfamiliar nature and beribboned girlhood, enchant and disorient viewers. The experience of watching it is easy to submit to, as the sounds and images wash over the audience. Dialogue is spoken as if characters are in a trance, or reciting a prophecy. “What we see, and what we seem, is but a dream: a dream within a dream,” a languorous voiceover intones at the start. The fragile pan pipes of the soundtrack lull us further. But there’s a hallucinogenic shift when the girls reach the rock – the music building, synths operatic and soaring, as they leave their recognisable world behind, and we are plunged into the realm of the unknowable for the rest of the film.
This central unknowability is compelling: not just the mystery of the missing girls, but both the film and the novel’s attempts to grapple with a larger sense of the incomprehensibility of nature’s vastness, and our relative tininess within the universe. Time is so flimsy; throughout the film and the book, the stopping of clocks is a regular motif. Irma comments, dreamily, on how the faraway people on the ground look like “ants” from their vantage point on the rock, and how “a surprising number of human beings are without purpose”. Unfathomable patterns are set in place, they are merely pawns within them. But they don’t seem to be alarmed; Miranda, the enigmatic centre of their group, even seems to be prepared for her fate somehow, hinting to Sara that she will be gone soon, and murmuring, on the rock itself, “Everything begins and ends at exactly the right time and place.”
Girlhood then, in the film, is both a place of innocence and a place of tragic possibility. I felt it too, as a teenager living with one foot in the day-to-day life of rural Wales, and another in a dreamy universe of my own making, of all-consuming friendships, albeit with diaries and mixtapes in place of the pressed flowers and Valentine’s cards strewn around the opening scenes of the film. In fields and school corridors I was often bored, but sometimes had the eerie, prickly feeling that there was more to the universe than met the eye. The girls who go missing do not seem quite of this world, with the preternatural beauty of cherubim and their strange, distant statements on time and human nature. Maybe it is this which allows them to vanish into thin air, some kind of receptiveness to mysteries beyond human comprehension. But there’s no escaping a more prosaic kind of girlhood, the trappings of their social status as elegant young women-in-training. The vanishings grip the community around the school because of the beauty and youth of the girls. When Irma is found, the doctor assures the adults that she is “intact”; Mrs Appleyard is surprised at the vanishing of Miss McCraw, thinking her “masculine intellect” would surely render her immune to any mysterious silliness. Such an environment of repression is a perfect setting for hysteria to take hold.
Perhaps it’s this acknowledgement of girlhood’s complexity that appeals to young women more than anything else in the film. When Irma returns to say goodbye to her friends she isn’t greeted with love, but with a sullenness that erupts into hysterical violence, the girls descending upon her as if to tear her to shreds. On one hand, girlhood is ribbons and ruffles. On the other it’s viciousness and strangeness. It contains an energy, always under the surface, that can’t be repressed forever. Anyone who’s ever been a teenage girl, or met one, can attest to that. The tension bubbles throughout the novel and film, and finally breaks through, with devastating effects.
With everything falling apart, the film that started drenched in such sunny radiance tips into pure nightmare. Hints of psychedelia become stronger and more twisted, the colours grow darker. Mrs Appleyard descends into her own vortex of cruelty and madness, and the sense of claustrophobia as things crumble spectacularly is all the more powerful given how happy the earlier scenes were. One of the final images of the film – Mrs Appleyard sitting dressed in a lavish funeral outfit, the photographic negative of the white lace gowns elsewhere in the film, manic eyes fixed on an indeterminate point ahead of her – is deeply unsettling. Like the ants devouring the cake, there’s a nastiness under the surface niceness of civilisation.
One way to keep people invested in a mystery, enchanted by it, is to keep it very much as a mystery – we never find out what happened to the girls, either in the film or in the original edition of the novel. When an “excised” chapter offering concrete explanations was published in 1987, the reaction was largely negative (I’ve read it; I wouldn’t recommend it). Rewatching it, I was reminded of how fervently readers on social media have taken to the novel I Who Have Never Known Men, another story without a neat conclusion, in which the appeal is in the untangling of the universe’s mysteries rather than a neat plot. Narrative-wise, there’s always something appealing about a mystery we can feverishly speculate over ourselves. Perhaps it’s best to leave some of them unsolved, with the beauty being in what’s unknown, and in the interpretations that spring up around them.
[See also: There is no contemporary fiction]
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