Why “Picnic at Hanging Rock” is an alluring Antipodean classic

By Z.A.

THE STORY came to Joan Lindsay in a dream in 1966. She had holidayed at Hanging Rock as a child. The vivid and disturbing vision recurred for two weeks; she shut the door to her study and wrote it down, feverishly, through a cold winter. “Picnic at Hanging Rock” was released the following year, republished by Penguin in 1975 and reissued this year by Penguin Classics. The cult novel—the first in a thriving genre of “gone girls”—continues to beguile: it has been adapted into a new six-part miniseries.

Framed as a true story, the tale begins on Valentine’s Day in 1900 on the “well-trimmed lawns” of Appleyard College, an exclusive girls’ school nestled in the Australian bush outside Melbourne. The students are preparing for an educational trip to observe the geology of Mount Diogenes—or “Hanging Rock”—a former volcano. As their horse and carriage departs, Mrs Appleyard, the school’s steely headmistress, urges them to beware the dangers of the area. “The vicinity is renowned for its venomous snakes and poisonous ants,” she cautions. She has no idea, yet, that more menacing, intangible threats will cause the disappearance of four members of the party.

The moment of their vanishing is elided; as the hour draws near for the group’s return no trace of them can be found. Search teams are sent out and Aboriginal trackers enlisted. Miranda, Marion and Irma—who ventured up into the rock on that fateful day, along with their teacher Greta McGraw—have gone. Scraps of torn material lead to the eventual discovery of Irma, dehydrated, confused but unharmed, who has no recollection of the events. The others are never discovered. “Picnic at Hanging Rock” is a rare novel that refuses to provide a resolution to its central question (though after Lindsay’s death, and following intense public demand, a last chapter—better omitted, said her canny editor in the 1960s—was released in 1987.)

It was Patricia Lovell, a producer, who first thought that the dark subject matter and otherworldly natural landscape would work well on the big screen, and approached Lindsay for the rights. In 1975 the film was shot on location. Director Peter Weir honed in on the sinister ambivalence of this ancient rock amid the lush southern-Australian landscape; to capture the slow-moving, saturated quality of the text, Mr Weir approached Henri Cartier-Bresson, a French photojournalist known as a master of “candid photography”, for advice. The camera was draped in a thin sheet of bridal-veil fabric, which created an effect visually stunning in its softness. The film was widely praised for allowing the story to unfold in a nuanced, hypnotic manner.

The new adaptation departs from the gentle, hallucinatory tone of the film but poses fresh questions raised by Lindsay’s text. It spans six hours, so viewers are given (no spoilers) more answers than would be possible in a feature film. It takes a deeper dive into the psychology of the characters, both before and after the disappearance. The criminal history of Mrs Appleyard—a departure from the text but a shrewd one—is well evoked by a cool Natalie Dormer. The impact of the incident on the remaining teenagers, vulnerable and struggling to make sense of the incomprehensible, is slowly revealed. The claustrophobic atmosphere is similar to that in “The Crucible”.

This new iteration of “Picnic at Hanging Rock” offers a sharpened focus on female friendship and desire, but is most compelling in its approach to the book’s colonial subtext. The show’s depictions of lavish Victorian wealth are set alongside an ugly past the characters overlook. Mount Diogenes was occupied by indigenous tribes for thousands of years before British settlers forced these groups from the land; it is Appleyard College that Lindsay describes as “an architectural anachronism in the Australian bush – a hopeless misfit in time and space”. One of the scenes in the novel takes place at the garden party of a wealthy family; in the series, toasts are raised to the “united colonies” of Queen Victoria. Even within this “united” space clear divisions of class, race and gender abound.

Those divisions are made more significant by the casting of Madeleine Madden, an indigenous actress, as Marion (pictured). “I wonder if Marion’s more recent representation is meant to acknowledge the ‘Stolen Generations,’” says Rosemarie Miller, an associate lecturer at the University of Worcester, referring to the children of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders who were forcibly removed from their families and placed in government institutions from 1905 until around 1967. It gives the missing-child narrative at the story’s heart a revisionist poignancy that speaks to the present day. “In contemporary times, when children are separated from parents during border crossings, or filmed in war zones…society’s failure to protect reveals that the Gothic lies more within culture than wild nature,” she says.

In 2008 when Kevin Rudd, then Australia’s prime minister, issued an apology to the victims of the separations on behalf of the country’s parliament, many had died and so were unable to accept or reject the acknowledgement of wrongdoing. Their disappearance, and the lack of answers offered after so many years, was a disturbing reality with no neat conclusion. Lindsay’s tale derives its power from its own rejection of a resolution. It defies the old adage that the simplest explanation is often the correct one, and will continue to haunt readers for generations to come.