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Picnic At Hanging Rock

Steven said:
I got a similar feeling (one that, surely, the artist intended to convey) when seeing the controversial Landseer painting Man Proposes, God Disposes:

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Wikipedia: 'Man Proposes, God Disposes is an 1864 oil-on-canvas painting by Edwin Landseer. The work was inspired by the search for Franklin's lost expedition which disappeared in the Arctic after 1845. The painting is in the collection of Royal Holloway, University of London, and is the subject of superstitious urban myth that the painting is haunted.'
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We have discussed the painting, its artist and the students' superstition around it before.

Here are some of my previous mentions if anyone's interested -
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Landseer was a national hero of an artist and sculptor whose every work was devoured in prints and engravings by an adoring public.

He has been mentioned several times on this very forum, notably in the context of his 'haunted' painting displayed at Royal Holloway College, University of London.

Safe and informative The Conversation link -

Man Proposes, God Disposes

Landseer's mental health was never good. Its deterioration, or his impulse to express it, is seen in his art, which moved from depictions of adorable puppies through mighty stags and stallions to polar bears devouring lost explorers.
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I just thought I'd chip in to say that these days, Hanging Rock has lost most of its atmosphere to excessive tourism. We live not far from the spot and visit there occasionally, usually to show visitors around. We were last there a couple of months ago with Mrs S's Rotary Exchange Student.

Nowadays there is a toll gate at the entrance - you have to pay to get in. You then drive up to a large car park near the overpriced cafe and the Visitor Centre, which is a large and rather ugly concrete building. There are sealed walkways all the way up the hill and visitors are encouraged to stay on the paths.

So you jostle your way up through the crowds, like cows being herded to the milking sheds.

Once you get to the top there are still some great views, if you can push your way to the front of the gawking mob. But there's not a lot of atmosphere.
 
Salmonellus said:
I just thought I'd chip in to say that these days, Hanging Rock has lost most of its atmosphere to excessive tourism. We live not far from the spot and visit there occasionally, usually to show visitors around. We were last there a couple of months ago with Mrs S's Rotary Exchange Student.

Nowadays there is a toll gate at the entrance - you have to pay to get in. You then drive up to a large car park near the overpriced cafe and the Visitor Centre, which is a large and rather ugly concrete building. There are sealed walkways all the way up the hill and visitors are encouraged to stay on the paths.

So you jostle your way up through the crowds, like cows being herded to the milking sheds.

Once you get to the top there are still some great views, if you can push your way to the front of the gawking mob. But there's not a lot of atmosphere.
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What a shame that commercialisation has robbed the location of its mystique.
That's happened to so many places, including world heritage sites.
 
Salmonellus said:
I just thought I'd chip in to say that these days, Hanging Rock has lost most of its atmosphere to excessive tourism. We live not far from the spot and visit there occasionally, usually to show visitors around. We were last there a couple of months ago with Mrs S's Rotary Exchange Student.

Nowadays there is a toll gate at the entrance - you have to pay to get in. You then drive up to a large car park near the overpriced cafe and the Visitor Centre, which is a large and rather ugly concrete building. There are sealed walkways all the way up the hill and visitors are encouraged to stay on the paths.

So you jostle your way up through the crowds, like cows being herded to the milking sheds.

Once you get to the top there are still some great views, if you can push your way to the front of the gawking mob. But there's not a lot of atmosphere.
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Sounds like Land's End here in Cornwall although thankfully there is still unspoilt Cape Cornwall where you can get the atmosphere of being at the end of the land and surrounded on three sides by ocean.
 
sherbetbizarre said:
After it was proved the book wasn't historically accurate, the author maintained it was based on a truth... but wasn't more forthcoming than that.
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Actually, I think I get this.

Although definitely not unique to Australia the lost-child trope is a pretty deep-seated one in Australian culture, with its genesis way back in the history of European settlement. There’s a fair amount of literature on the subject, and some writers see in the general ‘lost in the landscape’ context a resonance with more recent anxieties – like, for instance, child welfare abuses, especially those connected to things like the forced adoption scandal and the child migrant program. It also ties up with another motif: the ‘white vanishing’ trope - a powerful narrative that seems to have found its most recent expression in the current explosion of Bush or Outback Noir (some of it very good, by the way). It’s also hard not to see resonances with some of Australia’s most notorious criminal cases: The Beaumont Children, the Adeleide Oval abductions, Azaria Chamberlein.

I’ve always been fascinated by our relationship with both our natural and our built environment – specifically, our common assumptions about those relationships, and our place within them. My personal opinion – to echo something from my previous post – is that nature is an apex predator. Thankfully, if our relationship with it remains on an even keel, then it generally spends most of its time sleeping. But if once you assume your ascendency within the relationship, you are – by the time you realise the error of your ways - likely to find yourself already well within its maw. Even a relatively gentle landscape can turn on you – start adding more lethal environmental factors and the potential increases exponentially.

But beyond this there are certain landscapes that I think of as a sort of as a sort of super-apex; inherently very dangerous, but made more deadly by a proximity to relative concentrations of human population. I have a feeling that Australia may be one of the broadest geographical examples of this in the developed world – a place where, for a significant portion of the population, ‘Here be Monsters’ or ‘Ne plus ultra’ might be best written - not in the middle of ocean charts, or at the end of the known world - but on the battered road signs leading out of town.

I’ve read recently somewhere the phrase ‘nonspecific evil’ in relationship to the atmosphere of Picnic at Hanging Rock. I’m not entirely sure that the word ‘evil’ works for me, although at the same time I totally understand what the writer is trying to describe. Personally, I’d describe it as an almost Lovecraftian cosmic horror, but without the ‘evil’ agency, which tends to be applied because of our utter inability to fathom the overarching power and annihilative indifference of nature. I think the very fact that it’s difficult to name or describe makes it somehow terrifying. The idea of ‘nameless terror’ is something of a horror cliché, and I’m not sure most people really examine what it means; personally, I think the concept has more relevance to a movie like Picnic at Hanging Rock than it does in regard to the general output of the Horror genre.

For what it’s worth, I’ve always approached Picnic at Hanging Rock as kind of dark fairy tale, the best of which are always informed by some sort of truth - and although factors like lost innocence and sexual awakening may play a role, in the end it’s about the land itself and our place within it.
 
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Spookdaddy said:
Personally, I’d describe it as an almost Lovecraftian cosmic horror, but without the ‘evil’ agency, which tends to be applied because of our utter inability to fathom the overarching power and annihilative indifference of nature.
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Oh, yes!

I think the suppressed last chapter, with it's dreamtime-esque imagery, highlights this wonderfully.
 
Frideswide said:
Your post has encouraged me to find a copy on Audible! Thank you.
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I have to admit that, although I have watched the movie somewhat more recently, it's so many years now since I read the book that when I think about Picnic At Hanging Rock I suspect my memory is something of an amalgamation of both, rather than one or the other.

I'm going to have to read the book again now, aren't I. My first reading was of a borrowed copy way back at university - so I'll have to hit the shops.

This place costs me a small fortune!
 
Spookdaddy said:
I have to admit that, although I have watched the movie somewhat more recently, it's so many years now since I read the book that when I think about Picnic At Hanging Rock I suspect my memory is something of an amalgamation of both, rather than one or the other.

I'm going to have to read the book again now, aren't I. My first reading was of a borrowed copy way back at university - so I'll have to hit the shops.

This place costs me a small fortune!
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I watched the film back a year or two ago and it was somehow less powerful than I remembered it. Maybe in the context of the time - first saw it maybe a year or two after it came out when it was first on TV - it seemed more impactful than it actually is. But like you, I know I read the novel as well, years ago (will have been a library book so I don't still have it) and also can't recall what was book and what was movie, even though I re-watched the movie in recent years.

Maybe need to watch again!

Same phenomenon has happened to me with novels. Something I remember as really powerful and impactful, I re-read years later and it's just "Meh". I suppose we change, a lot more than we realise.

The over-all idea of that film though, the people lost in the landscape, is incredibly evocative.
 
Frideswide said:
how on earth can it be the 50th anniversary?????
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Do you remember when it was first on TV? There were lots of lingering shots of the pretty young teenage girls.

It looked to me as if they were being set up for unspecified but undoubtedly sexual unpleasantness.
 
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Interviews with director Peter Weir and Anne Louise Lambert (the film's Miranda) here:

"There have been times in my life when I thought the film was a load of fluff, like a shampoo commercial. About 10 years ago, Indigenous groups started objecting to it – which I understand, when the history of the rock is so much greater – and I decided not to talk about the film. But I recognise it’s got this extraordinary life force that keeps it going. I’m a psychotherapist now, and it has this Jungian aspect in the unsolved mystery: the exploration of society’s shadow side, all the murky stuff that is brought up when the girls disappear."

How we made Picnic at Hanging Rock ~
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/feb/17/peter-weir-how-we-made-picnic-at-hanging-rock
 
While recently reading some background on another Australian film, I came across the following quote:

…(an atmosphere) of general foreboding that crystalizes often enough into particular terror and that is not quite like anything else I can remember feeling at the movies. Certain science-fiction films come closest to it, especially those in which some evil alien presence has taken over a community that to all outward appearances remains normal—with only the slightest most fugitive hint that something somehow is hideously wrong…
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I thought it wast interesting how easily parts of that statement might be applied to Picnic at Hanging Rock, and yet the film they were actually written about – Wake in Fright – appears, at least on the surface, to be very different indeed.

I say 'on the surface' because, although the films are very different, I’m not sure that some of the anxieties involved are unconnected. Wake In Fright is very much about disappearing, but in a moral and psychological sense, rather than a physical one – and seems, in some ways, to apply itself to the white vanishing trope I mentioned in a previous post.

I’d recommend the movie. Caused quite a controversy in Australia when it was released, I believe. Possibly still does.
 
There are probably lots of common 'threads' between the two films, but these are perhaps quite subtle and appear merely like 'background' compared to the films' developing stories. My own guess: a seemingly minor part of the fear caused by the atmosphere is that both overall plots suggest the emotional chaos/anarchy that might issue from a breakdown in *civility* - not only does the lack of control unnerve us but also the brutal or ever-imminent ending of innocence both literal and figurative. The tension of this is always there, and increasing (the Turn of the Screw indeed).
 
For reference: There was a recent remake of Wake In Fright (which I think is available on Amazon Prime). In my opinion, it doesn't really pack anything like the same punch as the original film.
 
Spooks: The 'disappearing' you mentioned is to me akin to 'loss' - a similar spirit of a loss of control, and the frightening results (and vision of the future, so to speak), as in Lord of the Flies perhaps.
 
I watched the film today, in the Home cinema in Manchester. I think it was the first time I had seen it in about 20 years.

It really is a singular work, by an immensely talented film maker. It wasn't Peter Weir's first feature film (I am quite fond of his debut, the now somewhat forgotten "The Cars That Ate Paris") but it was the film which announced him to an international audience. It is a pity he seems to have retired now - several older directors are still working.

It is interesting to note that when Weir made a Director's Cut of the film, he made it shorter than the original version. I agree with Roger Ebert (in a typically excellent and perceptive review) that he must have done this to increase the sense of mystery.

https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-picnic-at-hanging-rock-1975

On reading about Rachel Roberts, I couldn't help being struck by the manner of her death:

"Her gardener found her body on her kitchen floor, lying amidst shards of glass; she had fallen through a decorative glass divide between two rooms."

Spoiler alert: A spooky similarity to the death of the girl she prevented from going on the picnic and had a bit of a thing about..
 
Nothing profound to add, but I did like the film and thought it had a nice mysterious and unique vibe ,and I also liked The Last Wave which I believe was his next film....which also had a nice eerie feel to it.
 
John Fairclough71 said:
On reading about Rachel Roberts, I couldn't help being struck by the manner of her death:
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When they talk of "hell-raising" actors, it's usually men but Rachel Roberts was in that category, for sure!

She is polite and pleasant in an interview she gave for Picnic but there are some lurid anecdotes on the commentary-track!

The young Weir did well to manage her, as well as he did, though he makes sure we all know that the hideous wig was her own idea, as she disdained the one created for the original actor! :)
 
JamesWhitehead said:
When they talk of "hell-raising" actors, it's usually men but Rachel Roberts was in that category, for sure!

She is polite and pleasant in an interview she gave for Picnic but there are some lurid anecdotes on the commentary-track!

The young Weir did well to manage her, as well as he did, though he makes sure we all know that the hideous wig was her own idea, as she disdained the one created for the original actor! :)
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I thought that too. Weir was only 30 when he made "Picnic At Hanging Rock". Aside from how confidently he handled the material, I imagine Rachel Roberts could be a challenge as well.

I must try to watch the documentary about the making of the film.
 
Margaret Nelson, the young actress who played tragic Sara, has always refused to speak about the film or to participate in any cast reunions.

It has been suggested that her voice was dubbed without her knowledge or consent and she was angry with Weir.

Watching the film, it is obvious that some of the girls voices are dubbed (Weir cast the girls for their appearance and without any regard to acting ability), although this was only confirmed about 30 years after the film was made. None of the voiceover artists were credited.

Eventually Barbara Llewellyn broke cover and said she voiced Edith, including her famous scream. She sounded quite bitter that Weir had never publicly acknowledged her or the other voice artists, one of whom presumably dubbed Sara.

IMDB lists several other credits for Margaret Nelson (including 99 episodes of "The Young Doctors"), the last being in 1979. Presumably she then quit acting.

To add to the sense of mystery around "Picnic At Hanging Rock", her current whereabouts are unknown.
 
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