• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

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:

View attachment 76438

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.'
Click to expand...
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 -
#1,362
#1,360
#1,346
#1,345


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.
Click to expand...
 
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.
Click to expand...
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.
Click to expand...
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.
Click to expand...

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.
 
Last edited:
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.
Click to expand...

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.
Click to expand...

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!
Click to expand...
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.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top