PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK

I didn't sleep for days. Just thinking about the film made me quake, tears stinging my eyes. When I tried to watch the film again a year or so later, I ended up on the floor, my hands over my eyes, shaking. Something about this film frightened me on a deep, unexplainable level, and even though I have now seen it more times than I can count, know almost every frame of it as intimately as any film, it still frightens me, still makes me want to crawl into a ball and hide, still makes me feel the weight of an unknown world suffocating me. And yet, I can't take my eyes away from it. I've never been able to shake it. Ever.

Its premise has become so ubiquitously a part of Australian mythology that the question persists whether it is fact or fiction - on Valentine's Day in 1900, three schoolgirls and a teacher from a nearby ladies' college disappear on a picnic to Hanging Rock. It isn't just that no trace of them can be found in the immediate aftermath or that any logical explanation can be offered, but that in the following weeks, further events transpire to make the mystery of their disappearance even more inexplicable. In truth, it's very unlikely that Lindsay's story is based on hard fact, but even knowing this, it's hard to fully accept that to be truly the case. Many don't. Something about it feels real, like it's putting into words something we all collectively know but are too afraid to admit to ourselves. It's a story that feels stranger than fiction, even though fiction is very likely what it is.

That quality is in Lindsay's masterpiece and Peter Weir's masterpiece. Though we know, logically, that we are seeing actors in costumes, and there are many aesthetic choices in the filmmaking that seem to remind us of its unreality, it somehow feels like reality preserved - not in a documentary sense, but in the sense that the images themselves are alive, that like the Rock, the film is a sentient, living, breathing thing, patient and hungry. Watching 'Picnic at Hanging Rock', I can't shake the feeling that the film is watching me back.

While the narrative is intriguing enough, you realise quickly into 'Picnic' that the mystery at its heart is far from its point. The opening lines of dialogue make that clear, Miranda (Anne-Louise Lambert) in narration quoting Edgar Allan Poe, that "What we see and what we see are but a dream, a dream within a dream." This frames the film within the realm of the subconscious, that what will lead Weir and his collaborators will be subtextual rather than textual, an adherence to true dream logic.

In an interview related to his 1988 stop-motion film 'Alice', acclaimed Czech filmmaker Jan Švankmajer remarked that a "dream, as an expression of our unconscious, uncompromisingly pursues the realisation of our most secret wishes without considering rational and moral inhibitions, because it is driven by the principle of pleasure". If we take the inverse of a dream, that of a nightmare, and apply the same logic to it, then a nightmare expresses the fears and paranoias hidden within our subconscious. Perhaps a way to think of 'Picnic at Hanging Rock' (in all its iterations but especially with Weir's film) is that of a national nightmare, dragging the darkest elements of our collective subconscious and rendering them flesh in the form of a white Australian colonial mystery.

'Picnic' is a film of incongruities and absences. There are the incongruities in the narrative - details that don't line up, bizarre slips in time and space, objects disappearing and reappearing, relationships shifting and breaking down. And there are absences, the most notable being the girls themselves, and the complete lack of explanation for how and why they have disappeared in the first place. Those incongruities and absences also extend to the visual language of the film, something that Weir and cinematographer Russell Boyd relish in. Much like the Rock having erupted in the middle of a flat plain, the presence of Victorian British society is often placed in strange, almost humorous contrast to the wilds of the Australian bush. Appleyard College feels completely out of place in its surroundings, a great British ship that seems to have grounded itself in the middle of a paddock by accident. The Fitzhuberts, an aristocratic family whose nephew Michael (Dominic Guard) will become integral to the story, take their tea in the bush in full formal regalia, in defiance of how illogical this is with the terrain and the heat. We are constantly presented with images of things being where they should not, civilisation persisting in places where it has no reason or right to be.

It's important that 'Picnic' occurs in 1900, the year before Federation in 1901. Australia is still a British colony, and thus those occupying these lands saw themselves as being on British soil, whether the soil itself complied with this or not. This accounts for why the image of the girls climbing the Rock, in white lace blowing in the wind, is such an arresting one. They are careless tourists, and as they climb, they shed their uniform of British civilised decorum, as if they are leaving their old world behind in preparation for whatever is ahead of them. When they look down at the picnic below and Marion (Jane Vallis) remarks, "A surprising number of human beings are without purpose, though it is probable that they are performing some function unknown to themselves," it could almost be the Rock itself speaking through her.

However, the absence that fascinates and haunts me the most in 'Picnic at Hanging Rock' is the almost complete absence of First Nations characters in the film, with the exception of a tracker who helps in the search (and who isn't even listed in the credits for the film). Most of the Australian canon fails to mention the people who have lived here for over 65,000 years, but rather than a sin by omission, in the case of 'Picnic', I wonder whether that omission is purposeful. They may not be physically present, but as time has gone on and the film has grown richer, their thematic presence grows. The relationship our First Nations people have with the landscape of this country is deeper and more complex than colonial culture and language can possibly explain, and extends back further than our colonial minds can comprehend - much like the Rock itself. By their absence, they are thunderously conspicuous.

The major event of the film sees three girls and a teacher, all white, all of European descent, being consumed by an ancient presence at the height of British rule of this country. So much of Australian Gothic storytelling returns to this idea, that of white people disappearing in the Australian landscape. It's as if we live in constant paranoia that the land which we occupy is out to get us, out for revenge, and that when the moment comes, we will be powerless to stop it and unable to explain it. Even with so many similar colonial myths, 'Picnic' remains the most potent.

With the (I think) pointed absence of First Nations presence in the book and subsequently the film, the specific date on which the film takes place, the return again and again to the absurdity of British culture forcing itself on the Australian landscape and the persistent, unending feeling that whatever force exists subconsciously in the film is alive and furious, I wonder whether the nightmare this "expression of our unconscious" is rendering speaks to our collective colonial paranoia that we know we do not belong here, that our presence on this land and our insistence on wiping away its spiritual and cultural history is an act of assault, and that the land itself, intrinsically linked to those people who have been here long before that upstart little island in the Northern Hemisphere was barely a functioning society, that the land itself will enact its revenge upon us. Miranda, Irma, Marion and Miss McCraw, in their corsets and flowing dresses, with their white skin and delicate natures, are symbols of the British Empire, and in response to their presence, Hanging Rock, this ancient monolith on a country so ancient that we don't know its name, swallows them alive and wipes them from the face of the earth.

"Waiting a million years... just for us."

In the many years I have been watching this film, talking about it, writing about it, arguing about it, dreaming about it, wrestling with it, this is what I have come to explain the infernal mechanics of it. I have no scholarship to back it up, no articles to link to, no evidence other than what I see and what I feel, what I see and what I seem. It may be completely wrong or misguided or a product of my own white guilt, but ones relationship with this film can only ever be personal. We'll never fully understand it, and every piece of evidence and every story of its creation just makes its mystery all the deeper. You can watch all two hours of the excellent making-of documentary 'A Dream Within A Dream', and you still won't fully understand it. You can even read the legendary deleted chapter from the book where Lindsay actually recounts the moment of disappearance, and you'll (deliciously) understand it even less. The best any of us can do is try and find the words for what it says to us individually, and what it says to me is that this great myth of Colonial Australia is an expression of our great colonial nightmare, our collective guilt for what we have done and our shared paranoia that the crimes of the past one day will, and must be, answered for.

And this isn't even addressing how the film speaks to female sexuality, the oppressive nature of the education system, arguments around class and privilege, male fantasies around female purity, the fetishising of young women and generational trauma.

This is what makes 'Picnic at Hanging Rock', I think, the finest film this country has produced, based on the finest novel this country has produced. It's a bottomless well, deep and dark, so rich in ideas and provocations while utterly refusing to ever explain itself. Each time we watch it, we are lowered down into it, so deep that all light ceases to exist and we are left in the dark, cold and shivering and alone, convinced that the dark around us is full of unseen eyes, unseen hands, the haunted whispers and laughs of young female voices, threatening to gently take us and pull us into the abyss where they have wandered, missing, for over a hundred years.

Time has stopped. And I am still fourteen years old, sitting in the dark in my grandmother's 100-year-old Queenslander, staring at the television, unable to move, unable to breathe, staring into Hell.

"Everything begins and ends at exactly the right time and place."