A dream within a dream: the spell that binds Picnic at Hanging Rock

This was published 4 years ago

A dream within a dream: the spell that binds Picnic at Hanging Rock

The original novel of Picnic at Hanging Rock, from the pen of Joan Lindsay, opens with this tantalising caveat: “Whether [this] is fact or fiction, my readers must decide for themselves; as the fateful picnic took place in the year 1900 and all the characters who appear in this book are long since dead, it hardly seems important.”

Well, Joan, we beg to differ.

A still from the television reboot of Picnic at Hanging Rock.Credit:Showcase

The heart of Picnic at Hanging Rock (Showcase, Sunday, 8.30pm, or on demand) pulses with that question, a was-it-or-wasn’t-it uncertainty that wavers between the very real physicality of the setting – the splendidly imposing Hanging Rock in Mount Macedon, Victoria – and the ethereal, almost fantasy-like mist of the story which gently overlays it.

This isn’t Peter Weir’s filmed Picnic at Hanging Rock, but make no mistake each is a masterpiece in its own right. The former a sensual fantasy of pan pipes and subcutaneous horror, the more recent reboot is more physically sexual story, but no less elusive in the understanding.

Each yearns to say a lot about sex and sensuality, about life and death, and about the connection between the wild and the tamed, the Australian outback and the strange sight a girl’s boarding school in the Victorian tradition has plonked in its midst. And each succeeds, in different and quite stunning ways.

The premise is largely unchanged from the original book: stentorian British headmistress Mrs Appleyard (Natalie Dormer) has opened a college for young ladies in the Victorian countryside and, on the occasion of Valentine’s Day, 1900, a party from the school sets out to enjoy a picnic in the looming shadow of Hanging Rock.

In the course of the afternoon, four members of the party – Miranda (Lily Sullivan), Marion (Madeleine Madden), Irma (Samara Weaving) and mathematics mistress Greta McCraw (Anna McGahan) – will vanish, and their disappearance will carve open this world like a gaping wound, fundamentally altering everything around them.

Dormer’s Hester Appleyard is younger than she seemed in the novel, and certainly younger than she was played in the Weir film by the brilliant Rachel Roberts, but in this iteration of Picnic at Hanging Rock Mrs Appleyard is also split open and repackaged as a more complex woman with a past.

As with most of the plot points of the novel (or indeed the film, which remains for many a definitive interpretation), the television series is bolder, quicker to exposition and braver in pushing into focus the details that perhaps were previously left smothered in ambiguity.

Lola Bessis, Yael Stone and Sibylla Budd round out the teaching staff, and Ruby Rees and Inez Curro play smaller, but pivotal, parts: Rees is Edith Horton, excluded from the school’s Mean Girls-seque social apex (and mysterious spared the fate of her fellow hikers) and Curro is Sara Waybourne, a girl excluded from the picnic by the cruel hand of Mrs Appleyard.

The magic of Picnic at Hanging Rock lies in the not knowing, a sort of withheld resolution that nudged other open-ended stories, such as Twin Peaks, from works of art to genuine masterpieces. And while this Picnic yearns to tell you more, it’s a tug of war you hope you will ultimately lose.

You do want to know more, but ultimately you do not. The mystery here is so much more potent than any resolution.