{"id":30755,"date":"2015-11-13T13:03:26","date_gmt":"2015-11-13T02:03:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nofibs.com.au\/?p=30755"},"modified":"2019-04-13T23:54:22","modified_gmt":"2019-04-13T13:54:22","slug":"hanging-on-a-red-herring-burgewords-reviews-picnicathangingrock","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/hanging-on-a-red-herring-burgewords-reviews-picnicathangingrock\/","title":{"rendered":"Hanging on a red herring: @burgewords reviews #PicnicAtHangingRock"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"SEEKING<\/a>

SEEKING RED HERRINGS Peter Weir’s 1975 film Picnic at Hanging Rock.<\/p><\/div>\n

The answer to what drew Miss McGraw to follow the girls up the rock that timeless afternoon was always there, it\u2019s just that others decided we were not prepared for it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

FORTY years since the premier of the Peter Weir film, it\u2019s time for Australians to realise that Picnic at Hanging Rock<\/i> has kept us completely fooled for five decades.<\/p>\n

This evocative screen mystery burst into our consciousness the same spring that the constitutional crisis of the last months of the Whitlam government left Australians in an altered state.<\/p>\n

The original novel by Joan Lindsay was similarly about the impact of sudden change. When three schoolgirls and a governess do not return from a commonplace picnic at a local beauty spot in 1900, the mechanics of shock and denial challenge the very foundation of knowledge.<\/p>\n

\"WHAT<\/a>

Helen Morse as Mlle de Poitiers and Vivean Gray as Miss McGraw.<\/p><\/div>\n

As French governess Mademoiselle de Poitiers farewells four of her charges wanting to explore the base of Hanging Rock, seeing Miranda turn away, she asserts: \u201cNow<\/i> I know\u201d. The only one who hears is mathematics teacher Greta McGraw, who replies: \u201cWhat<\/i> do you know?\u201d<\/p>\n

Mlle de Poitiers is happy to believe she has seen an angel by an old master, although Miss McGraw appears to have her eye on something far more attractive.<\/p>\n

Minutes earlier, this rational, scientific 45-year-old noticed her watch, like everyone else\u2019s, had stopped, right on midday. The picnickers are suddenly, and literally, out of time.<\/p>\n

This fictitious pre-Federation mystery perfectly captures modern Australia\u2019s struggle to form an identity, because the answer to what drew Miss McGraw to follow the girls up the rock that timeless afternoon was always there, it\u2019s just that others decided we were not prepared for it.<\/p>\n

A real-life disappearance occurred at another famous rock and challenged Australian identity all over again, when, on the night of August 17, 1980, baby Azaria Chamberlain was taken from her tent by a dingo at a campground near the base of Uluru – at that time known by its European name Ayer\u2019s Rock.<\/p>\n

\"EVILANGELS\"<\/a>It did not take long for the majority of Australians to decide this event was nothing more than a fanciful story, sprung from the imagination of Lindy, Azaria\u2019s mother, who was jailed for life for her daughter\u2019s murder.<\/p>\n

We were far more willing to cry murder than countenance the reality of predators in our landscape.<\/p>\n

Fred Schepisi\u2019s film of John Bryson\u2019s book on the Chamberlain case – Evil Angels<\/i> – outlined the dingo story and subsequently bombed at the Australian box office.<\/p>\n

We could barely look at the Evil Angels<\/i>, whereas the romantic never-to-return \u2018angels\u2019 of Picnic at Hanging Rock<\/i> we took to our hearts; but Australian cinema\u2019s \u2018new wave\u2019 success story rose on the back of a terrible cultural lie.<\/p>\n

Joan Lindsay complained of endless fan mail asking whether her story was based on fact, although I call her annoyance a dodge, because she brought all the attention on herself as soon as she allowed her publishers to lop off the last chapter of Picnic at Hanging Rock<\/i> before it was published in 1967.<\/p>\n

But her original Chapter Eighteen survived the butchering of editors: she entrusted it to her literary agent John Taylor in 1972, with strict instructions to publish it after her death.<\/p>\n

This he did in 1987, by which time a cult had grown around Lindsay\u2019s ruse. The twelve pages of Chapter Eighteen published in the booklet The Secret of Hanging Rock<\/i> were framed by tongue-in-cheek essays by Taylor (claiming that Lindsay\u2019s solution was \u201cunfilmable\u201d) and Yvonne Rousseau, a writer who\u2019d spent years sleuthing Lindsay\u2019s oeuvre.<\/p>\n

Despite the attention Lindsay\u2019s \u2018solution\u2019 received, it was not enough to challenge the trajectory of the film\u2019s success. A director\u2019s cut was released theatrically and on DVD, including a documentary in which not a single mention was made of Lindsay\u2019s Chapter Eighteen.<\/p>\n

Her long-concealed d\u00e9nouement quite matter-of-factly revealed the missing schoolgirls and their governess had undergone the kind of transformation common in Classical legends, although Lindsay had created a credible bridge between European myth and Aboriginal Dreaming.<\/p>\n

Other writers had attempted this earlier. Arguably the most famous was the fake Aboriginal Legend of the Three Sisters, the story of three Aboriginal women transformed into the famous rock formation by their \u2018witchdoctor\u2019 father, written by Sydney schoolgirl Patricia Stone in the 1930s<\/a> and subsequently sold by Katoomba\u2019s tourist industry as genuine Aboriginal legend.<\/p>\n

But Joan Lindsay avoided cultural appropriation. Instead, she allowed her large cast of European women to be themselves appropriated by a Dreaming entirely appropriate for an Australian story.<\/p>\n

They were happy to escape a life of corseting, cosseting and control.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Picnic at Hanging Rock<\/i> screenwriter Cliff Green identified one of the major themes in Lindsay\u2019s story as child abuse, and once the women do not return, the checks and balances of a \u2018proper\u2019 education gradually do reveal the physical and emotional weaponry of British headmistress Mrs Appleyard.<\/p>\n

\"DREAMING<\/a>

Peter Weir’s 1975 film Picnic at Hanging Rock.<\/p><\/div>\n

The missing schoolgirls and their governess, then, were not victims of crime or whisked away unwillingly. They were happy to escape a life of corseting, cosseting and control.<\/p>\n

\u201cI can hardly wait,\u201d star maths student Marion Quade says in Chapter Eighteen, anticipating her chance to shuffle off the twentieth century and follow her transformed maths teacher Miss McGraw \u201cwithout a backward glance\u201d.<\/p>\n

Marion\u2019s escape route comes straight out of 1960s notions of Aboriginal Dreaming, atmosphere that undoubtedly challenged the original publishers into such a severe deletion. Far more preferable for daughters of the Empire to disappear into thin air than be seen to delight in a spiritual transition well known by the nation\u2019s first people.<\/p>\n

The edit allowed Joan Lindsay\u2019s fact-fiction flim-flam to become the focus of the book and film\u2019s success, and even though all along she knew she\u2019d not written a mysterious disappearance, she played her part very well by suggesting the audience decide what was true and what wasn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Fans and detractors rushed to pore over the archives and trample across Hanging Rock, well off the scent of a simple look into Lindsay\u2019s education at a Melbourne ladies\u2019 boarding school.<\/p>\n

It was Terence O\u2019Neill in a 2009 La Trobe Journal<\/em> essay Joan Lindsay: A time for everything<\/a> who proposed that Lindsay can hardly have been unaware of her alma mater\u2019s move from Melbourne to Woodend, close to Hanging Rock, in 1919, after her graduation; and, far more interestingly, the account in the school magazine of a Miss McGraw, teacher at the school in Lindsay\u2019s time, who led the twilight expedition to Hanging Rock that inspired forty years of annual picnics and the telling of ghost stories on the way home.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also enlightening to analyse the corporal punishments Lindsay portrayed in detail – those that inspire adolescent fantasies about escaping the control of disciplinary adult paradigms – when seeking the real seeds of Picnic at Hanging Rock<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Missing corsets and stockings, a maths governess seen climbing Hanging Rock availed of her skirt, and the discovery of one of the missing girls, are all clues in both book and film, but they remain the worst kind of red herrings without Chapter Eighteen.<\/p>\n

Another red herring is the sound of Pan pipes played by Gheorghe Zamfi on the soundtrack, evoking the old Greco-Roman gods of different land altogether.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s probably un-Australian of me, but I call for a remake.<\/p>\n

\"JOAN,<\/a>

Joan Lindsay\u00a0(1896-1984).<\/p><\/div>\n

Pan pipes would easily be replaced by a well-known Aboriginal wind instrument; and doubtless there is much to learn from the Wurundjeri nation, traditional owners of Hanging Rock, the rock formation they were dispossessed of in the 1840s.<\/p>\n

Joan Lindsay\u2019s literary stock-in-trade was time. I can\u2019t imagine her not approving of a reappearance of Miranda, Marion and Miss McGraw in an episode of Doctor Who<\/i>, or at least a mash-up adaptation like Pride and Prejudice<\/i> and Zombies.<\/i><\/p>\n

The Northern Territory legal system took thirty years to come to terms with the facts about the dingoes that preyed on Azaria Chamberlain. Surely in that time we have grown enough to cope with Aboriginal Dreaming in one of our greatest novels?<\/p>\n

As Gough Whitlam famously affirmed in 1972, ushering in the government that would transform the lifeless Australian film industry, led by Lindsay\u2019s big-screen icon: \u201cIt\u2019s time\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u00a9 Michael Burge, all rights reserved. This article also appears on his blog<\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The answer to what drew Miss McGraw to follow the girls up the rock that timeless afternoon was always there, it\u2019s just that others decided we were not prepared for it. FORTY years since the premier of the Peter Weir film, it\u2019s time for Australians to realise that Picnic at Hanging Rock has kept us […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":30762,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[3434,1542,585,2474,854],"tags":[2800,2804,2806,2258,2810,2802,2808,2812,2805,2813,2803,2801,2809,2811,2807],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/PICNIC-2.jpg?fit=799%2C400&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3t0mw-803","jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30755"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30755"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30755\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30762"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30755"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30755"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30755"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}