10-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Picnic at Hanging Rock at 50: how a low-budget whodunnit became a cultural juggernaut
Half a century after it landed in cinemas, the extent of Picnic at Hanging Rock's enduring legacy seems both astonishing and improbable.
This half-a-million-dollar bush whodunnit, in which a group of schoolgirls and their teacher inexplicably disappear during an outing to Hanging Rock in central Victoria on Valentine's Day 1900, has managed to make its mark among fashion's foremost names, infiltrate the world of teen magazines, and run an implausible gamut of cinematic influence. Alexander McQueen riffed on it in 2005; 20 years later, brands like Zimmermann are still turning Picnic into runway fodder in Paris. Sofia Coppola referenced it twice, first for a Marc Jacobs ad, and then again for her gauzy, sexy remake of The Beguiled.
Today the film counts a new demographic in its ever-growing fanbase: cosmopolitan 20-somethings. Last year Peter Weir attended a screening of Picnic at the Cinemathèque française in Paris; he believes about 80% of attendees were young people.
As Picnic marks its 50th anniversary, feted with a 4K rerelease, the director has a few theories about why the film has proved so evergreen. 'Not only is the mystery at the heart of the film unsolved,' Weir says, 'but there is no message in the film. No lecture, no polemic. Picnic belongs to the viewer.'
Others find the film's success a bit of a head-scratcher. 'I truly love all of Peter Weir's films,' says Jacki Weaver, who played Minnie, the sympathetic maid at exclusive all-girls' boarding school Appleyard College. 'But Picnic is probably my second least favourite. That it has achieved a place in the pantheon is a tribute to the film-making genius of Peter Weir – and a mystery to me.'
Picnic's journey to the pantheon began with a conversation in early 1973. Children's TV host Patricia Lovell – an aspiring producer, and a one-time colleague of Weir – had read Joan Lindsay's ethereal, idiosyncratic 1967 novel and recognised its cinematic potential. She wanted to know if the director – only 28, and yet to helm a full-length feature – agreed.
Three months later, Lovell and Weir were in Langwarrin, 50km south of Melbourne, staking their claim to Picnic in the author's living room. 'Joan's main concern was the ending,' says Weir. 'If I'd suggested we had to have a solution to the mystery of the girls' disappearance I would, politely, have been shown the door.'
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Weir and Lovell's timing was perfect. By 1973 Australian film-makers had embraced the influence of 60s European art cinema, been liberated from the nation's tawdry history of cultural censorship, and were enjoying, for the first time, a suite of government-funded initiatives intended to revive the nation's moribund industry. The fruits of this era, dubbed the Australian New Wave, include The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Newsfront, My Brilliant Career and Breaker Morant.
Picnic at Hanging Rock, filmed in just over a month in early 1975, arrived at the crest of this wave: a perfect convergence of the right people at the right point in their careers. At the time, then-Sydney film festival director David Stratton – who visited the set – wrote of the 'pervasive feeling among everyone concerned that something very special was in the making'. Kim Dalton, second AD on Picnic, remembers it similarly: 'Clearly it had a resonance, potentially a poetry, a narrative that lifted it above just the normal run-of-the-mill feature film,' he says. 'I think everybody felt that.'
That Picnic still casts so potent a spell rests as much upon its ambiguous ending as its iconic, sumptuous aesthetic: frilled lace dresses, sheaths of summer bushland, beautiful girls captured with a halo of backlight in moods of gaiety and longing. A helping of Beethoven's Emperor concerto, as well as editor Max Lemon's penchant for artsy superimposition, elevates the film's haughty airs.
Where early-70s Australian films leaned into the colourful, ribald and commercial, Picnic was the departure, a decisive charge towards art. Visual references include British photographer David Hamilton, as well as Botticelli's Renaissance masterpiece Primavera, Frederic Leighton's Flaming June and, of course, William Ford's At the Hanging Rock. Pop artist Martin Sharp, who'd made album covers for Cream and been tried for obscenity while editing countercultural magazine Oz, also happened to be the world's foremost expert on Joan Lindsay's book. Weir kept him on hand as the film's 'artistic adviser'.
Weaver fondly recalls Weir's 'delicate aesthetic sensibilities'. 'Peter possesses a fine intellect,' she says. 'The soul of a poet.' Turning up each day in a straw hat and sandals, he liked playing background music to generate atmosphere on set. 'Peter's persona was absolutely in keeping with the mood of the film,' says Dalton. 'There was something slightly ethereal about him.'
If Weir concocted the ethereal, it was Russell Boyd's job to capture it. His photography wrung a liquid lusciousness out of Australian light that has secured Picnic's hallowed place in the annals of Tumblr and Instagram film fandom. He shifted frame rates, draped silk sheets in the tree line, and shot the girls' final minutes of innocence with, yes, a wedding veil over the lens. Sometimes his brilliance bubbled up extemporaneously. When a generator went crashing down the slopes of the Rock, Boyd ad-libbed a bounce light with some sheets of polystyrene. ('The sort of thing you make coolers out of,' he would later recall.)
Assisted by John Seale – who would later win an Oscar for shooting The English Patient – Boyd made working on the Rock look easy; in fact it was anything but. This, after all, wasn't an orderly film set but an ancient volcanic formation. Hanging Rock – or Ngannelong – had served as a site of ceremony for Wurundjeri, Taungurung, and Dja Dja Wurrung men for tens of thousands of years.
Judith Dorsman, costume designer on Picnic, tells Guardian Australia of her almost sisyphean struggle to keep everything pristine while shooting in the bush. 'All those white gloves,' she recalls. 'We had six million pairs of white gloves. Everything was white. And you're on a rock. My God.'
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Production soon decamped to Martindale Hall, a Georgian villa nestled in South Australia's Clare Valley, doubling as Appleyard College. Graham Walker, prop guy on Picnic, had a mansion to dress and no money to dress it with. With charisma and knack for improvisation, he made do. 'I'd find places, hire, buy, steal, borrow and get it back, all out of a Volkswagen Kombi van,' he says. 'Later I'd have people ring saying, 'That bed we lent you – when are you bringing it back?''
'It was a wonderful shoot,' says Weaver. 'Like a long summer camp.' For the producing team, however, it was less idyllic. A week from her first shooting day, Picnic's top-billing star, Oscar-winning British actor Vivian Merchant, told the team she had pneumonia and could no longer play headmistress Mrs Appleyard. In the scramble for a replacement, six actors were contacted; only Welsh Bafta-winner Rachel Roberts was available. 'She was, I think, a terrible shock to everybody,' Pat Lovell told Cinema Papers in 1976, 'because I don't quite know whether the McElroys [the film's producers, Hal and Jim McElroy] or Peter realised how powerful an actress she was.'
Powerful is putting it mildly. Her performance – intricate down to the alveolar trills – lends this rough-hewn bush flick its true star quality. But Roberts, a longtime alcoholic, managed to make some equally spectacular drama off screen. One night during the shoot, according to a 2004 documentary, she ran out of her motel room naked, hooting and yelling in the courtyard, as cast and crew watched on with bemusement. On other days, Guardian Australia was told, she could barely leave her motel room.
Yet she was, beneath it all, a thespian to the bone: as Weir said in February, Roberts even refused to wear the wig made for Merchant because, in the traditions of the English theatre, it was not the done thing. 'Fame has to be left on the outskirts of the set,' says Weir. 'Once an actor crosses into that magic circle they have a job to do. The best, like Rachel, understand this.'
At the time of its release, Picnic was the most seen and best reviewed Australian film to date. Its months-long run in domestic cinemas saw it gross $1.5m by March 1976. No Australian film had felt so consequential. 'Picnic was the first Australian film of that generation that was a serious film and an enormous success,' says Stratton. He remembers people seeing it 'again and again because they were trying to work out what happened'.
Although US distributors didn't pick up on Picnic until 1979, it had by then broken into several far-flung markets. Audiences admired it at Cannes and in Canada; the Italians gave it a baroque poster and retitled it Il lungo pomeriggio di morte – The Long Afternoon of Death.
The costume designer, Judith Dorsman, recalls how in the years after Picnic's release, its famed dresses were 'all hired out to girls to wear for weddings when they got married. They were worn to death. Every man and his dog got married in them'.
The only one who didn't go for it, apparently, was Joan Lindsay. Speaking to Film Quarterly in 1980, Weir recalled that Lindsay had 'considerable reservations' about the film upon its release. 'You've changed the tone,' she told him. 'I didn't write it with that kind of feeling.'
Weir's film is a haunted repertory of beautiful dreams, heraldic visions, memories gained and lost. If Lindsay had ensured her ambiguous ending would be respected, she could do nothing to prevent a cast and crew of great artists from feeling their way into the gaps of her story. The result was an art film with an Australian touch, ever beguiling all these years later – a film which, after five decades, still belongs to its viewers.
The new 4K digital restoration of Picnic at Hanging Rock is screening at Palace cinemas in Melbourne, Ballarat, Sydney, Brisbane, Byron Bay, Canberra and Perth from until 16 April.
