PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK:
Fifty years after publication, Picnic at Hanging Rock still intrigues with its gothic horror and repressed sexuality. Now, in a six-part miniseries, it’s had a 21st century makeover. The Women’s Weekly takes an exclusive peek behind the scenes.
reinterpreting the iconic Australian story
Asoggy, 17-degree Melbourne day on the set of Foxtel’s Picnic at Hanging Rock and the Italianate façade of Werribee Mansion is the stand-in for Appleyard College. English actress Natalie Dormer ( Game of Thrones, The Hunger Games) is the imperious Hester Appleyard, dressed head-to-toe in aubergine velvet. A smoke machine simulates early-morning mist while the headmistress is led across the lawn to a dead schoolgirl sprawled in a flower bed amidst the hydrangeas
Cast and crew are imbedded in novelist Joan Lindsay’s iconic tale of a group of schoolgirls who inexplicably vanish on a Valentine’s Day picnic in 1900. However, this six-part series is no remake of Peter Weir’s 1975 film classic. It is far darker, grittier, more psychological, with a splashy gothic melodramatic edge.
Natalie is intrigued by its many-layered genres. “It’s a psychological thriller,” she says, “but there’s humour and a supernatural element too …
It’s part of the rite of passage of adolescence to explore those esoteric
things. Your hormones are going wild. You’re a child but you feel like a woman. You want to believe in higher powers because the world can be a confusing place and your identity can be a confusing landscape … It’s got that energy of a slightly unhinged group of hormonal girls and what they can do to each other.”
In each of its incarnations, Picnic at Hanging Rock has inhabited an unsettling space between dream, reality and urban myth, perhaps because that’s where it was conceived. Author Joan Lindsay woke one morning from a lucid, feverish dream and wrote down everything she remembered. The dream continued over consecutive nights and each morning she hurried to capture it before it faded. In less than a fortnight she’d completed the novel.
An unpublished final chapter hints at a bizarre supernatural ending and Joan’s friend, Colin Caldwell, told her biographer, Janelle McCulloch, that she was “very much a mystic”. Certainly she was interested in spiritualism. However, Joan maintained a sense of mystery around her story’s ending and would never confirm just how much of the plot was fiction and how much reality.
The story’s place in urban myth was cemented when eerie happenings were reported on the set of Weir’s film. Clocks stopped and producer Pat Lovell described a sense of foreboding.
Natalie claims that the only uncanny event on set this time around was that “my bottles of superb Macedon red wine mysteriously depleted over the weeks”. But Samara Weaving ( Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri), who plays Irma, is not so flippant.
“We were sitting on Mount Macedon,” she recalls, “a sacred space in the Indigenous experience. Cast and crew were respectful and careful about that but everyone just had this feeling we weren’t meant to be there. Then, in six hours, we all got crazily ill. We dropped like flies. We were meant to be there for three days but we had to go away and come back and have stand-ins and doubles.”
Madeleine Madden plays Marion, daughter of an Aboriginal woman and a High Court Judge, and remembers it was “three degrees, raining, there were leeches, vomiting, diarrhoea, everyone in white dresses and delirious. We got to the rock and it was amazing. You feel how ancient and sacred it is when you’re up there and it’s so quiet.”
Before Joan Lindsay imbued it with her European supernaturalism, Hanging Rock, a six-million-year-old, 105-metre high volcanic outcrop, was sacred to the Wurundjeri, Taungurung and Dja Dja Wurrung people.
“It was really important to me, personally, to be welcomed onto the rock,” says Madeleine, the daughter of renowned art curator Hettie Perkins and granddaughter of Indigenous rights trailblazer, Charles Perkins. The producers made contact with the traditional owners who met with cast and crew. “We entered and left respectfully,” says Maddie.
Back on set, rows of corsetry, petticoats and bloomers hang in the costume trailer alongside hats, gloves, cameo brooches and garnet and ruby earrings. The young actors are uncomplaining as they are laced into corsets that make it difficult to breathe, eat or climb more than a flight of stairs.
“The corsets are horrific, horrible things,” says Yael Stone, who plays Dora Lumley, mistress of Deportment and Bible Studies, and also stars in Orange is the New Black. “I don’t know how women did it. I could barely breathe. It’s actually quite hard to act in a corset – hard to move and hard to find your voice. I’m of the opinion that feelings live in your guts and in your breath and it’s challenging to be cut off from those things. It’s a real insight into the level of physical restriction and a perfect metaphor for the narrow choice of options that women had at that time. It makes me value what I have now and want to hold onto it and protect it and advance it. In a lot of ways I think this is an interesting feminist tale.”
Ruby Rees plays 13-year-old Edith, the character who, in the 1975 film,
returned from the rock with a bloodcurdling scream. Ruby is fascinated by the way Picnic at Hanging Rock explores “expectation and oppression and being told that there is a right way to be a female”. These themes give the series a contemporary edge that’s propelled it into festivals and led to network sales in the UK, the USA and Europe.
“These young women were all being groomed for auction. They’re about to be married off,” adds Lily Sullivan, who plays Miranda. “They’re being moulded and prodded – literally with corsets, and mentally as well.”
In Peter Weir’s film, Miranda appeared wise beyond her years but insubstantial and ethereal. In this new series, Lily plays Miranda as a wilful, grounded country girl, at home in the stables, happier in trousers than floor-length lace. All the girls’ characters have been fleshed out, given greater complexity, back-stories and motivations. Perhaps this is, in part, a result of the number of women involved in the production, including two of the three directors and both of the screenwriters.
Natalie describes this retelling as a revision through a female lens: “It was a very interesting period in Australia’s history,” she explains. “Federation was being discussed, independence from the Brits, and women’s suffrage. The major themes of Picnic are liberation, rebellion, the fight against oppression … So it has a lot of resonance with the modern world. I’m very proud we’ve brought these stories out into the world now. It’s serendipitous, to be honest.”
Samara agrees that ideas like freedom and oppression are critical themes but, for her, Picnic at Hanging Rock has been first and foremost about female friendship. “That’s the biggest theme,” she says, standing in the catering tent on this fictional Valentine’s Day, Victorian boots sinking into mud.
“These women realised that they were stuck in their reality. The way to survive it was to develop strong bonds with each other and to take care of each other. That, I think, was beautiful.”
Picnic at Hanging Rock screens on Foxtel Showcase from May 6.