“It doesn’t like us,” murmurs a white-clad schoolgirl, peering up at the great Hanging Rock. She is one of a posse of excitable girls and their governess from Appleyard College, a strict upper-class girls’ boarding school, who venture out for a picnic on Valentine’s Day, 1900, at a monolithic geological formation in Victoria. Miranda, Irma, Marion and Edith discard their boots and corsets and, along with their teacher, Miss McCraw, trace their way up towards the rock’s peak. Three of them never return.
So goes the story in Joan Lindsay’s 1967 novel, adapted to film in 1975 by Peter Weir, as part of Australian cinema’s new wave – and now, as a modern crime thriller in a $20 million six-part miniseries produced by Fremantle Media and Foxtel, promised as a darker, sexier retelling.
As a story about Federation-era girls who vanish into a mysterious landscape, Picnic at Hanging Rock has always been loaded with disquiet about white people’s place in Australia. Lindsay, who wrote her novel in a two-week trance after dreaming it, said “it was written as a mystery and it remains a mystery ... I wrote that book as a sort of atmosphere of a place, and it was like dropping a stone into the water. I felt that story, if you call it a story – that the thing that happened on St Valentine’s Day went on spreading, out and out and out, in circles.” Her editor Sandra Forbes described Lindsay’s creation as “a book of place; a painterly book that captures the atmosphere of the Australian bush.” But where the story in its past incarnations has always avoided explaining the missing girls’ disappearance, the new series tempts audiences with answers.
A reimagining of the book rather than the film, the logic of Foxtel’s retelling is clear – that Lindsay’s novel, in the words of screenwriter Beatrix Christian (who also penned Ray Lawrence’s arthouse drama, Jindabyne), tells “a much bigger story” about the girls and their headmistress, Miss Appleyard (Natalie Dormer of Game of Thrones and The Hunger Games), than the classic film encapsulated. In that sense, the miniseries is loyal to Lindsay, and the first episode is promising. For 50 minutes, it seems we are not in the dull land of prestige television, but someplace more dynamic.
The first thing that hits you is the style – a kind of Alice in Wonderland psychedelic gothic bush aesthetic that’s a unique departure from the norms of prestige TV. Horizons are tilted or flipped upside down, the girls are captured in Wes Anderson-style schoolbook symmetry, and the bush’s strangeness is magnified by an evergreen, oversaturated colour palette.
With the girls missing and presumed dead, the story advances not as the dreamy tale we’re familiar with from versions past, but as a police procedural at the level of both plot and genre. Cutting between the disappearance and flashbacks, we learn of the frustrations of the girls’ ringleader, Miranda (Lily Sullivan, playing the role as melancholic free spirit) of being lured away from the wilderness toward urban married life. Her rebellions grow at Appleyard Collage with her girl gang, Marion (Madeleine Madden), now envisaged as local Indigenous girl, and Irma (Samara Weaving), a wealthy Brit who is scathing of Australia and the bush.
The plot unfolds as a thicket of backstories and premonitions amid ticking-clock sound effects, but it begins to feel more like a device to unravel anxieties about people’s place in Australia. As two of the girls return without memory of their ordeal on the rock, the script hurls red herrings at the viewer: did the other girls escape through the pass at Hanging Rock to find a freer future than that offered to them at the oppressive Appleyard College? Did local men rape and murder them? Finally, a black tracker advises his superior to call off the search. All this sub-plotting and cutting between past and present becomes a structural downfall: with so little lead-up to the girls’ disappearance, we never fall under the rock’s spell.
Meanwhile, Dormer’s casting as Mrs Appleyard, the sometimes sadistic schoolmarm, now with her own ghosts, gives the production a global glow, and her performance anchors the disorientating scattered plot and themes. But her youthfulness strips back the novel’s powerful subtext of a menopausal adult brutalising defiant girls on the brink of their own womanhood and sexuality.
In the effort to update the text, there are contemporary twists: insinuations of an erotic bond between Miranda, Irma and Marion; a gay romance between Irma’s rich suitor and a working-class man who aids the search party; and an almost lesbian relationship between Marion and Miss McCraw. Inserting queer subtext has certainly made for solid ratings. But smushing today’s zeitgeist feminist sensibilities onto a period piece doesn’t always make for a coherent message. All manner of social issues are crashed together without real interrogation. The series becomes “about” feminism, “about” class, “about” race and the nature of the Australian nation. Even the rock itself is given a backstory.
There’s no need for all this exposition. In evoking so much and explaining so little, both the film and the novel glided over the politics of the day to present an eerie distillation of atmosphere: a pocket of the Australian bush, unknowable to white people, haunted by its history.
In the new series, different characters repeat the line: “Where are the missing girls?” But this misses what was most interesting about both the novel and the film: not the girls’ whereabouts, but how the landscape obliterates them – the feeling of being there and not knowing. By trying to have it both ways – to be, on one hand, a crime drama about missing girls with a mystery to be solved, and to embrace the inherently unknowable element at the heart of the novel on the other – the miniseries is caught in an unresolvable tension.
Jamming such a grand, mythical reverie into the format of a modern thriller – literalising the enigma – is a doomed project. The story of the rock has returned, but the mystery has vanished.