Special information from Tim Colebatch

Tim Colebatch wrote me about some research he has been able to do on the film. He has a great advantage in being (a) a journalist, and (b) actually in Australia. This has given him access to some information which, hopefully, will once and for all clear up the question of whether or not the film is factual, fictional, or based on fact. I am reprinting his information below:

I am a journalist from Melbourne, and I am familiar with the debate over whether the events are fact or fiction. I believe your conclusion is correct. Despite a massive data base of Australian newspapers on file, no one has produced any evidence that such an event occurred. The story essentially originated in the mind of Joan Lindsay, and I think it dishonors her imagination to think that she was merely embellishing a historic event. I don't know how much you know about her - maybe far more than me - but a few things seem to me relevant:

- European settlers certainly did disappear in the bush in the early years of Australian settlement. There is no record of three students and a teacher disappearing at once, but the bush was seen as alien and threatening, especially by those bred on English landscapes.

- Hanging Rock is an outcrop of the Macedon Ranges, which a hundred years ago was one of the favorite summer holiday spots of Melbourne's upper class. The Governor of Victoria (the Queen's representative) had an official summer residence at Mount Macedon. In the sense that the theme of the film is the collision between the stifling order of British upper-class culture and the sensual other-wordliness of the Australian bush, nowhere would it have been more evident than at Macedon, where the two worlds met each summer.

- The young Joan Lindsay, daughter of a Supreme Court judge, was part in the summer excursion of the elite to the Macedon region. Her family were also friends of the artist Frederick McCubbin, who lived there. She would have picnicked at Hanging Rock herself in that era; later in life she lived for a while not far away at Bacchus Marsh.

- Her husband Sir Daryl Lindsay was director of the National Gallery of Victoria for 15 years, and among its collection is a painting entitled Picnic at Hanging Rock, made in the same era by the impressionist E. Phillips Fox.

- In 1919, soon after she graduated from the private girls' school, Clyde, it shifted from Melbourne to Mount Macedon. That provides the basis for a girls' school near The Rock.

- Joan and Daryl were married on St Valentine's Day (1922).

- They kept no clocks in their house, because Joan despised the world of mathematical precision and believed it devalued the richness of experience. See her autobiography, Time Without Clocks, also published by Penguin Australia.

You may be interested in some of the theories published in the Sydney Morning Herald in 1987 when the final chapter of Joan Lindsay's novel, excised originally by her publishers, was released after her death. (The final chapter, as you probably know, had Miss McGraw and the girls trapped in a cave when a boulder fell across its entrance, shutting them in. The overwhelming view here is that the publishers did us all a favor by persuading her to drop it.) Among those the Herald asked to contribute was Joan's friend Phillip Adams, a prominent film, TV, radio and print personality; I think he is spot on.

THE TIME WARP THEORY

Phillip Adams

It isn't very hard to work out what happened to Miranda, Irma and Marion. First the setting relates to an intriguing painting (Picnic Day at Hanging Rock by William Ford), a picture of paradox. Second, the day was St Valentine's, Joan's magic day. Third, time was playing tricks. You'll remember as the coach full of girls approached Hanging Rock for the fateful picnic, the coachman's watch stopped. He put it down to "magnetism", to some natural force from the rock.

Re-reading the text I had in mind Joan Lindsay's obsession with time. Like J.B. J.B.Priestley, Joan believed that times present, times past and times future co-exist, that time isn't a simplistic continuum that most of us believe. Long before Einstein revealed his relativity theory, in which time ceases to be something solid and dependable and becomes elastic, Joan believed that it was somehow dreamlike, that yesterday is still with us while tomorrow is already here.

As the girls moved towards the peak, Joan has them look down at the picnickers "through a drift of rosy smoke, or mist".

"Whatever can those people be doing down there, like a lot of ants?" says Marion. "A surprising number of human beings are without purpose." And just as those lines are sinking into the readers' minds, suggesting some sort of choice between meaningless reality and a fascinating dream, the key words -and the book's most emphatic clue - occur.

"Irma was aware, for a little time, of a rather curious sound coming up from the plain. Like the beating of far-off drums."

Hours later, in real time, the searchers will be beating sticks on sheets of tin. Yet the girls hear those sounds already, before they've disappeared, while, below them, the picnic continues undisturbed.

By putting all those clues together the truth becomes quite obvious. Like Alice stepping through the looking glass, Joan's girls moved into another dimension. Into time. What Joan Lindsay wrote was a sort of science fiction in crinolines instead of space suits.

(Adams, a close friend of Lady Joan Lindsay, also points to a book The Ghosts of Versailles, which she claimed had inspired her to write Picnic at Hanging Rock. It tells the story of two women who visited Versailles at the turn of the century and found themselves taken back to the time of Mary Antoinette.)

THE "NO THEORY" THEORY

Elizabeth Jolley (novelist)

Wild and lonely places suggest sinister happenings and mysterious disappearances. The ingredients of mystery and drama are within the human individual and the fascination is in their release at the time of an unexpected and frightening event.

I don't think it matters how and why the girls in Picnic disappeared. The possible revelations and literal explanations are not important. Really, the important parts of the novel are the actions and reactions, and the subsequent behaviour of all those who did not disappear.

MADEMOISELLE MURDERER

Thomas Keneally (novelist)

I'd prefer not to end it, but if I had to, I'd tend to keep the mystery rolling along and choose an ending which raises as many questions as it solves. Let's say the Mademoiselle, the French governess, did it. She comes forward and confesses, but they can't find the bodies. Then it's like the Chamberlain case, the mystery just rolls on and on and isn't diffused at all. It raises as much mystery as it settles.

Then you've got to ask, did the French governess really do it? And if she didn't, to what extent is her confession a protection of someone else or a demonstration of her own pathology, or what? I'd give an explanation which immediately comes under suspicion leaving great doubt about whether she was guilty and what her confession was based on.

I don't think Sergeant Plod or Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot have any place in Picnic at Hanging Rock, and the big final scene in the school library where the master sleuth runs through all the possibilities and dispenses with them one by one ... definitely not.

A VOICE FROM THE GRAVE

Anne Louise Lambert (who played Miranda in the film)

I accepted Joan Lindsay's statement at the time that it was a mystery and a secret. There are not enough mysteries and secrets left in the world.

As Barry Oakley puts it, the decision not to publish the final chapter of Picnic was probably a masterstroke.

The head of the English Department at Sydney University, Professor Dame Leonie Kramer, says that while the book has always puzzled her because it adopts a mystery form then fails to solve the mystery, she would prefer not to see it resolved.

"I see it as a kind of bush myth which implies that the Australian bush is mysterious and frightening and weird and that inexplicable things happen in it," she says.

"I got used to thinking of it in that way and I don't want to be given an explanation. I would hate to see it slip into the category of a detective story with a mundane solution. I fear that any resolution is likely to be an anti-climax."

Caption: Seven Ports: Steve J. Spears, Phillip Adams, Elizabeth Jolley, Thomas Keneally, Anne Louise Lambert, Nicholas Hasluck, Morris Gleitzman. Publication: Sydney Morning Herald Publication date: 14-2-1987. Edition: Late. Page no: 43. Section: Saturday Review. Length: 1971.

Another element I forgot to mention in my list:

- the Lindsay clan into which Joan married was a family of artists who waged war on the repressed sexual attitudes of that era. The most famous of them, her brother-in-law Norman Lindsay, was a controversial figure whose work featured voluptuous nude women, often cavorting with satyrs or men, or engaged in scenes of orgy/rape. (He also lives on largely through for a very different work, the children's classic The Magic Pudding, which he wrote and illustrated.) Sexual awakening was something of a family theme for the Lindsays.

A few years ago the filmmaker John Duigan attempted a kind of 90s R-rated version of Picnic at Hanging Rock, a film called Sirens. Set in the 1930s, a visiting English clergyman (Hugh Grant) and his wife visit Norman Lindsay (Sam Neill) at his home in the Blue Mountains near Sydney to try to persuade him of the evil he is doing, but instead are seduced by the uninhibited sensuality of the establishment and its women (including a buxom Elle Macpherson) and the wife ends up joining in their sexual abandon. As a film, it was an interesting failure, lush and indulgent where Picnic was taut, gripping, delicate and magical.


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