Picnic At Hanging Rock: Literature, Landscape, and Cinema.

Picnic at Hanging Rock endures because it gives elegant form to a less elegant national disturbance: the suspicion that European settlement in Australia has never quite settled anything. Joan Lindsay’s novel, Peter Weir’s film, and later theatrical reworkings return obsessively to the same scene of colonial confidence undone: white schoolgirls, dressed for discipline and display, enter an ancient volcanic landscape and fail to come back. The mystery is usually treated as the work’s great seduction. Yet the more consequential mystery is cultural rather than narrative. Why has a fictional disappearance of white girls become one of Australia’s most durable myths, when the historical disappearance of Aboriginal children under state policy was, for so long, denied the same imaginative and civic attention?