A picnic gone very wrong

This is a horror classic that manages to skilfully examine class prejudice in Australia,.

I first watched Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock one very hot May afternoon two decades ago. By the time I saw it, the film was already considered a classic of Australian cinema. Till then, for me, Australian film and TV was only feel-good stuff like Neighbours and Crocodile Dundee.

Here was something else entirely and thrillingly different to boot — an eerie masterpiece of psychological horror, which sends chills down your spine despite being filmed in the sunniest of environments.

It would be some years before I realised that Weir’s film was actually based on a book. Joan Lindsay, who was born in Melbourne in 1896, wrote Picnic at Hanging Rock in four weeks. When Weir interviewed her in the early 1970s, she claimed that the book came to her like a film in her dreams — and that she woke up each morning to “write like a demon”.

For many years after it was published, Lindsay was asked whether the story was based on a true incident — Hanging Rock is part of the Macedon Ranges in Central Victoria in Australia. She was vague in her answers and even included a note to readers at the start of the book that they themselves could make up their minds as to whether the book was truth or fiction. Reading the book, it does seem like it came to Lindsay from some otherworldly source.

On the surface, the story is simple enough and might even seem tragically commonplace. It’s 1900 and Valentine’s Day. A cloudless summer day that inspires everyone at Appleyard College for Young Ladies to go off on a picnic to Hanging Rock. After lunch, three of the girls go off to climb up the rock in the heat of the afternoon. They never return.

An investigation is launched and a manhunt ensues to find the missing girls. Mrs Appleyard, the headmistress of the college, soon becomes a central figure in the story and her actions and decisions lift the lid on the emotions and resentments that were hitherto hidden under the genteel veneer of the college.

What starts as a picnic gone wrong turns into a skillful examination of class prejudice and sexual repression in turn-of-the-century Australia.

Combine those subjects with the almost mythical, alien structure of Hanging Rock and what you have is an irresistible narrative that ranks among the very best horror stories ever written. Picnic at Hanging Rock was published in 1967 and didn’t really garner much success at first.

In 1971, an Australian television presenter, Patricia Lovell, bought the book from a discounted pile at a newsagent and found it fascinating. She and Weir teamed up and bought the film rights to the book. When the movie was released in 1975, it heralded an Australian film renaissance; the book soared to the top of the bestseller lists and was acclaimed as a classic.

Read the book and watch the Weir film — but be warned, Lindsay’s story may haunt your dreams. But isn’t that what stories are meant to do?

The author is a Bangalore-based writer and communications professional with many published short stories and essays to her credit.

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