Recurring NIGHTMARES Dark Australian Classics Reimagined
I’m not really a particularly nostalgic person, but I think films remain outside of nostalgia. I think they are like little worlds you’d lived in – like a period [when] you lived in another country.
So says director Peter Weir, recollecting the time he spent realising the Gothic fever dream of Joan Lindsay’s 1967 novel Picnic at Hanging Rock, which was brought to his attention by eventual executive producer Patricia Lovell. The magnetic pull of the teenage longing, repression and rebellion behind the unexplained disappearance of three finishing-school girls and one of their governesses on Valentine’s Day 1900 was irresistible to the then-emerging director: ‘I read it from cover to cover [and] was gripped by it, and by the fact it was an unsolved mystery […] I was burning with it. I mean, it was just like electricity through my body.’
As much an Australian classic as the novel itself, Weir’s eponymous 1975 adaptation – shot by Russell Boyd in woozy noonlight and accompanied by Gheorghe Zamfir’s haunting panpipes – was in the vanguard of the Australian New Wave, helping to reignite an industry long left languishing. Following closely on the heels of fellow literary adaptations Wake in Fright (Ted Kotcheff, 1971) and Walkabout (Nicolas Roeg, 1971), Picnic shares its predecessors’ fascination with primal terror, presenting the inescapably strange, alluring vastness of a land barely understood by its colonial intruders. As critic Rebecca Harkins-Cross frames it in her excellent Ivan Hutchinson Award–winning essay ‘The Shadow of the Rock’, these films ‘struck a cultural nerve that would prove crucial to the national film revival, both presenting terrifying portraits of an untameable interior’.
As the works of the Australian New Wave are still cited as some of the finest films ever produced in this country, it is far from surprising that, during a creative period seemingly obsessed with retelling old stories, both Picnic and
