Haunted Country: 50 Years of Picnic at Hanging Rock and the Gothic Landscape of Colonial Dispossession
Jo Coghlan
Fifty years ago, Peter Weir's haunting masterpiece Picnic at Hanging Rock emerged from the Australian New Wave cinema movement, forever changing how audiences would perceive the relationship between human civilisation and the untamed natural world. Based on Joan Lindsay's 1967 enigmatic novel, the film tells the story of three schoolgirls and their governess who mysteriously vanish during a Valentine's Day picnic at the ancient volcanic formation of Ngannelong, colonially named Hanging Rock, in 1900. Arguably the most compelling character in this atmospheric thriller is the landscape.
Ngannelong looms over Weir's film not merely as a setting, but as a primordial force that predates and ultimately outlasts human concerns. The massive volcanic outcropping, formed over six million years ago, becomes a repository of geological memory that renders the Edwardian social structures of Appleyard College suddenly fragile and insignificant. Cinematographer Russell Boyd captures the rock’s imposing presence through sweeping camera movements that emphasise its vertical dominance, while the golden afternoon light creates an almost supernatural glow that suggests something beyond ordinary reality or the uncanny.
The landscape here functions as what Indigenous Australians would recognise as country—a living entity with its own consciousness and agency. The film’s silence about Infigenous perspectives becomes itself a form of commentary, creating a Gothic absence that haunts every frame. The mysterious disappearances echo older stories of sacred sites where the boundary between the material and spiritual worlds grows thin, yet the film's inability to acknowledge these stories reflects the broader colonial erasure of Indigenous knowledge. The rock becomes a portal where the rational, colonised world of the boarding school encounters something far more ancient and unknowable, a presence that predates and ultimately rejects European claims to the land.
The journey from Appleyard College to Ngannelong represents more than physical distance, it's a passage between worlds. The manicured gardens and rigid architecture of the school, with its emphasis on European refinement and social propriety, stand in stark contrast to the wild, uncontrollable landscape of the rock. Weir uses this geographical transition to explore the tension between imposed civilisation and indigenous wildness that defined colonial Australia. The landscape strips away the girls' carefully constructed identities as proper Victorian ladies. As they climb higher up the rock face, shedding shoes, stockings, and corsets along the way, they're literally and symbolically removing the constraints of their civilised selves. The rock demands authenticity, calling them toward something primal that their education has taught them to suppress. Miranda, the ethereal leader of the group, seems most attuned to this call, moving through the landscape as if responding to an ancient summons.
Weir infuses the natural setting with an unmistakable sense of Gothic unease that reflects the unacknowledged trauma of colonial dispossession. The film’s famous opening sequence shows the girls preparing for their picnic, their white dresses creating a stark visual metaphor for European rationality imposed upon a landscape that has witnessed profound loss and violence. When they arrive at Ngannelong, the setting becomes a Gothic space where the repressed returns to disturb colonial complacency. The rock's crevices, caves, and hidden passages suggest secrets buried but not forgotten, while the act of climbing represents a dangerous intrusion into spaces that were never meant for colonial occupation. The mysterious magnetism that draws the girls deeper into the rock's embrace mirrors the way colonial guilt draws settlers toward reckoning with truths their society has tried to suppress. The landscape becomes a site where the unspoken violence of dispossession manifests as supernatural mystery.
One of the film's most unsettling elements is how the landscape exists outside normal temporal boundaries. While the characters inhabit the structured time of Edwardian society, with its strict schedules, measured proprieties, and linear progression, Ngannelong, operates according to geological time, where millions of years compress into moments and moments can stretch into eternity. Temporal disruption reflects a deeper philosophical question about whether European notions of time and progress have any meaning in a landscape that has witnessed countless cycles of birth, death, and renewal long before white settlement.
What makes Picnic at Hanging Rock enduringly powerful is its refusal to provide rational explanations for the girls' disappearance. Like the landscape itself, the mystery remains inscrutable, resistant to the Victorian impulse to categorise and explain everything. Ngannelong keeps its secrets, offering only hints and suggestions that multiply rather than resolve the central enigma. This ambiguity reflects a broader truth about the Australian landscape, its fundamental resistance to colonial appropriation and the impossibility of truly possessing what was never empty land to begin with. Ngannelong becomes a metaphor for all the ways that this ancient continent confounds attempts at conquest and settlement built upon the fiction of terra nullius. It suggests that some mysteries are meant to remain unsolved because they point to truths about dispossession and cultural violence that colonial society cannot bear to acknowledge. The Gothic atmosphere that permeates the film stems from this fundamental dishonesty, the way settler culture must constantly repress its awareness of the injustice upon which it is founded.
Viewing the film fifty years later, its portrayal of landscape takes on additional resonance in our era of a lack of national consensus on reconcilitation, climate change, environmental crisis. The rock's indifference to human concerns now reads as a warning about the futility of believing we can control or master the natural world. The girls' disappearance becomes contemporary political and ecological prophecy—a reminder that the landscape will ultimately reclaim everything we think we've built upon it. Weir's vision of a landscape that operates according to its own logic, that demands respect rather than conquest, feels remarkably prescient. The film suggests that our relationship with the natural world requires a fundamental shift in consciousness—away from domination and toward something approaching reverence, and similarly a shift in consciousness about Australia’s colonial past and the urgency of reconciliation.
Further Reading
Botting, Fred. 1996. Gothic. London: Routledge.
Dermody, Susan, and Elizabeth Jacka. 1987-1988. The Screening of Australia: Anatomy of a National Cinema. 2 vols. Sydney: Currency Press.
Gelder, Ken, and Jane M. Jacobs. 1998. Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and Identity in a Postcolonial Nation. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.
Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. 2015. The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
O'Regan, Tom. 1996. Australian National Cinema. London: Routledge.
Rayner, Jonathan. 2000. Contemporary Australian Cinema: An Introduction. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Rose, Deborah Bird. 2011. Country in Flames: Politics of Landscape and Climate. Canberra: ANU Press.
Turcotte, Gerry. 1998. "Australian Gothic." In The Handbook of Gothic Literature, edited by Marie Mulvey-Roberts, 10-19. New York: New York University Press.
Weir, Peter. 1975. Picnic at Hanging Rock: A Film. Melbourne: Sun Books.
Wolfe, Patrick. 1999. Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology. London: Cassell.
