On Pauline, can I please explain?

Despite the ideological violence Hanson continues to wreak on our body politic with her Billy Tea Party, I was not suggesting anything violent happen to her. Picture Gary Ramage

When Pauline Hanson said hooroo to Uluru, I tapped out a tweet to my modest number of tweethearts suggesting she now climb Hanging Rock and, like Miranda on that famous picnic, disappear. The suggestion was much retweeted and “liked”. But not by everyone. There was a considerable backlash.

Some unfamiliar with Joan Lindsay’s novel – or Peter Weir’s film – mistook my tweet’s Miranda for Frank Devine’s famous daughter. Others chose to believe that I was wishing Hanson physical harm. My tweet was branded as misogynistic as the escalating attacks on women by Alan Jones. There was even a stern reprimand from the ABC’s watchdog on the use of social media.

All of the above are the result of misunderstanding, in some cases wilful. Joan’s Hanging Rock was never a crime scene surrounded by yellow tape. The disappearance of Miranda and her school friends did not involve violence. There were no fatalities. Joan was writing in a mystical, mythological, metaphorical frame of mind. I know this because she was a lifelong friend – and I can claim to be a Picnic expert.

We visited each other’s homes on many occasions. Once the Lindsays arrived on St Valentine’s Day and Joan gave me enough hints to detect the clues and decode the mystery – which, with her blessing, I subsequently revealed in a series of columns. Clearly EM Forster’s A Passage to India, with its fateful (but not fatal) picnic near a cave-filled monolith, had its influence on Joan’s novel. But I was the first to discover that her prime inspiration was the so-called “Moberly-Jourdain incident” as told in a book called The Ghosts of Versailles, in which two women wandering through the royal gardens at Versailles convinced themselves that they’d been miraculously transported back in time from the early 20th century to encounter Marie Antoinette and her entourage near the Petit Trianon. The English ladies’ story thrilled the readers of supernatural writings for decades – until the sad discovery that in all likelihood they had merely stumbled on a gathering of decadent French aesthetes wandering around the grounds in period drag. When I raised the subject with Joan, she agreed: “That story inspired my book.”

In simplest terms, Joan’s work of fiction is science fiction – in frills. She lived and died without believing in sequential time. That’s why her autobiography was called Time Without Clocks. It’s why she wore no watch, had no clock in her home. It’s why the coachman’s watch stops on the picnic.

Joan’s belief in the all-at-onceness of time is, to a surprising extent, shared by science (even Einstein saw sequential time as an illusion, “albeit a very convincing one”). So to her, Miranda and the girls are not lost in physical space but in time. They are with us still, safe and unharmed. As far as Joan’s beliefs are concerned, the girls might have walked down from the Rock in time to walk the red carpet at the movie premiere. They might reappear today or tomorrow.

So, despite the ideological violence Hanson continues to wreak on our body politic with her Billy Tea Party, I was not suggesting anything violent happen to her. She might urge that electric cattle prods be used on protesters, but I was merely suggesting she join Miranda in another dimension. To get lost in time for a time. For surely her views, so anachronistic, prove she’s lost in time already.