Think you know the classic Picnic at Hanging Rock? Time to think again

OK, let’s get this out of the way first. Yes, there will be plenty of cries of “Miranda!” No, there will not be a giant rock on the stage. Yes, the schoolgirls will be in white dresses. And no, it is not a true story.

“It’s just really, really cool,” says Olivia DeJonge, one of the five actors who are bringing Joan Lindsay’s myth-making 1967 classic – about four teenage schoolgirls and their teacher who go missing during a bush picnic in 1900 – to the stage for the Sydney Theatre Company.

“To see this story told in this way, I think you’ll come out of it feeling really affected. You might come out of it feeling disgusted, or you might feel inspired or prideful, but it’ll make you feel something. And that’s the pursuit of any good piece of art, to evoke a response in the audience, whether that’s good or bad.”

A scene from the 1975 film adaptation of Picnic at Hanging Rock, starring (from left) Karen Robson as Irma, Anne-Louise Lambert as Miranda, Jane Vallis as Marion and Christine Schuler as Edith. Credit: B.E.F.

Ever since the book was published in 1967 and after Peter Weir’s woozy 1975 film adaptation, a critical and box-office hit, the story of the picnic and its location at Hanging Rock – an extinct volcano and sacred gathering place for the Dja Dja Wurrung, Woi Wurrung and Taungurung peoples in central Victoria – has become the stuff of legend. Were the girls and their teacher really swallowed up by the rock?

The answer is a straight no, but that hasn’t stopped countless Google searches, theories and even celebrity psychics from attempting to unravel the mystery. And much like Mad Max or even Muriel’s Wedding, the film has such a firm grip on the Australian psyche that you don’t need to have seen it, to be able to quote or visualise it. Most recently, it was adapted into a six-part series for Foxtel in 2019.

This stage adaptation by Tom Wright leans into that mythology, but it isn’t a straight re-creation of Lindsay’s novel, nor does it try to imitate Weir’s film.

“It honours Joan Lindsay’s novel more than it does the film. It very much follows the story of Picnic at Hanging Rock that we all know,” says Ian Michael, the show’s director. “But Tom [Wright] has really leaned into these ideas of time that Joan Lindsay also did, even further in the sense that we meet these five storytellers on stage who then become the vessels for the story, become almost possessed by it, who give us so much of the exposition and the set-up of the Picnic at Hanging Rock that we know.”

Director Ian Michael at rehearsals for Picnic at Hanging Rock at Sydney Theatre Company. Credit: Daniel Boud

In other words, “Don’t expect a lot of frilly white dresses,” says Michael.

DeJonge – who won the AACTA award for best supporting actress for playing Priscilla Presley in Baz Lauhrmann’s kaleidoscopic biopic Elvis – and Michael are sitting with castmate Kirsty Marillier on a break from rehearsals. There are five in the cast, which also includes Lorinda Merrypor, Masego Pitso and Contessa Treffone, and they are dividing the story’s 17 roles between them.

For Marillier, that means not only playing one of the schoolgirls, Irma, who returns from the rock, and a policeman, who is a conglomerate of several characters in the book.

Kirsty Marillier (left), Masego Pitso and Lorinda Merrypor in rehearsals for Picnic at Hanging Rock.Credit: Daniel Boud

“I feel a lot of empathy for [Irma],” says Marillier, “Because she can’t grasp what happened, but she knows whatever happened to her was deeply, profound, traumatic, monumental and life altering, but she doesn’t know why or how.”

DeJonge, meanwhile, plays Mrs Appleyard, the strict headmistress of the exclusive boarding school the girls attend.

“She’s a complex lady, a very, very complex lady,” says DeJonge. “She has a fierceness about her, a harshness, she follows what she calls her ‘inner-knowing’.

“But I think the beauty of this adaptation, too, is that there is also colour to her in terms of her weaknesses and her past. We do catch glimpses of her questioning her own intentions or the intentions of the world around her, but she’s still sort of ransacked by societal expectations.”

Olivia DeJonge plays Mrs Appleyard, the headmistress of the exclusive boarding school in Picnic at Hanging Rock.Credit: Daniel Boud

Mrs Appleyard – who is seen as the colonial force in the story, a very British woman who has been “brought up to believe that is the only thing in the world” – is the “most complicated person I’ve ever played, without a doubt”, says DeJonge.

Does that make it challenging or fun?

“Massive challenge,” says DeJonge. “And I’ve experienced growing pains on this, too, because you get to a point where you’re like, ‘Oh, I’m in unfamiliar territory now,’ you can kind of feel yourself wanting to sort of nestle away.

“But I’ve been looking for something challenging to do, so this feels like it’s exactly where I’m supposed to be … and rehearsals is such a thing that I’m not used to, obviously, working predominantly on TV and film. I’m just lavishing in. To have all this time to sit in the character just feels like one big soak … you have five weeks until you do the first take!”

Joan Lindsay, who wrote Picnic at Hanging Rock when she was 70, with her husband, Sir Daryl Lindsay.

The story of Picnic at Hanging Rock came to Lindsay in a dream, according to the book Beyond the Rock by Janelle McCulloch. It was winter 1966 and Lindsay, who was then 70 years old, told her housekeeper she had dreamt of a summer picnic at Hanging Rock, near Mount Macedon in central Victoria.

Lindsay, according to the book, sketched out the story – about a group of teenage girls from an upper-class school who set off on a Valentine’s Day picnic to Hanging Rock – within a day. The dream returned to Lindsay every night for a week and within two weeks she had finished the story.

William Ford’s At the Hanging Rock, which can be seen at the NGV in Melbourne.

When it was published a year later, the book – which Lindsay named after William Ford’s 1875 painting At the Hanging Rock – was a critical success, but it wasn’t until Weir’s film in 1975 that the mythology around the story, and whether its central mystery about the missing schoolgirls, was true.

Even Lindsay wrote at the beginning of the book that it was up to readers to decide if it is, “fact or fiction”.

And while that central mystery is what the book is most remembered for – that deep fear of the bush – its deeper cautionary tale is of exerting control over the uncontrollable, of the English colonialists trying to tame the Australian landscape and its traditional owners.

“I’ve been very fascinated by the story for a long time,” says Michael, a proud Noongar man. “And always quite fascinated about our intense obsession with people who go missing in the bush, and what that means and what it means to disrupt land.

Hanging Rock, in central Victoria, is a sacred Indigenous site.

“And I always think that these four girls who go to the rock, they’re teaching Miss McCraw, that they weren’t meant to be there. This was a traditional sacred site for initiation, and especially for young men, and they just weren’t meant to be there.

“And so when I thought about this at this production, I knew we couldn’t do it with five white women, mostly because it’s bookended by these two present-day scenes, and that our present day doesn’t look like that any more.”

Casting women of colour to play the schoolgirls also lends greater significance to the text, says Michael, as it won’t be as easy to overlook the racial themes in the story.

“I think some people will find that confronting because that’s not the Picnic at Hanging Rock they know,” says Michael. “There are certain relationships and characters who exist in scenes where I think people will go, ‘Oh.’ For example, [one of the students] Sara is played by Masego Pitso, who is a South African woman, and so for a young black woman to be treated the way that she is by Ms Appleyard will be confronting for people.”

Adds DeJonge: “I think this play is a step closer to acknowledging the history of our country.”

Kirsty Marillier (left) and Olivia DeJonge star in Picnic at Hanging Rock. Credit: Louise Kennerley

Marillier agrees. “Exactly. Going back and reading the novel, I was like, this [Indigenous angle] is in there, it’s deeply in there. When [Lindsay] talks about who has been at the rock, who has come before, where are the tracks of the people that have walked through? She does a lot of inference, but she was incredibly smart.”

Adds Michael: “A criticism of the story is that it’s a very white story, but I really do believe that Joan Lindsay – so there’s one mention of blackfellas in the story, and it’s the tracker, that’s the only mention of blackfellas in the entire story – and I choose to think she did that on purpose because we have to question why that is, why be retelling a story like that without any [Indigenous] presence existing? That’s something that I am thinking about all day.

“But I also think she was writing with a lens that was hers, and I like to think that she chose not to write it because it wasn’t her space, she can’t write that. I give Joan Lindsay lots of credit.”

Picnic at Hanging Rock is at the Sydney Opera House from February 17 to April 5.

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