Analysis Of Picnic At Hanging Rock

Peter Weir’s film is full of mysterious and expressionistic sounds and images that draw on Joan Lindsay’s book to create tension between the apparent refined college and the various forces in the Australian landscape. This tension is not exemplified through the attempt to combine the college and the Australian landscape but rather the difficulty of a traditional European college set up in the Australian bush, completely juxtaposed to the values of the country life. This is presented in both the novel and film with the clashing of the use of time between cultures, and the difficulty for Appleyard College to accept the barren Australian land as well the presentation of the European culture and appearances.

Picnic at Hanging Rock tests the apparent timelessness of Australia against the received concepts of European time, and the durability of the colony objected to natural and historical time. In the film and novel, the Europeans are steeped by their own tradition. They present an infatuation with time; constantly inventing new traditions to keep the chaos of natural time from their door. Mrs Appleyard - the principal of Appleyard College - is fixated with time and the order of things and this is opposed to the Australian bush, which prides itself on its natural movements of time, guided by the sun and heat of the day. However the events at Hanging rock cannot be measured by time. It is as though the girls do not just disappear from the rock, but they also disappear from time itself. The whole excursion of the rock cannot be checked and placed at a certain hour of the day, which is unfathomable to the Europeans. A chain reaction of unravelling occurs at the college not long after. The cracks in the college start to show, and traditi...

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...The ants take over the cake, marching their way through the remains of their picnic, and layers of clothing are taken off. It begins with the removing of the gloves on the journey towards the rock and continues with the ascent of the rock (excluding Edith) where the girls’ posh Victorian dresses are slowly peeled away. It can be drawn that this peeling away of layers can indicate the loosing of control and order the females contained on themselves. This display of unstable European civilisation in the bush increases the tension and differences of the two cultures.

In conclusion, it is a clash of two cultures utterly opposed to each other that creates tension in Picnic at Hanging Rock. The inability of the Europeans to abandon their rigid structure of life separates them from the Australian landscape ending in a hopeless combination of tragedy and unravelling values.