Playwright Tom Wright shares the inspiration behind his adaptation of Picnic at Hanging Rock. 

St Valentine’s Day, 2016. A day of portals, of opening the heart to love, of new affairs, of secret ones, of opening delicate lace cards like doors, to find enigmatic poems written within.

A pair of university students, far from Osaka, are meandering up Hanging Rock. For some reason ludicrous parasols are daintily propped on their shoulders. One stops, pouts, mock-coquette; the other takes out her phone and starts filming. The girl further up the Rock turns to profile, stares into a very dark shadow, and trills

“Miranda! … Miranda!”

She vanishes into the cool dark. The girl with the camera giggles self-consciously.

“Miranda” she softly repeats as she checks the screen.

Why do some tales mutate into myths? Since it came to light in 1966 Picnic at Hanging Rock has hung in the collective mind. Mention it casually and people frown, say,

“They went missing didn’t they?”

The news that the whole story is an invention is greeted with perplexed surprise.

 “No, no, I was sure it really happened…”

If Picnic wasn’t written we would have had to invent it.

A country of lost children.

Waifs weeping in McCubbins.

Children moving silently through bush that never changes until they vanish utterly. From the beginning the white experience of the land was one of trepidation; it seemed nature would take our innocents…if we didn’t watch them. Maybe there was suspicion in the ether that this land needed to be watched too, that it changed, did odd things when unobserved. This lonely continent, which would alter itself when your back was turned…

But this land isn’t empty, and never was. It wasn’t unknown to human minds, in fact minds had concentrated so hard on it for so long that a complex web of myths, rites, songs, wisdoms had been spun, so dense the crossover space between human body and land became blurred, unfocussed, itself a song…

In this case, not lost children but lost adolescents, in the liminal space between girlhood and womanhood. The country that will not grow up, cannot grow up, trapped in a landscape which it cannot comprehend. Europeans crawling over it like ants. Taxonomy, endless taxonomy. Every species, every stone, every dot on the map, labelled. New words for new things. But in the end only the things that could be seen could be named. There was no name for the things that could not be seen. And there was no time against which things might be measured. No temporal landmarks, no key dates of history; what is a hundred, a thousand, a million years when there’s no history?

In England everything had been done before: quite often by one’s own ancestors, over and over again.

But here? What did ‘Time’ mean when yesterday and tomorrow seemed to collude against the present?

Irma climbs the Rock, wading through a morass of verdure in the heat:

Whoever invented female fashions

For nineteen hundred

Should be made to walk through bracken

In three layers of petticoats.

She isn’t of nineteen hundred, she is of now. She is watching herself. In the Rock’s terms, 1900 and 2016 are the same. It dreams in millions, not split fractions. It is Hanging – in time, in space. (Maybe it is also the hanging rock, a place of killing, of removal from the world? After all, why is that coachman staring at the girls’ calves, gently wetting his lips? Nature is cruel, very cruel…)

Oh, wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! 

Exclaims Miranda, but a different Miranda, in a different story of exile and dreams. A story of the sea of love, where Mrs Appleyard dreams of her late husband’s caresses, where Michael FitzHubert dreams of mermaids and gentle laughing female voices.

Miranda, whose name means wonder. 

Miranda, who has been kept from herself, who is secreted away in a cave, deep in a rock.

Miranda, the beauty that does not know her beauty for lack of any culture with which to compare herself.

Miranda, the European who knows nothing of Europe.

Miranda, enchantress. Miranda the naïf.

Oh, what a wonderful new world, that has such people in it!

 In Picnic at Hanging Rock, Miranda has transmuted again. Now she is a cipher.

The girls yearn for her return when she will redeem their suffering. Sara the orphan carries a devotional icon in her underwear. When the girls in their gym class transmogrify into maenads, one girl prays to Saint Valentine: Let them leave Irma alone, for Miranda’s sake, for Miranda’s sake…

Miranda starts to fade from real life, become myth; her hair more golden with every memory, her smile more beatific.

Miranda the spirit guide, who jumps down from the cart and opens the gate into the Hanging Rock picnic area, ushering them all in, like a pied piper.

Or, Miranda as Australia. The emotional intuitive. Not necessarily anti-intellectual but definitely not intellectual. Pulchritudinous, in an Australian idiom; like the land, beautiful, but impassive. Difficult to read, destined to be endlessly discussed.

Or, Miranda as a conduit. A lightning conductor. She 'magnetises air', things are drawn to her, animal, vegetable, mineral. Maybe she precipitates time, and events as well…

Names for things that have not been named, no names for things that were once named. The Kulin wisdom of Ngannelong has no role in Lindsay’s text. In fact the only Indigenous figure is a tracker, brought in to find the girls, then dismissed with all the other failed search methods. But under the text, secreted between the words, there are presences. The thick bush on the Rock is described as having no tracks;

Or if there have been tracks, they are long since obliterated.

As if Miranda, Marion, Irma, are re-making some lost path, finding some lost sequence of events that unlock a key, a song, a rite.

The Kulin treated the Rock with reverence. Young people that came here for thousands of years went up children and came down adults. It has always been a zone of metamorphosis. Sexual, physical, social, and more….

When Major Mitchell first started the drawing of white lines on the black map, he passed through these volcanic ghosts. It was 1836. He climbed Geburhh, and glimpsed Port Phillip. In a cerebral game of fevered word-association he renamed the mountain Macedon, after another Phillip’s homeland. And radiating out, a pattern of classicism darkened and spread; Mount Alexander for Alexander the Great, Phillip’s son; a river Campaspe for Alexander’s concubine. And our little mamelon of trachyte, brooding on the plain? Some years later Robert Hoddle scribbled Mount Diogenes on his map, in keeping with the Major’s fancy, named for the philosopher of cynicism, conscience of Alexander’s age. It was said that when the Great Man came across the cynic, the philosopher was staring attentively at a skeleton. The emperor stood above, the thinker squatted below. “And what are you doing?’ Alexander asked finally. “I am searching for the bones of your father. But the trouble is, I cannot tell them apart from the bones of a slave.”

This is, of course, only a story. But history treats it as if it happened. We have a habit of doing this.

What is this Rock? A portal to other worlds, if only you have the password, the key, the combination? Maybe the characters who do pass through have some capacity to glimpse the noumenal: Miss McCraw, who sees the world through calculus as a study of Change; Marion, who can grasp the abstract idea of Time; Miranda, who feels, and loves.

Those rejected: Edith, a materialist who lacks the imagination to inhabit a bigger world; Michael, who is unreconciled to the land and himself; Irma, who is worldly, not other-worldly.

What is this Rock? A site of transformation, a magic box in which objects can be made to disappear, or turn into something else? An antipodean monster park of Bomarzo, a sort of anti-Eden, where Nature is littered with grotesqueries and grottoes, caverns where the living may speak to spirits, and sometimes, if the mood is right, the spirits may whisper back?

Joan Lindsay possessed the remarkable ability to stop time. Or, more precisely, she claimed her presence caused watches to halt. For her time was not linear but like an oddly-hued cloud which hung all around her. She didn’t have a physicist’s understanding, it was an artist’s sense; felt, not calculated with a pencil on a white sheet. Time changed shape and mood depending on circumstances and, of course, place.

Her novel is one of these places; time is elastic, or compressed. No-one is sure how long they are on the Rock; what feels like a sweep of seasons in Woodend is only moments up high. The Rock’s warping and vibrating of time increases as you near it until it resonates like a million cicadas. Like the zone in the Strugatsky Brothers’ Roadside Picnic (1971). Perhaps this is another way of understanding our weird fable; in this novel the picnic is an analogy. It is suggested that there are certain places where something not of this universe has visited. The best way to understand these visitations is to imagine a picnic. Perhaps a group of girls have arrived, eaten, gossiped, sung, snoozed, then packed up and left. But behind them, the residue; crumbs, hairpins, a pair of spectacles, a book of equations, a teaspoon, a silk stocking. Once the girls leave, timid creatures come from their burrows. They investigate, crawl over the objects left behind but can never comprehend their purpose.

The little animals are Western rational humans who stray into the picnic’s residue, finding that the world has changed in a way incomprehensible. Maybe the other entities have never noticed humans, any more than humans notice lizards and ants and spiders during their picnics. We are small animals, caterpillars, centipedes, moths. And we will never understand.

St Valentine’s Day, 1900.

A liminal year, between one century and another, between a Victorian era of colonisation and the era of nationhood, of wrestling with whom we really are. Are we in that time still? Or are we now in some new liminal time?

The two students from Osaka are coming back down the mountain. Their faces give nothing away. Have they found what they came for, up there, up on the rock ledge? What was this strange pilgrimage they were on? What exactly did they think they might find up there, among rocks dripping slowly back into the earth? They sit on a fallen tree; one of them has worn completely inappropriate shoes. I understand nothing of what they say; it is melodious and beautiful. Girlish, songlike. But one word is clear;

“Miranda…Miranda…Miranda…Miranda…”