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This Adaptations and Transformations essay considers the way the meaning of Joan Lindsay’s novel ‘Picnic At Hanging Rock’ is changed in Peter Weir’s 1975 adaptation.
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A menacing brooding force, Joan Lindsay’s depiction of Hanging Rock as a place of antiquity is accompanied by an overwhelming sense of its omnipotence; a sacredness incongruent with the gaze of a eurocentric perspective. Taking up this idea, Weir’s 1975 production accentuates the rock’s immensity but diverges from Lindsay’s prose fiction in its haunting focus on loss. Eerily foreboding, panpipes evoke, from the outset, the interminable mood of lamentation that is the correlative of the girl’s disappearance. For Weir, the emptiness of a landscape bereft of Miranda is associated with despair whilst in Lindsay’s prose fiction, the tonality of the narrative is unsentimental and unforgiving, insinuating that the mystery is central to the narrative has its origins in the arrogance of invasion.
