When the Australian director Peter Weir arranged to meet the writer Joan Lindsay in the early 1970s, her publisher warned him there was one question he absolutely must not ask. They were meeting to discuss turning Lindsay’s 1967 novel, Picnic at Hanging Rock, into a feature film. The book, which she wrote at 70 years old over a feverish month, opens on Valentine’s Day in 1900 at Appleyard College for Young Ladies, a fictional boarding school outside Melbourne. Girls in pinafores and straw hats are preparing for an outing to Hanging Rock, where giant obelisks of red stone jut out of the earth and create a labyrinth of craggy interstices—a geological marvel and a sacred site for Aboriginal Australians.



In Picnic, Lindsay tells the story of three friends—the bold ringleader, Miranda; the pretty heiress, Irma; and the curious, intelligent Marion—who break away from their classmates to explore the contours of the mountain. Trailing behind them is their chubby, whining classmate Edith and a math teacher, Greta McGraw. Of the five women who set off on the trail to the rock, only Edith returns, screaming her head off. Several days later, Irma also emerges from the woods, not remembering a single thing that happened to her. Miranda, Marion, and Miss McGraw are never found, vanished without a trace.

Weir was told not to ask whether the story was true and was wary of asking about the ending. Lindsay certainly flirted with the idea that she had based the mystery on her own girlhood experiences. “Whether Picnic at Hanging Rock is fact or fiction, my readers must decide for themselves,” the novel’s epigraph reads. “As the fateful picnic took place in the year nineteen hundred, and all the characters who appear in this book are long since dead, it hardly seems important.” The possibility it might have a basis in reality fueled the book’s cult success. But Lindsay refused to discuss the inspiration any further. Weir pressed her on the ending. Did she think the girls had been abducted? Dropped into a black hole? Transported to another plane of consciousness? She would only tell him that all options were possible, and continued to sip her coffee.

Despite his prying, Weir earned Lindsay’s blessing for an adaptation. His 1975 film, which is now part of the Criterion Collection, feels like a long dream sequence, suffused in pink light. The pacing is languorous, woozy, dipped in honey. The first shot lingers on girls lazily tightening each other’s corsets; there is a sense that these girls are complicit in their own bindings, but that they also don’t take them too seriously. Miranda, in the film version, is an ethereal blonde who waltzes into the wilderness as her acolytes follow, magnetized by her hazy aura. When the film originally aired, many moviegoers walked out upset. They could not stand the open ending, the blunt opacity of the unsolved mystery. Weir’s film is a poem about not knowing—the interiors of women, the fates of those who choose a new path—and it stands alone as one of the most exhilarating, and also frustrating, films ever made.



These are big bloomers to fill. Deciding that it was time for a modern update, a team of Australian television producers have made a new six-part series based on Lindsay’s novel, which airs in the United States on Amazon Prime on May 25. The series, adapted by writers Beatrix Christian and Alice Addison, immediately feels distinct from the film version, though it is still set in 1900 and is an incredibly detailed period piece down to the last lace glove.