The grassed back half of the school where we played when I was a child was called the Back Paddock, and sometimes we found things there. The Back Paddock bordered a quiet suburban street on one side, and on the other was the high barbed wire of one of the state’s largest juvenile-detention facilities. Teenagers broke into the Back Paddock at night. It must have been perfect in the privacy of the dark. In the mornings before class began we would find beer cans and broken bottles of rum, KitKat wrappers, syringes, and wet condoms filled with semen. These, and the strange things that sometimes happened, like the teenage boy who once bicycled naked past the window of my grade-two classroom, were frequently attributed to the juvenile-detention center next door. There was, in the end, no real way of knowing where the bicyclists and beer cans and condoms came from. Besides, it was never those things that rattled me. What rattled me was the clothing.
When I was six, I found a pair of pink underpants by a tree stump. The next year, I found a pair of adult men’s track pants. I was eight when the clothing began migrating from the Back Paddock proper to the concrete playground outside my classroom doors. One winter morning I arrived early to school and found an entire outfit outside the grade-four classrooms. There was a blouse, a jumper, jeans, a bra, socks, and underwear. I remember that the underwear was dirty and had been left crotch-up on top of the pile. The pile frightened me for reasons I couldn’t articulate, and I backed away from it to the wet-weather shed, where I waited for the other children to arrive.
I asked our teacher later that day about the woman those clothes must have belonged to, and whether she was naked now. I was worried because it had been so cold the night before. Why were the woman’s clothes there, I asked, and not on her body? And where was that body now?
There is a scene in Picnic at Hanging Rock in which Mademoiselle de Poitiers, the French tutor at Appleyard College for Young Ladies, is overcome with horror. In Peter Weir’s 1975 film version, she looks around and shakes her head, but in Joan Lindsay’s original 1967 novel, the tutor’s thoughts are explicit. She stands by the edge of a creek, looking up at the rock overhead, and wonders “how anything so beautiful could be the instrument of evil.”
That nonspecific evil is at the center of both the novel and the film. Both follow a group of schoolgirls in rural Victoria who travel two hours outside of Melbourne to Hanging Rock, a volcanic outcrop that rises abruptly out of the plains. Four of the girls ascend the Rock shortly after lunchtime. Our last glimpse of them occurs as they disappear one by one, barefoot and corsetless, between two boulders at the top. One of girls is terrified and wants to turn back. She begs the others to stop. But they don’t listen, or else they cannot hear her. The girl stumbles, screaming, down the slope of the rock, passing their middle-aged mathematics instructor, Miss McGraw, as she descends. None of the three schoolgirls nor Miss McGraw ever return. They leave no trace. The mystery of what happened to the girls at Hanging Rock, never solved, reverberates in the town for years to come. It seems as though the landscape itself swallowed them up. (...)
“I used to go there when I was a kid,” recalled Helen Morse, who played Mademoiselle de Poitiers in the film. “We’d go for picnics and climb all over the rock, but it was only going back to make Picnic at Hanging Rock that I actually became aware of those faces in the rock.” The film lingers on these faces—ancient, volcanic, otherworldly—and, visiting the site, I saw for myself how the pockmarks and holes in the rock can, in the right light, seem to be literally looking down at you. “We were asserting that the landscape took these girls,” Hal McElroy, the film’s coproducer, explained. “So the landscape had to be alive. And anyone who’s spent any time in the Australian bush knows it is. It’s a kind of living, throbbing, and in fact a very noisy place.”
In Lindsay’s novel, the landscape is full of that throb and noise, that gloom. The bush is full of cicadas that “shrill” and leaves that “hang lifeless.” The slabs of the Rock “repudiate” the landscape around it. The boulders “force” their way toward the sky. In some instances Bush is capitalized, as if it were a proper noun, just as possessed of power and agency as a person.
As the schoolgirls ascend the rock, they are described as “unconscious of the strains and tensions of the molten mass that hold it anchored to the groaning earth.” But the animals know. The snakes and insects are attuned to the “creakings and shudderings” of the landscape, and they flee. The girls climb higher, as if bewitched, or seduced. The frightening thing about the seduction is what Lindsay suggests with all her anthropomorphisms—not merely that the landscape might possess its own agency, but that it might also have very bad intentions.
Picnic at Hanging Rock takes place in 1900, a year before six separate British colonies were federated into the Commonwealth of Australia. Federation was an era of Australian life when newly minted citizens set about casting their recent history into oblivion, trying to forget 112 years of institutional violence and bureaucratic bungling, indigenous displacement and massacre, and a vast prison experiment unmatched until the Soviet gulags. Australians in 1900, observed historian Robert Hughes, “embarked on this quest for oblivion with go-getting energy.” (...)
The scholar Elspeth Tilley has observed that all lost-child stories employ what she calls “the white-vanishing trope”: they begin with a white character—more often than not a girl—occupying a safe, familiar place, then crossing some kind of threshold. She enters an area of the unknown, where both spatial and temporal conditions are disrupted. Then she disappears. Whether or not she is found matters very little. The psychological effect on the community is always the real point, because the lost child is a kind of human sacrifice the culture gives up once in a while in order to vouchsafe its go-getting pursuit of oblivion. Because, Tilley argues, the white-vanishing trope is another way to keep Australians from fully confronting their history. “In endlessly retelling narratives of its members vanishing,” she writes, “white Australia… builds an ongoing myth of itself occupying a victim position.”
Pierce argues, in The Country of Lost Children, that these stories work to dramatize fears about the legitimacy of white occupation—the niggling feeling that not only were Europeans trespassing on the land of others’, but that their presence on the continent was uniquely unwelcome. By the nineteenth century, he says, Australians had begun to fear they might never feel legitimately “at home” in the country. “Children lost in places they might not belong focused anxieties,” Pierce writes, “not only over the legitimacy of land tenure, but of European Australians’ spiritual and psychological lodgement.” (...)
by Madeleine Watts, The Believer | Read more:
Image: Lost by Frederick McCubbin
When I was six, I found a pair of pink underpants by a tree stump. The next year, I found a pair of adult men’s track pants. I was eight when the clothing began migrating from the Back Paddock proper to the concrete playground outside my classroom doors. One winter morning I arrived early to school and found an entire outfit outside the grade-four classrooms. There was a blouse, a jumper, jeans, a bra, socks, and underwear. I remember that the underwear was dirty and had been left crotch-up on top of the pile. The pile frightened me for reasons I couldn’t articulate, and I backed away from it to the wet-weather shed, where I waited for the other children to arrive.
I asked our teacher later that day about the woman those clothes must have belonged to, and whether she was naked now. I was worried because it had been so cold the night before. Why were the woman’s clothes there, I asked, and not on her body? And where was that body now?
There is a scene in Picnic at Hanging Rock in which Mademoiselle de Poitiers, the French tutor at Appleyard College for Young Ladies, is overcome with horror. In Peter Weir’s 1975 film version, she looks around and shakes her head, but in Joan Lindsay’s original 1967 novel, the tutor’s thoughts are explicit. She stands by the edge of a creek, looking up at the rock overhead, and wonders “how anything so beautiful could be the instrument of evil.”That nonspecific evil is at the center of both the novel and the film. Both follow a group of schoolgirls in rural Victoria who travel two hours outside of Melbourne to Hanging Rock, a volcanic outcrop that rises abruptly out of the plains. Four of the girls ascend the Rock shortly after lunchtime. Our last glimpse of them occurs as they disappear one by one, barefoot and corsetless, between two boulders at the top. One of girls is terrified and wants to turn back. She begs the others to stop. But they don’t listen, or else they cannot hear her. The girl stumbles, screaming, down the slope of the rock, passing their middle-aged mathematics instructor, Miss McGraw, as she descends. None of the three schoolgirls nor Miss McGraw ever return. They leave no trace. The mystery of what happened to the girls at Hanging Rock, never solved, reverberates in the town for years to come. It seems as though the landscape itself swallowed them up. (...)
“I used to go there when I was a kid,” recalled Helen Morse, who played Mademoiselle de Poitiers in the film. “We’d go for picnics and climb all over the rock, but it was only going back to make Picnic at Hanging Rock that I actually became aware of those faces in the rock.” The film lingers on these faces—ancient, volcanic, otherworldly—and, visiting the site, I saw for myself how the pockmarks and holes in the rock can, in the right light, seem to be literally looking down at you. “We were asserting that the landscape took these girls,” Hal McElroy, the film’s coproducer, explained. “So the landscape had to be alive. And anyone who’s spent any time in the Australian bush knows it is. It’s a kind of living, throbbing, and in fact a very noisy place.”
In Lindsay’s novel, the landscape is full of that throb and noise, that gloom. The bush is full of cicadas that “shrill” and leaves that “hang lifeless.” The slabs of the Rock “repudiate” the landscape around it. The boulders “force” their way toward the sky. In some instances Bush is capitalized, as if it were a proper noun, just as possessed of power and agency as a person.
As the schoolgirls ascend the rock, they are described as “unconscious of the strains and tensions of the molten mass that hold it anchored to the groaning earth.” But the animals know. The snakes and insects are attuned to the “creakings and shudderings” of the landscape, and they flee. The girls climb higher, as if bewitched, or seduced. The frightening thing about the seduction is what Lindsay suggests with all her anthropomorphisms—not merely that the landscape might possess its own agency, but that it might also have very bad intentions.
Picnic at Hanging Rock takes place in 1900, a year before six separate British colonies were federated into the Commonwealth of Australia. Federation was an era of Australian life when newly minted citizens set about casting their recent history into oblivion, trying to forget 112 years of institutional violence and bureaucratic bungling, indigenous displacement and massacre, and a vast prison experiment unmatched until the Soviet gulags. Australians in 1900, observed historian Robert Hughes, “embarked on this quest for oblivion with go-getting energy.” (...)
The scholar Elspeth Tilley has observed that all lost-child stories employ what she calls “the white-vanishing trope”: they begin with a white character—more often than not a girl—occupying a safe, familiar place, then crossing some kind of threshold. She enters an area of the unknown, where both spatial and temporal conditions are disrupted. Then she disappears. Whether or not she is found matters very little. The psychological effect on the community is always the real point, because the lost child is a kind of human sacrifice the culture gives up once in a while in order to vouchsafe its go-getting pursuit of oblivion. Because, Tilley argues, the white-vanishing trope is another way to keep Australians from fully confronting their history. “In endlessly retelling narratives of its members vanishing,” she writes, “white Australia… builds an ongoing myth of itself occupying a victim position.”
Pierce argues, in The Country of Lost Children, that these stories work to dramatize fears about the legitimacy of white occupation—the niggling feeling that not only were Europeans trespassing on the land of others’, but that their presence on the continent was uniquely unwelcome. By the nineteenth century, he says, Australians had begun to fear they might never feel legitimately “at home” in the country. “Children lost in places they might not belong focused anxieties,” Pierce writes, “not only over the legitimacy of land tenure, but of European Australians’ spiritual and psychological lodgement.” (...)
The stories began, in Australia, with the wilderness swallowing up its lost white girls, but over time the girls began to fall victim to men. If the landscape was thought to act on the country’s women by seducing or absorbing them, it acted on men in quite another way. Men often seemed to emerge out of the landscape, like some kind of malevolent byproduct of the country’s cult of “mateship.” They were cast in the mold of John Jarratt’s rifle-wielding Mick in the film Wolf Creek, the infernal flip side of Paul Hogan’s friendly, larrikin Mick in Crocodile Dundee. But it was rarely felt that the harsh, unforgiving landscape of the country manifested the savagery of the men who had occupied, settled, and killed upon it. Rather, the evil of the land that Mademoiselle de Poitiers can see at Hanging Rock was the thing that worked through the men. (...)
To this day, electioneering politicians go out into the bush every three years to try and connect with the electorate. They praise the egalitarian, hardworking spirit of the bush, and thank the farmers who live there for extracting sugar and wheat and gold from the soil. They describe their policies as being “fair dinkum” and, wearing Akubra hats and standing in the middle of farms, surrounded by eucalyptus and drought-stricken plains, affirm their belief in Australia as “the land of the fair go.” While they’re at it, they praise the spirit of mateship, which is everywhere in the bush. The men turn and give each other those big Australian handshakes, roaring, “Good to see you, mate” in a way that never feels not aggressive.
The politicians know this is where the country conceives of its heart, even if most of us don’t live there. The work of the bush was done by men and their mates—mates built the farms, drove the sheep, felled the trees. Such work built character, made Australians eccentric, but pleasantly so—different, but not so different as to look anything less than British with a suntan. But there was no room for women in the mythology of the bush. Women weren’t mates.
To this day, electioneering politicians go out into the bush every three years to try and connect with the electorate. They praise the egalitarian, hardworking spirit of the bush, and thank the farmers who live there for extracting sugar and wheat and gold from the soil. They describe their policies as being “fair dinkum” and, wearing Akubra hats and standing in the middle of farms, surrounded by eucalyptus and drought-stricken plains, affirm their belief in Australia as “the land of the fair go.” While they’re at it, they praise the spirit of mateship, which is everywhere in the bush. The men turn and give each other those big Australian handshakes, roaring, “Good to see you, mate” in a way that never feels not aggressive.
The politicians know this is where the country conceives of its heart, even if most of us don’t live there. The work of the bush was done by men and their mates—mates built the farms, drove the sheep, felled the trees. Such work built character, made Australians eccentric, but pleasantly so—different, but not so different as to look anything less than British with a suntan. But there was no room for women in the mythology of the bush. Women weren’t mates.
by Madeleine Watts, The Believer | Read more:
Image: Lost by Frederick McCubbin
[ed. See also: The Sunburnt Country (The Believer).]
