Peter Weir's haunting and allusive Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) set in 1900 tells the story
of the mysterious disappearance of three schoolgirls and their teacher on a trip to a local
geological formation. The film is widely hailed as a classic of new Australian cinema seen as
exemplary of a peculiarly Australian style of heritage filmmaking. Anna Backman Rogers' study
considers Picnic from feminist psychoanalytic and decolonialising perspectives exploring its
setting in a colonised Australian bushland in which the Aboriginal people are a spectral
presence in a landscape stolen from them in pursuit of the white man's 'terra nullius'. She
delves into the film's production history addressing director Weir's influences and
preoccupations at the time of its making its reception and its lasting impact on visual
culture more broadly. Rogers addresses the film's treatment of the young schoolgirls and their
teachers seemingly as embodiments of an archetype of the 'eternal feminine' as objects of
the male gaze and in terms of ideas about female hysteria as a protest against gender norms.
She argues that Picnic is in fact highly subversive: a film that requires its viewers to read
its seductive surfaces against the grain of the image in order to uncover its psychological
depths.
