very brief analysis of Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock because this year is its 50th anniversary

In interweaving colonial imagery with the natural Australian landscape, Peter Weir’s Australian New Wave film Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) adopts post-war anti-establishment questioning of Australian identity. The ambiguity of Appleyard College students’ disappearance highlighted in the epigraph, “On Saturday 14th February 1900…,” provides the gothic narrative documentary-like verisimilitude while simultaneously reflecting the ambiguity of Australian identity as the country gains increasing independence from the United Kingdom post-Vietnam War. The search for collective identity and thus belonging is further explored through the juxtaposition of colonial imagery, seen through the upper class costuming of the students and teachers of Appleyard College, against the superimposed photomontages of the natural Australian landscape. As the students picnic next to Hanging Rock, they escape from their boarding school characterised by high-bound colonial moral values and social repression enforced by 1970s censorship laws and radicalisation resulting from the Vietnam War. The gothic ambiguity of the disappearance of the girls, symbolic of loss of colonial white femininity emphasises anti-establishment Australian independence, where the defiant bush rejects colonial ideals, enforcing the power of the landscape in a pre-Christian pantheistic mystic manner. The helplessness of colonialism in the face of the Australian landscape is explored through the hazy atmosphere of the natural landscape, inspired by the Heidelberg School of art and the Impressionist art movement and created through the covering of camera lenses with nylon stockings. Further, the use of panflutes as a leitmotif throughout the film, especially in scenes where the landscape’s defiant power is emphasised, “venomous snakes and powerful ants,” contrasted against the colonial use of classical music including Bach and Mozart symbolises the increasing distance between Australia and Britain especially in the wake of 1970s second wave feminist liberation and the radicalisation of youth during the first televised war. As the disappearance of the girls remains ambiguous throughout the film, Weir critiques the colonial Australian identity, instead advocating for the creation of an identity not reliant on the United Kingdom and the colonisation of Australia. Thus, the contrast of colonial imagery with the natural Australian landscape in Picnic at Hanging Rock explores the tensions between colonialism and re-emerging independence of Australia, reflecting 1970s anti-establishment movements including second wave feminism and radicalisation by televised war.