On the 50th anniversary of Picnic at Hanging Rock, director Peter Weir, actress Anne Lambert, and others reveal hitherto unshared memories of this trailblazing — and mystery-laden — moment in Australian cinema.
Peter Weir’s 1975 film of Joan Lindsay’s 1967 novel Picnic at Hanging Rock continues to tantalise us with the riddle that opens this most iconic of Australian mysteries: “On Saturday 14th February 1900, a party of schoolgirls from Appleyard College picnicked at Hanging Rock near Mt Macedon in the state of Victoria. During the afternoon, several members of the party disappeared without a trace …”
“I may have made Picnic 50 years ago, but the experience remains timeless,” Peter tells The Weekly in an exclusive interview.
It’s eerily similar for audiences who, for five decades, have watched this unfathomable and unforgettable film. And have been left intrigued, disturbed and beguiled. What happened that hazy summer day at Hanging Rock 125 years ago? Is Joan Lindsay’s story based on true events or a work of pure fiction?
“It’s a secret,” the film’s star Anne Lambert tells me, channelling her character Miranda, “and there aren’t enough secrets in the world today.”
True enough, but the elegant way Weir unleashed that secret in our imaginations electrified the world’s view of Australia. The film inspired a new wave of visionaries, both local and international, in the fields of film, fashion, literature, and art. And its depiction of the bush sparked a tourism boom. Anne, just 19 when she shot the film, became the angelic face of that revolution.
“It was a life-changing experience,” she reflects in the still-tremulous voice of Miranda St Clare. “Everyone on set had the sense that this film was special and different, very new. There was a distinctive quality: the feel, the atmosphere, the otherworldliness. It was truly an unrepeatable moment in time. And for 50 years, people around the world have been sharing their Picnic story with me. The film has had an enormous impact on so many.”
In 2025, the film’s 50th year — and the 125th year since the picnic allegedly took place — Picnic at Hanging Rock will be reimagined by a new generation of creatives: as a new production of Tom Wright’s acclaimed play for the Sydney Theatre Company and also Black Swan Theatre, a rumoured fashion line by an internationally-renowned local designer, and in a special global re-release of Peter’s 1998 Director’s Cut, freshly restored, with a new trailer and original poster art commissioned by the British Film Institute.
“With classic films, technology matters, and 4K restoration [which enhances to four-times the resolution of television] was like a surge of energy transmitted to the film,” says Peter’s daughter, Ingrid, who in 2013 was given the remit of keeping the film available and updated to the latest technology. “All these festivals want to screen it because it is a film that is both ancient and modern at the same time. The girls could be characters in a Greek tragedy. Or they could be heading out right now to picnic at the rock.”
For audiences, it’s a chance to revisit the story and the mysteries at its Valentine’s heart. Even the origins of the book are steeped in the supernatural. Its author, Joan, was a Melbourne society darling when she dreamed the story, aged 69, in 1966. Inspired by childhood visits to Hanging Rock, Joan woke one day “possessed” and wrote the novel in a fever dream that lasted 12 strange days.
“I’d lie there thinking of it so clearly, obsessing. When I woke, I knew exactly what the next bit was going to be,” she said.
Joan was a well-known mystic, with a spooky sensitivity for seeing things in the bush that others couldn’t. Hanging Rock called to her just as it had picnickers since the 1850s.
Over 10,000 years prior, the ancient monolith had been an important meeting place and Ngargee (Corroboree) ceremonial ground for three traditional owner groups: the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung, the Dja Dja Wurrung and the Taungurung. Today they share custody and connection to Hanging Rock and know it as Ngannelong or Anneyelong.
Bleeding its story across primordial and new worlds, Picnic at Hanging Rock was uniquely Australian, mining early settlers’ terrors of being swallowed or lost in a prehistoric land. Indeed, near Hanging Rock is an early monument to three children forever lost in 1867. It may have inspired Joan’s dreamings, but she remained schtum: “Whether Picnic at Hanging Rock is fact or fiction, my readers must decide for themselves.”
Peter’s most vivid recollections of shooting the film are of the rock itself.
“Film memories age in a different way to life memories — none more than Picnic,” the 80-year-old says. “Those were intense experiences, and the days we shot at the rock remain crystal clear to me. It had a very powerful atmosphere, especially when viewed through the imagination of Joan Lindsay. I’d often get to the rock before the crew, or stay late after they’d gone, soaking in the changing light, seeing angles I’d not seen before.”
Not everyone was at ease. The shoot, like the film itself, was beset by eerie moments. As they did at the film’s picnic, the watches of cast and crew often stopped for no reason. John Jarratt, who played Albert, describes furious storm cells orbiting the film set but never losing a drop of rain onto Hanging Rock. Russell Boyd, whose spellbinding cinematography for Picnic at Hanging Rock won that year’s BAFTA, insists that “equipment often went missing. Once, a generator fell from a helicopter trying to drop it on top of the rock.”
The paranormal activity of the landscape enhanced the experimentalism on set.
“In the 1970s film world, in Australia, there was a sense that you could try anything,” says Peter. “That reckless energy made it a wonderful time to be young and making pictures.”
Enraptured by a drowsy light that hit the rock between noon and one o’clock daily, Russell draped bolts of bridal veil in tulle and organza across the camera lens to achieve the film’s famously dewy, dreamy quality — a technique soon rife in advertising.
“I was very inspired by Tom Roberts and the Australian Impressionist painters of that era,” says Russell, now 80, who worked with Peter on five further films. “They loved using the light to give their art a distinctly Australian aesthetic. Still photographers use gauze over the lens to soften images, and the imagery of [British photographer] David Hamilton also inspired Peter and me. The girls were set up to be visually beautiful — the art department put incredible detail into their hair and dresses and accessories — and our job was to harness that beauty.”
The exquisite costumes used on Picnic at Hanging Rock became part of the film’s legend. “The dressmaker, Judith Dorsman, went above and beyond,” recalls Anne. “The attention to detail, the quality of the craftsmanship, the symbolism woven into each of those dresses, each character with little talismans of flowers and birds.”
Judith used lace and silk to emphasise the wealth of the girls’ austere college, plus drawstring corsets and pin-tucks to convey the repression of their budding sensuality.
The film’s delicate aura — surreal against Australia’s harsh terrain — continues to inspire.
“Picnic is hugely iconic, and often referenced in international fashion,” says renowned stylist Nicole Bonython-Hines. “That Victorian style — fragile, whimsical, romantic — is timeless. The girls’ virginal white dresses infer innocence, frailty and femininity.”
And, curiously, rebellion. “Alexander McQueen’s 2005 show, Picnic at Hanging Rock, had robots flinging paint on models,” laughs Ingrid. “He saw the film’s unpredictable, dark, romantic edge and used it as a creative portal, as many musicians have too.”
Peter also brought an agent provocateur onto the set in legendary pop artist Martin Sharp.
“Martin contacted me during pre-production. He was obsessed with the book,” says Peter. “In a large notebook, he’d placed a single page of the novel on the left-hand side, and on the right, his dense notes. He’d done this to every page!”
“Martin worked in the art department, finding iconic props for the girls and the headmistress. He saw the book as encoded, whether intentionally by Joan Lindsay or in some other mystical way. It jolted me, causing me to look at the story searching for my own perspective.”
In this heady brew of Jungian symbolism, the film needed a rock of its own. Patricia Lovell, who played Miss Pat on the ABC children’s show, Mr Squiggle, had bought a second-hand copy of the novel in 1969. She was enraptured. Despite having no experience as a producer, she secured the film rights from Joan Lindsay for $100 and handpicked Peter Weir to direct.
“The spirit of the whole production was due to her,” Peter acknowledges. Anne agrees: “Pat was extraordinary. I’d arrive on set at 5am and she’d be in front of the school ironing our dresses. She was involved at every level, loving and caring, ensuring synchronicity.”
One of Pat’s most arduous tasks was corralling the film’s biggest star, Rachel Roberts. The formidable Welsh actress played Mrs Appleyard, the college’s headmistress.
“Rachel was a dragon,” recalls Anne with a shiver. “She liked a drink and got scarier and scarier the more she did.”
One night, Pat was woken in the night by Rachel, drunk and naked, bellowing solicitations from a balcony to men on the street below. Although brilliant in Picnic at Hanging Rock, Rachel’s turbulent life foundered afterward. In 1980, she poisoned herself with caustic lye and fell through a glass window, dying aged 53. Conversely, says Peter, Pat “looked after the young actresses with fun and energy”. That was crucial given the alchemy required of the juvenile cast, particularly the fateful lead trio of girls Miranda (Anne), Irma (Karen Robson) and Marion (Jane Vallis).
“Peter was looking for qualities in us that perhaps even we didn’t know we possessed,” Anne believes. The success of the film dealt different hands to each: Karen Robson retired from acting and became a lawyer. She and her lawyer husband lived in Los Angeles. Jane Vallis continued to act on TV until breast cancer cut her down in 1993 at the age of 36.
Anne — whose Miranda, Peter believes, is the “soul of Picnic at Hanging Rock” — was already a fledgling star (as “Fancy Nancy” the face of Fanta) when she won the role. Picnic at Hanging Rock made her an international icon, an acclaim she struggled with.
“I stopped talking about it for a long while,” she confesses. “It was strange to see myself frozen in time. Unlike Miranda, who is worldly and confident, I was shy and self-conscious. She isn’t so much a character as a quality, so now I trust destiny: it was written in the stars.”
After Picnic at Hanging Rock, Anne, now 69, acted intermittently but is today a psychotherapist in northern NSW.
“It’s intense and intimate entering another person’s world and acting really set me up for that work,” she explains. “The fact that Picnic exerts such fascination 50 years on is proof that trauma stays present. The sounds of that film — the pan pipes in the score, Edith’s scream — can still trigger the past in the present. The last time I saw the film, a few years ago at a festival in Germany, I saw it objectively for the first time. I was incredibly aware of how beautiful it is, how perfectly crafted. It’s almost flawless.”
Not to everyone. Some critics, particularly in the US, found the film’s inconclusive ending utterly bamboozling. For many, including Peter, it remains Picnic at Hanging Rock’s most enduring virtue.
“This was no ordinary who-done-it; it was a who-done-it without a solution,” he tells The Weekly. “I knew I was going to play with the genre, frustrating the conventional ending. There was no safety net, no middle ground. The film would either succeed or fail.”
History spoke. The Observer called it “the first true masterpiece of Australian cinema”. Yet the riddle of whether the story was truth or fiction continues to niggle at audiences. Even after her death, in 1984, Joan toyed with readers, ordering that a final chapter which explained the girls’ fate (excised by publishers before the original publication) be released post-mortem. In it, the girls throw their corsets off the rock, enter “a hole in space” and transmogrify into lizards. It kept the mystery a mystery.
“It was like dropping a stone into the water,” the author said of her novel in 1974. “The thing that happened on St Valentine’s Day went on spreading, out and out and out, in circles.”
Peter, too, made a cryptic film even more so by cutting 12 minutes for a 1998 re-release — a move that angered Anne, who claimed it was no longer his to tinker with.
“What Anne probably didn’t know was the edit I made, I had wanted to make in 1976 for the film’s world release,” Peter reveals to The Weekly. “Despite its success, I felt it could be improved. Too much ‘languor’ and the fine tension of the film suffers. The investors were incredulous. ‘You want to cut a hit?’ They wouldn’t have it, to my frustration, but I got my chance with the truthfully labelled, Director’s Cut — that’s the film you see today.”
Picnic’s opening line — “All that we see or seem is but a dream … a dream within a dream” (from an 1850 poem by Edgar Allan Poe) — became both its prophecy and its legacy. Weir would go on to make some of cinema’s most beloved films — Gallipoli, Dead Poets’ Society, The Truman Show, Master & Commander — but none elicit the awe of Picnic.
“It is a film of great beauty and mystery,” Ingrid observes. “Our world now is very literal. Picnic at Hanging Rock is an escape into a more ethereal landscape.”
The STC production of Picnic at Hanging Rock runs 17 Feb–5 April at the Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House; and the Malthouse/Black Swan production at Heath Ledger Theatre, Perth 1-17 April. Catch special 50th anniversary screenings of the film at Melbourne’s Cinema Nova from 20 Feb and the Cremorne Orpheum in Sydney on 12 March (with an introduction by Peter Weir). For information on future screenings, visit picnicathangingrock.au.
This article originally appeared in the March 2025 issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly. Subscribe so you never miss an issue!
