AustLit

'Critical attention to landscape in Australian cinema often reproduces and consolidates an inherently (white) masculine relationship to Australian space. At the same time, some of the best-known Australian films suggest otherwise. The movement of a group of white schoolgirls and female teachers towards the monolithic rock in Peter Weir's iconic Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) provides a classic case in point. As Michael Bliss argues, 'the journey into the outback, which is also considered an Aboriginal domain, becomes a confrontation with the symbolic dark realm' that non-Aboriginal characters 'fervently attempt to deny', and although the trip to the rock is identified with 'an untamed, virtually Edenic region', the 'area around the rock is perceived of by humans in negative postlapsarian terms'.' (Introduction)