I still don’t think I can understand the fear I felt when I watched A Picnic At Hanging Rock. I hated nature when I was a kid but as a teen I respected it, and I now love it for its visuals, its surface, what it does for us.
A Picnic At Hanging Rock is centrally about disappearances at Hanging Rock. Girls wander up into the rock in a strange trance and three get lost. One returns sometime later but it is never said what happens to the rest. People in this world rarely disappear. We often know where they go. They die. There is an end to grapple with. Maybe we don’t get to talk with the ghost of our father but I know where he is. He’s nowhere. The same nowhere waiting for us all. I don’t know what happens to the girl in the film. The film has people search for answers but the rock face is as inscrutable a surface as one can know. The music haunted me. I would sometimes just think about the movie and it brought me back to that place. That strange fear of nothing. The nothing between the floor and the ceiling of our neighbors below us. Like nothing was watching me. Like there was some entity living where I couldn’t see it. I watched it recently and that feeling was gone. It was still a good movie but that ghost was gone.
There is a shot in the film of cake being conquered by ants. There is a contrast between the people trying to conquer a land and being instead conquered by it. This negative relationship between land and people is at the core of the film. That the two don’t really understand one another and in this misunderstanding they lose one another. We lose those girls to the will of the land just as we lose the will of the land. Australia where the film takes place is a land that was colonized by the English. The aboriginal people who had lived on the land for an estimated 60,000 years are displaced again and again by the Europeans. This has happened all over the world.
I live on a reservation, Pleasant Point. Our water supply is poisonous and we have to shower with this water. We were put on this land by whites. A swamp. It had always meant something to us but our people traveled and hunted the pollock. Our relationship with the land is fractured. There was a time where we offered up our carbon credits to a company for cash. The people don’t see this money or where it goes. There is little industry in Perry Maine. So we offer up the land as a sacrifice for cash flow because we suffer and we need money. We play ball in a system that was set up to destroy the world. Now we have stock in a gambling website. Feels like some ditch effort to make money. Because we were left nothing but the fuck all end of the world by invaders who came centuries ago to prey on our flesh and land.
I would not be surprised when the womb of the world starts to swallow us up for what we have done. We’re marching for the end of a pier anyway. It’s just how fast we drown that counts.
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