Those who walk away (original) (raw)
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Jytte Holmqvist Copyright©2013 This text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged. Abstract: The following essay explores the relationship between contrasting cultures and cultural spaces within a rural Australian, Victorian, context, with reference to the narrated cultural landscape in Joan Lindsay's novel Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967) and in the film based on the novel, by Peter Weir (1975). In the analysis of the five first scenes of the film, the focus will be on the notion of scenic-and human-beauty that is at once arresting and foreboding, and the various contrasting and parallel spaces that characterise the structure of book and film. The article will draw from a number of additional secondary sources, including various cultural readings which offer alternative methodological approaches to the works analysed, and recorded 1970's interviews with the author and the filmmaker.
Did it really happen? : Picnic at Hanging Rock
Sydney Review of Books, 2017
Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, which turns fifty this year, owes a share of its longevity to the modern folklore of vanished white women that has swirled around sites like Hanging Rock in Victoria’s Macedon Ranges since the nineteenth century. Lindsay’s Gothic legend still clings to this unique rock formation. The tale’s enduring appeal and unsettling allure arises from a mist of fact and fiction, casting a magic unspoiled even by the kitsch tourist injunction at Hanging Rock Reserve to ‘Experience the Mystery.’ No matter how often the story is demystified, its ghost lives on in urban legend, with all the appearance of an actual unsolved crime. The mystery lives on in the inescapable question: did it really happen
Confining Nature--Rites of Passage, Eco-Indigenes and the Uses of Meat in Walkabout
Senses of Cinema #51 , 2009
Walkabout (Nicolas Roeg, 1971) is a film about transitions: movement between childhood and adulthood, country and city, pre-modernity and modernity. My analysis of Roeg’s classic is part of a study of the genre of environmental film: representations or re-visioning of the human-nature relationship. I explore Walkabout’s transitions by observing how the film interweaves two coming-of-age stories: an aboriginal youth, Black Boy (David Gumpilil) on a walkabout (a trial to prove his readiness for manhood); and the Anglo children, Girl (Jenny Agutter) and White Boy (Lucien John, the director’s son), he rescues in the Australian outback, especially a girl on the threshold of womanhood. But these rites of passage in turn contribute to the film’s larger fabula told primarily through visual narrative: a critique of the post-industrial world’s attitudes towards nature, including its disconnect from (or repression of) what is untamed or natural in human nature.
Cultural orienteering: a map for Anthony Browne`s into the forest
Observing historical changes in the cultural construction of childhood and of child characters in fairy tales, Nodelman and Reimer (2003) conclude that fairy tales encode the ideology of the culture that retells them. Taking Little Red Riding Hood as a case in point, they contrast assumptions about the child protagonist in Perrault's (1697) tale with those in the version by the Grimm brothers (1812). In the first, it is assumed that the child is aware of the danger in the forest and therefore has the knowledge to survive in the world. In the second, the plot is driven as much by the child's disobedience as her ignorance of danger. According to Nodelman and Reimer, Grimms' narrative reflects the belief that 'children need only know how much they don't know so they can see the wisdom of accepting the wise advice of their parents' (2003: 308, emphasis in original). These two versions of the tale reflect different understandings about the child protagonist's understanding of risk, the knowledge she needs to survive in a dangerous world, and therefore beliefs about childhood at the time they were written. What remains constant, however, is the danger the forest represents. In Into the Forest (2004), Anthony Browne offers a retelling of Little Red Riding Hood which expresses-and contests-more recent assumptions about childhood, risk and the resources children need to survive in today's world. In Browne's version, the forest is the terrain in which a young male protagonist imaginatively explores his anxiety about his father's unexplained absence. In this respect, the narrative speaks to widespread social anxieties about the family, particularly the effect of parental separation and divorce on children. The mother's instruction not to go into the forest in Browne's version is suggestive of contemporary parents' desire to protect children from unnecessary worry about what might happen to them if the family breaks down. On his journey through the forest to Grandma's house the boy meets various fairy tale child characters, each representing some of these possibilities.
Art & the Public Sphere, 2020
In January 2017, settler Australian artist, Amy Spiers, launched a creative campaign to contest habitual associations at the site of Hanging Rock in Central Victoria with a white vanishing myth. Entitled #MirandaMustGo, the campaign’s objective was to provoke thought and unease about why the missing white schoolgirls of Joan Lindsay’s fictional novel, Picnic at Hanging Rock, prompted more attention and feeling in the general public than the actual losses of lives, land and culture experienced by Indigenous people in the region as a consequence of rapid and violent colonial occupation. The campaign incited significant media attention, substantial public debate and some reconsideration of the stories told at Hanging Rock. In this article, Spiers will describe how she conceptualized the artwork/campaign as a propositional counter-memorial action that attempted to conceive ways in which non-Indigenous Australians can acknowledge, and take responsibility for, the denial of colonization’s impact on Indigenous people. She will do so by discussing the critical methodology that underpinned this socially engaged artwork and continue by analysing the public reception and dissensus the campaign provoked. She will conclude in presenting some thoughts about what #MirandaMustGo produced: a rupture of the public secret of Australia’s violent colonial past, a marked shift to the discourse concerning Hanging Rock and an ongoing, unresolved agitation stimulated by Picnic at Hanging Rock’s persistent reproducibility.
Songlines 25 years on: walking and encounter in a postcolonial landscape
The Encounters: Place, Situation, Context Papers—The Refereed Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the Australasian Association of Writing Programs. Eds. Cassandra Atherton, Rhonda Dredge, Et. Al. Canberra: The Australasian Association of Writing Programs, 2012,, 2012
Strident criticism since publication has failed to dampen enthusiasm for Bruce Chatwin’s The songlines (1987), which a quarter century later remains popular among visitors to Central Australia and those interested in Aboriginal culture. Early critical reception was shaped by postcolonial theory during the emergence of Aboriginal land rights in Australia, and a corresponding period of critical reflection for anthropologists. This led to significant themes and strengths of the text being overlooked, which are now being retrieved under the influence of ecocriticism. As part of a research project aimed at helping Australian nonfiction writers to better tackle the writing of place, The songlines is read afresh for walking’s contribution to its representation of a postcolonial geography. The narrative emerges as a peregrination, rather than as an example of Said’s orientalism, for which it was widely criticised. The preliminary results presented here highlight walking’s close relationship with place through embodiment, specifically its ability to help overcome the ‘filters’ through which humans view the world; in simple terms, when Chatwin walks, his prose talks. Walking enhances constructions of race and frontier, as well as underpinning the text’s thematic concern with place-making. The research provides new and valuable insights for writers of place, and promises a productive critical reading of this popular work, notably as to walking’s role in the construction of an Australian identity. Building on theoretical interest in walking as a critical tool, the paper contends that walking be considered as one technique of a postcolonial ecocriticism.