A Tribute to Australia: Two Films by Peter Weir

Picnic at Hanging Rock and Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World

Hanging Rock, Victoria, Australia

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On a recent review of the statistics related to my newsletter I was pleased to discover that many of my first subscribers were from the proud country of Australia.  At one point, Australians accounted for some 10% of my readership, and though that percentage has gone down a bit as people from other places have happily joined in, I am very grateful for that initial support.  As such, I thought I might delve into a new area for the Library of Celaeno and review two films from one of the greatest living Australian directors, Peter Weir.  I believe these two movies, Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) and Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003) parallel each other in very interesting and overlooked ways, and together offer an important message about the structures of civilization and the means by which they are maintained.  It is also my contention that this message is a subtle rightist critique of liberal assumptions about society and human nature.

**Please note that this essay assumes the reader is familiar with both films and contains numerous spoilers. Also note that this review takes no notice of the more recent version of Picnic at Hanging Rock, which is She-Hulk tier stuff.

Before I begin, I am aware that many Americans (my largest reading demographic) have a lot of stereotypes and misconceived ideas about Australia.  To remedy this, the following paragraph offers some quick facts about Australia that will help clear up any misunderstandings.  Note: if you are from Australia, you can skip this next part, as this will be information that is already familiar to you.  For the rest, know that the following is the result of several minutes of research on the internet and some reasoned conjecture.

***Australia is a large island somewhere between China and Antarctica.  Nearly three-hundred people live in Australia, the majority of whom are descended from Captain James Cook and a series of Victorian women exiled to the island for pickpocketing and/or witchcraft.  About half of the population lives in the Outback, a desert region where the inhabitants have adopted a lifestyle reminiscent of the Bedouin or Fremen, while the remaining Australians live in the capital and only city, Sydney.  Interestingly, Sydney predates white colonization, having been founded by the Aboriginal people sometime in the Pleistocene Era as a ritual center for the native art of opera.  The name actually derives from the Proto-Pama-Nyungan *syd, meaning “abode of the Rainbow Serpent’s Dreaming” and *ney meaning “sleeping in the middle of the road.”  Culturally, Australia is basically if Canada was Florida.  The main exports of Australia include mutton, boomerangs, and Hugh Jackman.  Cuisine in Australia centers on a substance called Vegemite, which extends life and expands consciousness and is collected by spice harvesters in the Outback, and Cooper’s Sparkling Ale, NOT Fosters as many ignorant Americans believe.  The current head of state in Australia is King Charles III of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, while the prime minister is Mel Gibson, who is widely expected to take power as the next pope following his forthcoming march on Rome.***

Peter Weir’s career in many ways parallels that of American Steven Spielberg, a Australian New Wave director in the 1970s who made a name for himself with popular films with a very characteristic style.  Now retired, Weir was never a consistent generator of blockbusters like Spielberg, probably because in many ways his work is more thoughtful and consistently unsettling than that of his American counterpart.  Spielberg gives audiences happy, or at least emotionally satisfying, endings; Weir’s films are often ambiguous and challenging.  This is particularly true of his 1975 breakout film, Picnic at Hanging Rock, but also in its own way his 2003 feature Master and Commander.

On the surface, the subject matter of the two films is very different.  Picnic at Hanging Rock is based on a 1967 novel by Australian author Joan Lindsay, which became a bestseller and remains popular today.  The story centers on a group of girls and their teachers at an all-female boarding school who go on a field trip to the eponymous Hanging Rock on Valentine’s Day in 1900, whereupon several of the girls and a teacher go missing.  Though one of the girls is later found, she has no memory of what happened, and the mystery is never resolved.  Most of the novel is an exploration of the effects this lack of resolution has on the school and its inhabitants, as well as the surrounding community.  Everything falls apart in the end, the school shuts down, and strange deaths accumulate. 

Master and Commander is also a book adaptation, this time featuring elements from several novels by English author Patrick O’Brian, who was quite literally a poor-man’s Ian Fleming and an interesting character in his own right.  The film is better known and more easily appreciated by those on the right; it is commonly encountered on “Greatest Conservative Movies” or “Top Ten Right Wing Movies” types of lists for its positive depiction of patriotism and military life (a very different depiction that that offered by Weir’s Gallipoli).  Unlike Picnic at Hanging Rock, which featured a cast comprised largely of unknowns, Master and Commander stars Russell Crowe and Paul Bettany as Captain Jack Aubrey and his friend and ship’s surgeon Stephen Maturin respectively.  They and the crew of the Napoleonic-era sloop HMS Surprise are hunting a French privateer while sailing around South America, which hunts them in turn.  Much of the drama in the film centers on the captain’s willingness to pursue the ship despite the dangers involved and the low likelihood of success, and the resulting tensions among the crew, which are bound up with class, political, and ethnic divisions that come to the surface as casualties mount. 

While a film about missing students from a girls’ boarding school and a movie about Age of Sail warfare may at first seem to have little in common, they in fact overlap in important ways.  Both films feature largely single-sex worlds, isolated from surrounding society yet bound by its conventions.  Indeed, one of the central themes of both films is the carrying of Western civilization into desert places, the open ocean and the barely-settled Australian bush.  There, the characters encounter powerful forces hostile to their culture, and each film centers largely on attempts to maintain a sense of proper order in the face of an unseen and unknown threat.  Both films in their way say something profound about Western spirituality, and the effects of its presence and absence in the wild places.  The films offer contrasting views of leadership in the face of spiritual crisis; In Master and Commander, civilization survives, though not without cost.  In Picnic at Hanging Rock, there is doom.

The film version of Picnic at Hanging Rock follows the plot of the novel fairly closely (Lindsay was actually one of the producers and interviewed Weir about directing personally).  The first scene opens on Appleyard College, the girls’ school, as the students start their morning in anticipation of Valentine’s Day and the relative excitement to come.  Subtext here is heavy, as the girls have only one another to exchange cards with, and it is clear there is an unhealthy amount of all sorts of tension among them.  The juxtaposition of them stuffing one another into corsets as they read love poems is striking and already a bit foreboding.  A theme is introduced here that will be present throughout the movie, form without substance.  Hair and bodies are bound up- buttons and lace, collars, stockings, and hats, all for a trip to a picnic in the woods in the Australian summer (as a concession to the heat, the headmistress of the school informs the girls they can dispense with their gloves).  They are putting on the costume of chastity and propriety that their culture has bequeathed to them, but the manner is rote and substantially meaningless.  Worse, it hints at something deeper, modesty corrupted into sterility, a pride-fueled shame at one’s standing before one’s forebears and a fear of growth and reproduction.

Master and Commander, more loosely formed by the plots of two O’Brian novels, opens to morning preparations as well, but in a strikingly different way.  We see the ship bobbing in the empty ocean, bells ring distantly, and the camera passes through the narrow corridors of the wooden world that will form the setting for almost the entire movie.  The audience sees cannons and weapons along with the sleeping men, dirty, weather-beaten and tattooed, bunking together with animals and stores.  There is nothing superfluous here, and everything centers on its ultimate purpose, war.  This is an instrument of sacrifice, an altar upon which men will offer themselves to preserve their people and their way of life.  Even before the crew stirs for the day, we can already imagine what is coming.

In the opening of Picnic at Hanging Rock, three characters are introduced who will play the most pivotal roles in the story.  Sara is an orphan, sent to the school by a mysterious benefactor.    While she seems perfectly normal, she is the object of resentment on the part of the staff, mildly at first, but which will escalate over the course of the film into abuse and her violent death.  Alone among the girls Sara is forbidden from attending the picnic, as her benefactor has not paid her tuition for unexplained reasons. Sara idolizes Miranda, the most beautiful girl at the school.  Miranda is herself a tragic figure, and strangely seems aware of it; though she appears outwardly happy she warns Sara to prepare for her loss, as she will soon not be there anymore.  It is as though she has some premonition of what is to come, some connection with what will take her.  Certainly, the staff seems aware of her uniqueness, and many are themselves fixated upon her.  One of the few direct allusions to spirituality in the film occurs when the art teacher remarks, as Miranda and some other girls walk away from the picnic, that Miranda resembles a Botticelli angel, a heavenly creature meant to visit but not dwell in the world, but also conceptually a product of artistic conceit rather than theology (angels are depicted solely as young men in the Bible).  The third character is the headmistress of Appleyard College, Mrs. Appleyard.  She is seemingly an imposing Victorian matron, head to toe the image of both refinement and control.  One imagines she is impressively qualified for her role, but she seems to take no joy in it; at no point does she express any love for her charges or any interest in education as such.  She is a steward of Western culture but seems oblivious to any deeper meaning in what she does.  A later generation would recognize her as the box-checking manager, bounded by best practices and determined upon metrics.

Things go awry very quickly in both films.  In Master and Commander, the Surprise is attacked out of the mist by the French privateer, l’Acheron.  It is in this scene that the audience in introduced to three important characters.  Mr. Hollum is an overage midshipman already twice passed over for promotion to lieutenant.  Though nearly thirty, he has the job and role of a teenager on the ship, and is resented by nearly all of the others at his level.  This resentment will spread as the film progresses; at every turn he appears at where some misfortune occurs, and his character is a very close parallel to Sara from Picnic at Hanging Rock, down to the manner of his death.  His indecisiveness while on watch prompts the involvement and introduction of Captain Jack Aubrey.  He is in every way the opposite of Mrs. Appleyard, a bold and inventive leader who both loves and is loved in turn by his men.  As the ship is attacked, Aubrey’s friend Stephen Maturin is below decks aiding with casualties in his role as surgeon.  The relationship between these two men forms both the emotional core of the film and the force that holds the crew together.  They alone seem to have a bond outside of naval life.  They alone call each other by their given names.  Interestingly, they have clear political and ethnic differences; Jack is a Tory, patriotic, traditional, a believer in hierarchy and devoted to the British Empire, while Stephen is a man of the Enlightenment, a liberal and a scientist, an Irishman who is clearly only on board because of his devotion to his friend.  Their respective approaches to solving problems and their clashing senses of purpose form a central conflict in the story.

There are no real friendships depicted in Picnic at Hanging Rock.  The teachers are islands unto themselves, and no one seems particularly to like working at the school.  The girls, isolated from the surrounding community and from male or parental attention form strange attachments to one another that are clearly unhealthy.  Mrs. Appleyard commands respect through the control she can bring to bear on the school, and when that control fails, there are no emotional bonds that can save it.

The girls’ trip to the eponymous picnic and the event itself are where the supernatural elements are introduced, though as in Master and Commander this is done in an oblique way, through allusion, context, and visuals rather than any direct reference.  The carriages taking the girls pass from the beautiful Victorian building they live in, and we see that it is rather incongruously situated in a frontier-like settlement, as though someone were to plop Sandhurst Academy down in the midst of Earp-era Tombstone, Arizona.  As they pass out of the little town and enter the bush, the driver soon announces that they are approaching Hanging Rock, and there it is, looming over them, casting literal foreshadows. 

They are entering an ancient world of which they have no awareness.  Conspicuous by their absence are the Aboriginal people who were displaced by the girls’ forebears, who with violent energy carved out the space that Appleyard College inhabits.  Though the people are gone it is clear this is a lonely place haunted by forces to which the girls and their guardians are oblivious and indifferent.  They live in an eternal present, the past around them alien and unknown, until it intrudes upon their idyll.

Miranda and two other girls, Marion and Irma, receive permission to climb the rock.  There is another pair of witnesses to part of this scene, Michael, a teenager from the local gentry, and his coachman Albert; both clearly take an interest in the girls, but only Michael tries for a closer look.  As the girls lounge in the sun something seems to take over, the heat and the silence lulling them to sleep, an allusion to the Dreamtime, the Aboriginal primeval formlessness from which creation takes shape and is shaped (back at the picnic, the watches all stop at the same time, and they too fall asleep).  While for most of the film the soundtrack features the haunting panflute music of Zamfir, here everything falls silent with only an eerie hum indicating what is at work.  Something is calling Miranda and the other two girls, silently and irresistibly, and they begin to climb up the rock.  They strip off their stockings and their corsets, and unbound, they move further along.  Another girl, Edith, tries to follow, plaintively calling after them, but they do not listen.  Edith screams a scream of primal horror, and the scene ends. 

In Master and Commander, there are also subtle references to the spiritual nature of what the crew of the Surprise is facing.  The name of the privateer, l’Acheron, is a reference to a layer of hell, and the ship’s sudden appearances and seemingly preternatural awareness of where the Surprise will be lead the English crew to nickname it the Phantom.  It is one of the many ghosts haunting Europe, as the demons unleashed by the French Revolution have consumed the continent in war.  For the captain, this is what they are fighting, a retrograde spiritual force that will destroy everything he loves and believes worth loving.  Encouraging his men to greater proficiency in firing the cannons, he asks if they want to see a guillotine in Piccadilly, or their children to sing the Marseillaise, or call Napoleon their king.  They stakes of their mission are clear to him- defeat means the destruction of throne and altar, the triumph of the three-colored devil of leveling, atheism, and anarchy.

There are initially parallels between how the spiritual threats are faced in both films, though they diverge in their resolutions.  When the party returns to Appleyard after the picnic the coachman informs the headmistress that three girls are missing, and also that Miss McCraw, the geometry teacher disappeared as well, presumably while they were all sleeping.  She is taken aback by this, but at first she, like everyone else, seems to trust that the police will be able to find them.  They trust in the same sort of authority that has always served them in the past in contexts in which they are familiar.  The police are unsuccessful.  Edith claims to remember nothing but two strange details:  seeing Miss McCraw climbing the rocks in her underwear, and a red cloud.  Michael becomes obsessed with the case, convincing Albert to join him in their own search, and though he nearly dies in the process, Michael finds a stray piece of lace that inspires the police to look once more, where they discover Irma, still somehow alive.  Michael’s interest in the girls is ambiguous, and it is possible to interpret the film as him having involvement in the disappearances (he was the last person to see them; Irma only claims to remember nothing upon seeing him; the lead investigator asks him some evocative questions).  But this seems to be a red herring.  There is no solution.  Miranda and the others have vanished from the face of the earth, and there is no answer as to why or how.  Cracks form, and everyone starts to fall to pieces.

For the crew of the Surprise, there is a similar process of falling apart.  Senior officers openly question the wisdom of chasing l’Acheron, which outclasses the Surprise significantly.  Stephen alone can ask Jack if it is pride rather than military necessity motivating him, and Jack concedes that, unknown to anyone else, he is exceeding his specific orders in pursuing the privateer through the Straits of Magellan into the Pacific.  Everything seems to be against them, and at every turn, Hollum appears where the worst things happen,  Captain Aubrey is “Lucky Jack;” Hollum seems to be cursed, and the crew take to referring to him as a Jonah, an allusion explained through direct exposition for a biblically-illiterate modern audience.  This contagion spreads through the ranks.  Hollum is assaulted, prompting Jack to impose order through violent punishment, alienating him from Stephen and dividing Hollum even further from the crew.  It seems as if the bonds holding everyone together will break forever.

Certainly this is what happens in Picnic at Hanging Rock.  Families begin to withdraw their students from Appleyard College and the community besieges the home of the local police sergeant, desperate for answers; it is clear they would lynch someone, anyone, if only they had some target for their fear and anger.  The sergeant for his part is one of the few people not moved to hysterics, remarking to his wife with stoic resignation that some questions simply don’t have answers.  Mrs. Appleyard descends into drink and becomes increasingly abusive toward Sara, as do the other teachers.  As with Hollum, she becomes a kind of scapegoat for the pain and unease from which they all suffer. When Irma arrives at an exercise class to announce that she too is being withdrawn, the girls swarm her in rage, demanding that she tell them what happened.  The French teacher escorts everyone out, then discovers that Sara has been strapped to a posture-correction board by the exercise teacher, the visual being reminiscent of a torture rack, with the teacher unable even to explain why she did so.  Mrs. Appleyard later informs Sara that she is being returned to the orphanage due to lack of payment from her guardians, though this time, Mrs. Appleyard breaks down in tears when alone and descends into drink, as though she is coming to understand the negative forces that are consuming her and her school.

Sara, like Hollum, seems resigned to her fate at the end.  She informs a maid that she was abused in the past, that Miranda knew she was going to disappear, and that she cannot go back to the orphanage she came from.  Hollum, believing that the crew can only survive if they are no longer subject to his curse, leaps from the ship while embracing a cannonball.  Sara too is found dead from a fall beneath her window, though her actual death is not shown.  Somewhat ambiguously, Mrs. Appleyard had previously announced to the remaining students as they departed for break that Sara had already left for her home, when she clearly had not, and when the gardener arrives to inform Mrs. Appleyard of the news, the headmistress is already wearing mourning dress.  Perhaps the most unsettling scene in the film shows the French teacher and a clearly unhinged Mrs. Appleyard having dinner together, the latter oblivious to the French teacher announcing her resignation.  The headmistress suddenly descends into a furious rant about Miss McCraw, how much she depended on her masculine intellect, and how stupid it was for her to go off and get raped and murdered like a schoolgirl.  It is stark and quite scary, and ends with Mrs. Appleyard snapping back into form and reminiscing fondly about her beachside vacations with her late husband.

Hollum and Sara are familiar types. The former is basically a good-natured and inoffensive young man who lacks strong will and a sense of purpose. It is unclear how he ended up in a military career as he is profoundly unsuited for it. He is the classic late-starter; in our age he would be stocking shelves at Gamestop, mocked as an incel and a beta. Sara is a bright but plain girl who would be lost in the pornified world of today. Her lack of family, coupled with her love of poetry, would probably lead her down a tragic path to Tumblr, blue hair, and new pronouns. Their sad ends in the film echo real life in ways that are painfully relevant.

The main point of divergence in the two films is how leadership responds to these tragedies.  Sara’s death is the final act in the destruction of Appleyard College.  A voiceover informs the audience that the school subsequently closed and Mrs. Appleyard herself was found dead beneath hanging rock, presumably trying to climb it.  For the crew of the Surprise, however, the death of Hollum prompts a chance for redemption.  At Hollum’s memorial service, when the captain is passed a copy of the Bible open to Jonah, he closes it, and states plainly that we do not always become the men we hoped we would be before asking God’s forgiveness on his part and the part of his crew for failing in their duty of fellowship to Hollum.  It is a moving scene, and one of the real turning points, as Jack begins to renounce the pride that is the real cause of their misfortunes.  Following this, Stephen is accidentally shot by the marine captain while the ship is chasing l’Acheron, and Jack faces a choice- he can pursue the French ship, knowing his friend will die, or return to the Galapegos so that surgery can be performed on land.  He chooses the latter, and with it fellowship and the bonds that are the ultimate foundation of civilization.  The scene in which Stephen is forced to perform the surgery on himself is moving and features truly stellar acting from Crowe and Bettany.

For his part, Stephen, who hates war, has no real interest in the mission of the Surprise, and only wants to study the animal life on the Galapegos, has his own choice to make when he, and he alone, spies l’Acheron at harbor on the far side of the island he is exploring.  It would be easy and for his part morally justifiable for him to simply turn around and pretend he saw nothing; lives would be saved and none would be the wiser.  But he sublimates his own humane instincts and desire for peaceful pursuits out of a sense of duty, not to king and country, but to his friend.  Each man is in his way an example of kenosis, of self-emptying love, and their bond in turn forms the basis for everyone else’s willingness to sacrifice.  Jack’s speech to his crew on the eve of battle is moving, and his evocations of England hit home because he represents the best of that nation; England is fought for by men like him and it is worth fighting for because of men like him.  Bound together at last in their common purpose, they spring a trap (inspired by one of Stephen’s scientific discoveries) on l’Acheron and a spectacular battle scene ensues (interestingly, though ostensibly a war film, there are only two scenes featuring actual combat).  Men are lost, and victory is had, though the film ends ambiguously, as the French crew may not have been as defeated as first thought.

There are many other films by Peter Weir worth exploring; check out the overlooked The Last Wave if you get the chance.  But Picnic at Hanging Rock  and Master and Commander form a compelling and complementary pair that should be viewed together as a commentary on our modern Western condition.  The teachers at Appleyard were content, like the unprofitable servant, to bury the talent they had been given by their Master, and lived in a blithe cloud of presumption that all would continue as it had, even in the midst of an alien and hostile world.  They took the strength of their culture for granted, until its actual weakness could no longer bear the spiritual pressures it encountered, and everything fell apart in a way both horrific and mysterious.  The crew of the Surprise realized what they were fighting for, as they were reminded of it through the word and example of their leader, a man tested in both war and leisure, a man of cutlass and violin, who passed the test that Mrs. Appleyard failed.  He realized in the end that the bonds that hold civilization together are those we form between one another, and no institution, no ship, no school, and no nation can survive without them; they are fundamental in the most basic sense.  For the culture to survive in a universe of hostile spiritual forces, we must always remember this.