Category Archives: Art and exhibitions

Agreeing to create beauty

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An orchestra is … the only community that comes together with the fundamental objective of agreeing with itself. Agree on what? To create beauty…

With those words, Jose Antonio Abreu, an economist and classical pianist from Venezuela, had me.

In 1975 Abreu started a small children’s orchestra to share his secret about the profound effects of music-making, and today he is the founder of a program in Venezuela called Sistema involving over 300,000 children. Pilot programs based on Sistema are now being run around the world in the US, Scotland, England, Canada, New Zealand and, since 2008, Australia.

Yesterday, I attended one of the rehearsals of the Crashendo orchestra, the Sistema program established for the children of Laverton primary school in Melbourne. Laverton is a suburb regarded as being socially disadvantaged, with a high immigrant population. In the orchestra I found tiny wee girls from China with ribbons tied to their violins, sweet delicate boys from other parts, and bigger Australian-born children, one boy jumping over garbage bins in a single bound, two girls with small teddy bears in bags labelled “With love to Mum” perched on their music stands.

Their music tutors for the day, the astoundingly patient Laura and Eric, by whatever miracle, brought together this chirping, squawking flock of birds to play a hornpipe dedicated to “Cap’n” somebody-or-other and a tune called Barrier Reef featuring some of the children playing pizzicato.

Along the way they were many fits and starts: some of the children had forgotten their music or hadn’t written in their fingerings as they’d been asked; teddy bears fell on floors and had to be retrieved; the cellos went on a mini-strike because the violins were holding them back, and one boy cried over a disagreement he’d had with another child and declared himself “too stressed to play”.  But there were points at which the smoke cleared for a moment and in that moment something else was emerging.

One such moment came when Laura asked the double bass to play alone. After he finished, she asked him,

Did you notice something? Did you notice that everyone stopped talking while you played and that it was absolutely quiet?

The boy, who’d been very distracted, was still. At another point, she explained to the violins how the cellos were playing an octave lower and to have them be heard it was the job of the violins to “fit themselves into the cellos”. When they played the next passage it was markedly different.

In the final ten minutes they all sat and played together under Eric’s guidance, and there was a moment, I swear, when the six young girls on the violins next to me had me do a double-take. Hello, I thought. Where had this clarity come from?

***

As the Director of Sistema Australia, Christopher Nicholls, says:

There’s so much more to children than people give them credit for. They have an enormous capacity to be brilliant.

Chris has kindly agreed to be interviewed for my book about people being leaders in the world. What I know of him already is that he’s committed to having children live extraordinary lives, to having them experience joy and beauty and the grace of human harmony.

Sistema and the Crashendo program exists by virtue of Chris’s commitment and the generosity of people contributing their time and funds. It is one of the principles of Sistema as Abreu created it that no child has to pay to participate. Everything is provided by Sistema, including the instruments.

It really takes something to have this happen, to wrest something new from the ordinary inertia of life, and create it ongoingly. At present, Crashendo needs $60,000 for the rest of 2012. You can make a donation by clicking here.

For more information about Sistema and the Crashendo program, including a short video of Crashendo’s first concert, click here.

To read a recent New York Times article about Sistema, click here.

***

Image: Some of the children I met from the Crashendo orchestra in Laverton, Melbourne

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MONA revisited

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Went back to MONA on the weekend because I enjoyed it so much the first time round. Said hello to my favourites, Peter Buggenhout’s The Blind Leading the Blind, looking blacker and bigger and more sinister than even I remember, and Wang Qingsong’s Dream of Migrants. Marvelled all over again at the beauty and imagination of the presentation of works, including the tall inky cabinets of antiquities. Got a sob in my throat seeing the silhouette of a exquisitely carved cat, four inches high, an offering to a god from an ancient Egyptian tomb, cast against the cabinet’s side.

Looked in vain for the eye-high row of c*nt sculptures in the “Catacombs”. They’ve been replaced with a row of the pretty, lyrical drawings of Hungarian-born, New York-based Balint Zsako. His modern Kama Sutra, leafy and vaporous, is very relaxing. It requires only the eyeballs.

In the meantime, three of the sculptures have been turned into soaps one can buy in the gift shop, in the fragrance of Bianca, Angelique and another.

The one shot I managed to get off with my iPhone before the signal was lost in David Walsh’s underground kingdom is the first image below, which I believe is a medieval burial stone from Turkey. This dumb fellow moves me greatly. I could weep over him too.

***

* For more information about Balint Zsako, go to his website here. Note, the works above are not necessarily featured at MONA but ones very like them are.

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Making strange

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When I first moved to Melbourne from Sydney 12 years ago, I heard a saying I’d never heard before. “NQR”, people would say with a wink, and the conversation would end.

“NQR?”, I asked one day.

“Yeh, you know, Not Quite Right.”

Turns out there was a bulk grocery store of the same name that sold food in damaged packaging. Cans with dents, sacks with tears, that kind of thing. And the name of the store had been adopted as the shorthand for communicating something was “off” with a particular individual. Sort of like saying “he’s a few sandwiches short of the picnic”, only without the effort.

“NQR?”, one would ask. “Yep”. Enough said.

***

If you’ve ever had any dealings in the professional craft sector you’ll know people talk a lot about what makes something art and what makes something craft. Usually, they end up rolling out a very old and tattered premise: that craft is about the useful and art is not.

It occurs to me now the real distinction lies in the “not quite right”. Making the “not quite right” is what all artists, consciously or unconsciously, are setting out to do.

This isn’t an original idea. It has a long provenance. The Russian formalist literary critic, Viktor Shklovsky first used the term “defamiliarisation” in 1917 to refer to the strivings of the poet, the painter, to make strange the familiar.

The European philosophers of the 20th century, people like Heidegger and Derrida, standing on the shoulders of people like Shklovsky, deliberately sought to extend and exploit language that was defamiliarised. If language could be made strange to us, they speculated, what new things might we glimpse outside its usual remit?

The idea extends all the way to the field of artifical intelligence and computer programming with the postulation of the “uncanny valley”, the small region of human perception lying on either side of a norm, which I’ve written about previously in relation to Michael Jackson. The not-quite-right of art is about creating in the uncanny valley, and the best art has happened upon the sweet spot in that place.

The best, the most successful art has an indisputable effect on us. There’s no gainsaying it. We’re hooked and mesmerised in front of it, and it has everything to do with the tension between the familiar and the strange.

***

Image: One of the famously disturbing works of Australian artist, Patricia Piccinini; photo taken by me at Bendigo Art Gallery, Victoria, Australia

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Map o’ Tassie*: Final

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* Australian slang for a woman’s genital area.

The story so far:

Every nation has a place that underwrites the jokes and fears of its citizens. For mainland Australia, this is Tasmania, the triangular-shaped island to the south, last stop before the Antarctic, a place of legendary creatures and 12-fingered men, a watery world of seafarers and whaling ships and convicts, and since January 2011, site of the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), the $175 million dream of one man, the art collector, David Walsh.

This post is about the art. I was at MONA for over six hours and saw less than half the works. Many I got stuck on and kept going back for another look. Following are some of them.

***

There are two works I saw that day which I particularly admired.

The first is Dream of Migrants, 2005 by Chinese artist, Wang Qingsong. It’s a huge, hyper-realistic photo of an arranged tableau. At each window of a horrid grey besser-block building men and women appear, watching, talking, leaning out, embracing. The flag of the People’s Republic of China flies above. Below is an old sidecar motorcycle and scraps of rubbish and mud and overturned witches’ hats. To the right a couple conjugates in a broken down lean-to.

The artist talks of his experience moving from the Chinese countryside to the city. He tells of the Communist government and its long history of posing photographs of success; of buying in sheafs of wheat for the farmer to hold, smiling, in front of his plot.

***

The second is The Blind Leading the Blind, 2008 by the Belgian artist, Peter Buggenhout. What really works about MONA’s piece is that it’s shoved up next to the concrete coffered ceiling like something broken and formless and forgotten. Which is exactly what Buggenhout intended.

Buggenhout says,

my intention is to declassify the thing.

Below is an example from the same series that appeared in another gallery without MONA’s imaginative positioning.

At MONA, a similar piece acquires a whole new intrigue.

When I first spotted it next to the ceiling I didn’t know what I was seeing. It was intensely black, huge, sinister and … “are those giant insect legs sticking out?”. Also, there was a smell.

Turns out Buggenhout’s sculptures are composed of many materials including household dust, and what I could smell was dust. While I was standing there gazing up with my mouth hanging open, the female attendant handing out the coins at the pinball machine told me it had just arrived at the museum.

To assemble it, she said, museum staff, as a finishing touch, had had to roll it in dust.

I asked her what she thought about it. She said,

Well, at first I couldn’t make it out, then I realised it was brought in just before the anniversary of Sept 11, so now I see it’s about a plane wreck.

I restrained myself from saying “Whaddya mean, plane wreck? What about those insect legs?”

At that moment a male attendant came up to relieve her while she went on a tea break. I asked him the same thing. He said, very sure of himself,

Of course, it’s all about dismantling perspective.

Well, sure, I thought, it’s dismantled my perspective, but that’s not what’s most interesting about it.

What’s most interesting about is that it’s the thing on top of the wardrobe.

***

The mummy of Pausiris, dating from the Ptolemaic to Roman period (100 BCE to 100 CE), is one of the museum’s show-stoppers.

There are several other mummy cases in the museum, but this one’s the full deal. The mummy is still within. And it’s very moving to look at the small figure with the glass eyes. Next to it, lying on a separate bier is a x-ray recreation of the remains under the stucco. You can see the figure’s skull, his chest bones, his feet.

The exhibit, the only one for which you have to queue because of the limit of two persons at a time, is mounted in spectacular fashion. The two biers, one holding the mummy, and other, the x-ray of the mummy, are located in a silent, pitch black room, the floor of which is covered in black-dyed water. To stand beside the mummy, the visitor navigates the flooded room using white granite stepping stones.

***

Like all his stuff I assume – though I’ve seen only the anaesthetised shark in the infamous 1996 London Sensation show, or was it a sheep? – I could show you a picture of the Damien Hirst but it would be beside the point. What counts about a Damien Hirst is what you say about it. And what’s extra good is what David Walsh and his curator say about it, as reported in the MONA catalogue.

Remember Coney Island? Luna Park? Those wooden UFO-shaped objects with a clump of kids sitting on the centre that spun faster and faster until everyone was flung off? Hirst’s got hold of something similar, painted it in dribbles and mounted it on the wall rotating slowly. It’s from 1995 and it’s called Beautiful Mis-Shapen Purity Clashing Excitedly Outwards Painting.

When it arrived from the UK Walsh and his curator opened it to find spare cans of paint in case Walsh didn’t like the colour. As they’re unpacking it, the curator says to Walsh

This really is crap, isn’t it?

Walsh agrees, slightly nostalgic for his half-million.

Fast forward several months and it’s mounted in the svelte darkness of Walsh’s museum. Now, Walsh says, brightening,

I quite like its slow, determined cycling.

***

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Map o’ Tassie*: Part 3

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* Australian slang for a woman’s genital area.

The story so far:

Every nation has a place that underwrites the jokes and fears of its citizens. For mainland Australia, this is Tasmania, the triangular-shaped island to the south, last stop before the Antarctic, a place of legendary creatures and 12-fingered men, a watery world of seafarers and whaling ships and convicts, and since January 2011, site of the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), the $175 million dream of one man, the art collector, David Walsh.

This post is about the man.

***

The delectable of delectables when it comes to MONA is the fact Walsh made his money from gambling on horses and casinos.

He grew up in one of the poor parts of Hobart, and while spending his teenagehood dreaming of shagging, discovered he was good at maths. After dropping out of university, he spent 10 or 20 years building mathematical models in the obligatory garage before hitting the jackpot and starting to accumulate the millions.

His gambling partner, an old school friend, was recently reported to be a billionaire. Walsh himself can’t have been far behind. He says he was “extremely rich”, though now, after building the museum, he’s in debt.

He’s cheerful it will work out. He’ll make profits from the restaurants and stores and winery on the MONA site, and his gambling continues in the background, these days not even requiring his presence. It’s simply now the initiation of certain computer routines fed into international syndicates and the execretion of money at the end, rather like the artwork in the museum by Belgian artist, Wim Delvoye entitled Cloaca Professional, the giant defecation machine that consumes and shits at certain times each day. As one of the local newspapers remarked:

A bit tedious to watch and stinks. ~ The Saturday Age, February 26 2011

On TV every night we’re warned of the dangers of gambling. Wives, faces like graves, sit at bare tables late at night waiting for Him; young boys watch their fathers anxiously. At the same time in this country, politicians win seats, even form governments, according to where they stand on the issue of gambling.

And here is Walsh with his beautiful, joyful testament to the advantages of gambling, and the local politicians and community leaders can’t get enough of him. For the museum is single-handedly turning this small city on this tiny island into another Bilbao.

Only don’t mention Bilbao to Walsh; he can’t stand the Gehry thing.

***

Walsh’s love of words and learning is everywhere. How he must have beamed when the title of the opening exhibition – Monanism, a collection of his own favourite works – came to him. MONA, of course, nods to the museum in New York, though he says he was rather thinking of the character in Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle.

He’s building a library in the museum to house his huge book collection. In the meantime, on one of the lower levels of museum there is the installation by Cuban artist, Wilfredo Prieto. Titled The White Room it is a room lined with bookcases containing reading tables and chairs, all of them filled with blank white carapaces. Books without letters, newspapers without words. Borges would have loved it. A library without words.

Then there’s the sly half-dream he has of having donkeys carry visitors from the ferry terminal up the cliff face to the museum entrance. To underline the intention of the architect, and to gesture to the days of ancient Greece in which warriors and seafarers would arrive on land and climb the steps of the nearest temple to give thanks for their safe passage.

***

Outside, after the visit, I’m lolling on the iron ore parapet gazing out across the estuary when the man himself appears from the direction of the car park. He strides past. A back view is all I get: long hair, tallish. A big white cat is doing strange things in the wildflower patch, springing like a lamb. Walsh calls to it, laughs and then disappears into some residential quarter on the cliff face. A Dr No in his island fastness, replete with cat.

Next post: Some favourites from the art

***

Image: Fat Car, 2006 by Erwin Wurm (top)

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Map o’ Tassie*: Part 2

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* Australian slang for a woman’s genital area.

The story so far:

Every nation has a place that underwrites the jokes and fears of its citizens. For mainland Australia, this is Tasmania, the triangular-shaped island to the south, last stop before the Antarctic, a place of legendary creatures and 12-fingered men, a watery world of seafarers and whaling ships and convicts, and since January 2011, site of the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), the $175 million dream of one man, the art collector, David Walsh.

This post is about that man.

***

Some people hide their insecurity by running away; some people do it by becoming extroverts; others, Walsh says, in the enormous tome that passes for MONA’s catalogue lying with characteristic profligacy in piles next to every chair, build art museums.

And that’s what makes this place so special: that it’s all about the man. Every visitor must feel as I did, that I’d been invited into someone’s home, someone’s psyche, and that we were all welcome.

Mark Fraser, the London-born director of MONA, whom Walsh poached from Sotheby’s, affirms this view:

It would be a mistake to think MONA was anything other than ‘about David – one man and one man’s views … David is involved in the smallest detail, literally the finish of a handrail, the fittings in the bathrooms, the look of a staircase … everything is David … There is not a single work of art that has not been bought without his personal engagement. It’s intensively personal … It’s not a museum to David, but I do think it is a museum of David.’

In another setting such egoism could be stultifying, alienating. Here, it’s joyful; for him and his guests (and guests does seem a better word than visitors).

It’s the absence of cant that does it, the frigging glorious release from piety. Step inside the disco front door, descend into his subterranean kingdom and within minutes one realises what stinks about other museums and galleries the world over. The sanctimony! The approved view!

Instead, here he is this local-boy-made-good, saying, asking,

I’ve somehow gotten rich and I can have what I like. Here it is. Do you like it too?

It’s all in that question. Wanting to be liked. Hoping to be liked. Fearing to be liked. In the catalogue he tells of being a teenage boy with only one wish: to be shagged. That’s what he needed, he says, and yet it didn’t happen. All that longing, all that needing, and it just never happened as he wanted. Now, he says in the catalogue, decades and millions of dollars later, there are 16-year-old girls aplenty. At least metaphorically, you understand.

Yet that earlier, shag-deprived David is still running the show and that’s what makes the whole place delightful. He’s still there in the generosity, in spending his “salary” on courting us.

There’s the catalogue which one trips over at every turn that I’ve mentioned. No $40 pamphlet guarded in the gift shop for Walsh.

Until a few weeks ago, entrance was free too. Now it’s $20, unless

you are Tasmanian, and identify yourself as such (yes, yes, second head, etc. etc.)

In which case, it’s still free.

And, beautiful detail this, there’s the fact one of the artworks features a pinball machine, and hovering nearby is an attendant with a pocket full of 20-cent coins to dispense so everyone can play. Tell me, what other place would supply the coins, would make sure you had the coins to play? For this one detail alone, I love David Walsh.

He’s also still there in the “Like/Hate” button on the iPod with which each visitor issued so they can vote for each artwork. When asked what he plans to do with the data he says,

I’ll take the popular stuff out.

There is a photograph of him in the catalogue. It’s on the very last page of the mammoth book. It’s taken by US artist, Andres Serrano, whose work features in the museum. In it, Walsh is in a chair naked. He sits with his thighs pressed together, penis caught between, body fleshy and nourished, with young sunburn arms. Above it all, his face: shaggy hair, glasses, eager eyes. Serrano has captured him exactly: the 50-year-old teenage boy.

To be continued …

***

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Map o’ Tassie*: Part 1

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* Australian slang for a woman’s genital area.

Everywhere has a Tasmania, even Tasmania. A place that underwrites the jokes and fears of a nation.

For mainland Australia, this is Tasmania, the triangular-shaped island to the south, last stop on the way to the Pole, a place of 12-fingered men and hybrid women; extinct beasts and vanished Aboriginals, including Truganini, the last of her tribes.

Every nation has its Tasmania. Every nation needs its Tasmania.

***

You might remember a while back I was railing against artists’ statements and wishing for separate museums – museums for art and museums for artists’ statements. Though I didn’t know it at the time a new museum had just come into being granting my wish.

The Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in Hobart, Tasmania, the arse end of the world – forgive the crudity, MONA affects one’s vocabulary – is a private museum built by a man named David Walsh. It opened in January 2011 and I visited it for the first time a few weeks ago.

Finally, here is a museum of art without artists’ statements: a Museum Of Non-Artists statements (MONA, doubled). No tedious descriptions and explanations on the wall, just the thing itself. And an iPod for each visitor which locates the art nearby and provides little more than the artist’s name, “gonzo” thoughts by Walsh himself, and, here and there, audio clips of curators and artists bickering over the art, including, memorably, a beautifully futile conversation between a curator and the maker of a work titled “150 cunts I have known”, a row of life-sized plaster sculptures of the genitals of 150 female sitters arrayed at eye level in the “low light” section of the museum called the “Catacombs.” (Bravo, Mr Walsh).

The absence of artists’ statements and the other paraphenalia of curation is just one of the reasons why visiting MONA is so invigorating. I felt fresher when I left than when I’d arrived over six hours earlier. Yet give me an hour in any regular museum or gallery and I’m sapped.

To be continued …

***

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Perfect little bon-bons

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There’s a kind of story I particularly like. It’s short and based on some real-life episode, and has a certain tang. Nothing as blatant as a hook or a twist, which I find boring, but something … what? An unexpectedness is not quite it, nor an ambiguity – far too strong – rather, something like a small wrinkle. And it’s not an artistic wrinkle, you understand, but its antithesis, a wrinkle against all intentions including the author’s. And the story’s.

It’s a perfect little bon-bon, a palate cleanser, refreshing rather than nourishing, leaving one restored and primed, not sated. Unlike many lesser imitations and contemporary journalism, it refuses punch-lines and other cheap thrills, including resolutions-at-any-cost and rhetorical closing questions.

It eschews the authorial intrusion; yes, with these little babies, you’re on your own when it comes to working out what to think. It is scrupulous.

There is one such bon-bon in the current edition of The Monthly. Written by the crime author, Shane Maloney, it tells the story of the early life of the German cult photographer, Helmut Newton, the “king of kink.”

***

Newton, born Neustädter, was the “pampered son of a weathy button manufacturer.” At 13, already “besotted with photography and obsessed by sex”, he bought his first camera; at 18, a month after Kristallnacht, “he fled his beloved Berlin for the Far East.”

In 1940, he was shipped to Australia as an “enemy alien.” He picked peaches, “joined the army and spent the war unloading freight trains in Albury.” On discharge,

he changed his surname to Newton, took Australian citizenship and used his deferred pay to open a tiny studio.

One day in 1947, a rising Melbourne actress named June Browne, aged 23, walked into his small Flinders Lane photography studio, “looking to pick up some extra cash as a model.” As Maloney tells it, “when his standard pick-up technique failed, he recruited her as his sales assistant.”

Within a year, they were married. He told her,

Photography will always be my first love but you will be my second.

They remained together for the next 57 years, until Newton crashed his Cadillac into the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles and died. By that time June had become a renowned photographer in her own right, using the ironic pseudonym, Alice Springs.

***

For a decade or so after their marriage, the couple lived in Melbourne, with Helmut photographing “baby outfits for New Idea” and oil refineries. Meanwhile, June “garnered laurels” as an actress, including winning Actress of the Year award for her Saint Joan at the National Theatre.

In the 60s, they moved to Paris, and Helmut became a celebrity. June, with no French, lost her acting career. One day, something new happened.

Newton, bedridden with influenza, suggested she cover a commercial job for him. The client didn’t notice and soon she was shooting for Elle and Depeche Mode. In need of a professional name, she shut her eyes and stuck a pin in a map of Australia.

As Alice Springs, she “produced memorable portraits of the era’s iconic faces – Catherine Deneuve, Dennis Hopper, Terence Stamp and Charlotte Rampling.”

She is now 88 and still going strong; still, Maloney says, with “a sharp eye.”

***

Images: Helmut Newton by Alice Springs (top); Saddle 1 for Vogue Homme by Helmut Newton, 1976 (second); Woman by Alice Springs (bottom)

Picnic at Hanging Rock: Part 2

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The story so far …

On St Valentine’s Day in 1900 a party of schoolgirls and their mistresses went for a picnic to Hanging Rock in country Victoria, Australia. Three girls and one mistress vanished while walking on the Rock.

In the days following the disappearance, the police mount a search, to no avail.

Meanwhile, Michael Fitzhubert has become obsessed with the girls and their disappearance. The young Englishman decides to start his own search.

He scours the Rock, leaving markers on the trees. After several days of obsessive searching, he becomes disorientated and does not return. His valet, Albert, goes out looking for him.

Following the markers, he eventually finds Fitzhubert lying on the upper reaches of the rock, hurt and barely conscious. Albert gets help, and as they pack him off in a coach for medical attention, Fitzhubert, ill and mute, fixes his eye on Albert. Something is glasped in his fist, and Albert pulls apart his fingers to reveal a small scrap of white muslin.

Immediately, Albert sees its significance, and a new search is mounted for the girls in the area in which Fitzhubert was found. Then they find her, Irma, the “little, dark one.” She is lying unconscious under a rocky overhang. She is barefoot and alone, and has been missing for a week.

The renewed search finds no trace of Miranda and Marion, or Miss McGraw.

The Fitzhuberts put up Irma at their country estate so she can rest and recover and receive medical attention. After a doctor examines her, he talks with Mlle de Portiers. She asks tentatively, embarrassed,

Is she … intact?

“Yes, yes, quite intact,” replies the doctor.

Meanwhile, Irma has no memory of what happened to her or the others. As she recovers, she is coquettish with Fitzhubert who, uncomfortable and distressed at his failure to find the others, pushes her to remember. She makes a visit back to the school which is a disaster. The girls round on her, attacking her and demanding answers.

Very quickly, the school itself begins to suffer from the event. Parents withdraw their girls, and the iron authority of Mrs Appleyard, the headmistress, starts to break down. She is drinking heavily, and an orphan student whom she had routinely bullied is found dead after an apparent fall from the school’s tower.

A short time later, the voiceover informs us at the end of the film, Mrs Appleyard committed suicide by throwing herself from Hanging Rock.

The remains of Miranda, Marion and Miss McGraw have not been found to this day.

*****

The film got into the psyche of Australians for a number of reasons.

It featured a story that tapped into longstanding fears of Australians of European descent: the story of the lost child in the bush.

From the first days of European settlement in a land perceived as strange and hostile, the motif of the child lost in the bush had featured in art and literature. The fear was so potent that most Australian children, including those in my large extended family in the 1960s and 1970s, were taught what to do if it happened to them, ie, to call “cooee”. The call originated in the Dharuk language of the Aboriginal peoples living around Sydney at the time of European settlement, and is still used today to call to someone or cry for help across large distances in the bush.

The second reason for the film’s impact was the novelty of seeing our own stories and landscapes on the screen, and seeing them in their sublime beauty. The film showed an Australia that was dazzling, dreamy, deeply disturbing, resolutely non-prosaic.

The third reason was the air of sexuality which lay over the whole film, and centred on the incomparable beauty of Miranda, played by Anne-Louise Lambert. Every teenage girl wanted to be her, every man and boy to possess her.

And then there was the music. The pan pipes, played by Romanian, Gheorge Zamfir, emanated from another world, a world of gods and shepherds and satyrs. They were eerily suited to a film about the meeting of European civilisation – in the guise of the young, well-educated girls of Empire – with something obdurate, pre-historic, impervious in the Australian landscape.

Depending on how you look at it, the pipes were either the sound of the most ancient epitome of European civilisation, or the sound of immortality itself.

For these reasons, and many others, Peter Weir’s film and the story of the missing girls got a hold on Australia’s soul and it has never let go.

*****

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Picnic at Hanging Rock: Part 1

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On St Valentine’s Day in 1900 a party of schoolgirls and their mistresses went for a picnic to Hanging Rock in country Victoria, Australia. Three girls and one mistress vanished while walking on the Rock. A week later, one of the girls was found, alive but unconscious, and with no memory of what had happened.

The rest were never seen again.

The mystery of what happened that day was immortalised in Joan Lindsay’s 1967 novel, and, most famously, by Peter Weir in his 1975 film, Picnic at Hanging Rock.

The film made stars of everyone involved, was a worldwide hit and promptly lodged itself deep in the pysche of every Australian. Today, all it takes is the first notes of the pan pipes from the famous soundtrack and a nation is transported to that drowsy day in the thick of the Australian summer long ago.

This post and the next tells the story of the girls as imagined by Peter Weir, and speculates about the reasons why his film acted so strongly on the Australian psyche.

*****

They got to the picnic ground around noon in Mr Hussey’s trap, hired from the local town of Woodend for the expedition.

One of the girls, seated on the box next to Mr Hussey, read from a book about the local landmark, “Hanging Rock is a distinctive geographical formation which is over six million years old.”

“Just think,” says another,

six million years, and waiting just for us.

They set up their picnic at the foot of the monolith and spend a few hours eating, reading and sleeping in the afternoon heat. There is another party further down the stream, a young English officer on leave, Mr Michael Fitzhubert, with his father and his valet.

Mr Hussey wakes from his doze with a start. He consults his watch, and finds to his surprise it has stopped. Miss McGraw, a middle-aged mathematics mistress, hearing his puzzlement, looks at hers.

Extraordinary; mine has stopped too.

Soon after, the darling of the school, Miranda, with her friends Irma and Marion, asks the young French mistress, Mademoiselle de Portiers, if they can go for a walk around the rock. “Yes, but be careful.”

As Miranda turns to go, Mlle de Portiers, glancing from her face to the art book she has been reading, gasps and whispers,

But, of course, now I know.

“What do you know?” asks Miss McGraw.

“That Miranda is a Botticelli angel.”

The girls, in their white muslin dresses, set off walking through the bush towards the rock formation. Edith, a plain and unpopular girl, follows them. Michael Fitzhubert and the valet watch them jump across the stream. “I like the little dark one,” says the valet as Irma jumps, but Fitzhubert is silent, staring as Miranda gathers her skirts, looks backward for a moment and then sails across.

The girls start climbing upward, through the grasses and rocks. Edith starts complaining, “Miranda, come back. I’m getting tired.” They keep climbing.

At some point, they lay down on the rock for a rest, and Edith, who has dozed off for a few minutes, awakes to see the other three heading upward again, this time without their boots and stockings which they are holding. Edith becomes frightened, and starts screaming at them to come back, but they keep climbing, silent and intent.

Edith becomes more frightened and turns back. A little while later, she emerges running from the bush, screaming and hysterical.

Mlle de Portiers slaps her to try and calm her, and asks after the others. She can get no sense out of her. And then she giggles,

But I did see Miss McGraw.

Miss McGraw?

Edith giggles.

Why are you laughing? What’s funny?

Miss McGraw was funny.

How? What do you mean, funny?

Edith giggles again, and whispers in Mlle de Portiers’s ear.

“What?” says Mlle de Portiers, shocked and confused, “she was not wearing … les pantalons?”

*****

Late that night, much later than planned, Mr Hussey drives the trap to the front steps of the girls’ boarding school. The girls, crying and dishevelled, are brought out and wrapped in blankets by the staff, and Mlle de Portiers looks up to find the Headmistress, Mrs Appleyard, in her bombazine and tight bun, waiting for her.

“What is the meaning of this?” she demands icily, and Mlle de Portiers must tell her that three girls and Miss McGraw are missing on the rock. “Greta McGraw,” Mrs Appleyard, says, astounded, “missing?”

To be contd …

*****

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