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You made it. Welcome.
Strange Country is a podcast about Australian and New Zealand horror. Not as a curiosity. Not as camp. As a body of work that deserves the same serious attention as anything coming out of the US or Europe. More, honestly.
The films are the starting point, not the destination. Each episode uses them as a lens into something bigger. Colonial guilt. Landscape as threat. The fears a country buries in its fiction. The people who shaped what fear looks like down here, past and present.
This corner of world cinema has been ignored for too long. We're here to fix that, and we're really glad you're along for the ride.
There are no clocks in Joan Lindsay's house.
Not one. Not in the hallway. Not in the kitchen. Not beside the bed. And this isn't a design
choice. It's a truce. Because Joan Lindsay says clocks don't survive her. Watches stop when
she sits next to people. She said it herself, on the record, in 1973: "I have an extraordinary gift,
you might call it a very sinister one, of stopping people's watches just by sitting beside them."
She wasn't joking. Her memoir is literally called Time Without Clocks.
So. It's the mid nineteen sixties, in a house on the Mornington Peninsula with no clocks in it,
and a woman of nearly seventy starts dreaming the same story. Night after night. Each morning
she gets up and writes down what she saw. She does this for about two weeks.
And what comes out is a novel about a place where time stops. Where the watches all die at
exactly twelve noon. Where three schoolgirls and their mathematics teacher climb a rock on
Valentine's Day, 1900, and never come back down.
She never says it's fiction. She never says it's true. She lets an entire country decide it half
remembers something that never happened.
This is Strange Country. Today we're going up the Rock.
If you've been with us since episode one, you know the argument of this show. The outback is
the monster. The land doesn't need a creature in it. It is the creature.
Well, today we're at the scene of the crime. Because that idea gets born on film in 1975. In soft
focus. With pan pipes. No blood, no monster, no ending. Picnic at Hanging Rock. Voted the
best Australian film ever made, and the template for every piece of Australian dread that came
after it, from Wolf Creek to Lake Mungo.
Here's what I'm promising you in the next twenty five minutes. Three things.
One. The book had a solution. An actual, written, final chapter. And it got cut.
Two. The film is engineered, at a technical level I still find hard to believe, to stop you wanting a
solution at all.
And three. The Rock holds a real disappearance story. One the book never touches, the film
never touches, and the tourist signs took a century to mention.
Let's start with the woman who stopped clocks.
Joan Lindsay is not who you'd pick to write Australia's foundational horror story.
She's Melbourne establishment. Born Joan Weigall in 1896, trained as a painter at the National
Gallery Art School, married into the Lindsay art dynasty. Her husband Daryl ends up director of
the National Gallery of Victoria. They live at Mulberry Hill, a lovely house at Baxter, on the
Mornington Peninsula. She writes a bit. Nothing that troubles history.
Then, at an age when most writers are winding down, she has the dreams. And in about two
weeks, in that house with no clocks, she writes her first and only novel.
Hold that thought, because it matters. This is a book written by a painter. Someone who thinks
in images, not plots. Which is exactly why, eight years later, it becomes the most painterly film
this country has ever produced.
Published 1967. And right there on page one, before the story even starts, she sets the trap. A
note to the reader. Quote: "Whether Picnic at Hanging Rock is fact or fiction, my readers must
decide for themselves. As the fateful picnic took place in the year nineteen hundred, and all the
characters who appear in this book are long since dead, it hardly seems important."
That is one of the great cons in Australian literature. Read it again. She doesn't claim it's true.
She just declines to say it isn't, and then implies the question is beneath her. It hardly seems
important.
And the country fell for it. Completely. People went looking for the police files. Went looking for
the graves. Newspapers got letters from readers who swore they remembered the case. There
are no police files. There are no graves. No missing schoolgirls, no vanished teacher, nothing.
The Rock is real, the towns are real, the story is invented. And for decades, in interview after
interview, Lindsay would not kill the myth. She'd hint that some of it was real and some of it
wasn't, and she'd smile, and that was that.
But here's my favourite part. She may have left a confession hiding in plain sight.
The story is set on Saturday the fourteenth of February, 1900. It's on the first page of the book.
It's on the opening title card of the film. Saturday, February the fourteenth, 1900.
Go and check a calendar from 1900. Valentine's Day that year was a Wednesday.
The most famous date in Australian cinema never existed. Now, fair warning, and you know the
rules on this show: nobody can prove whether that was Lindsay planting a deliberate clue that
the whole thing was a dream, or a mistake she simply decided she liked. But either way, she
never corrected it. A woman obsessed with time built her story on a day that isn't there.
So that's the book. A mystery with no answer, from an author who claimed no relationship with
clocks, set on a date that doesn't exist.
Now. How do you film that? In 1973, a television presenter decides to find out. And it costs her
one hundred dollars.
Pat Lovell is Miss Pat. From Mr Squiggle. She's been on air with a pencil-nosed puppet since
1960, and she's still doing the show. She reads the novel in 1971 and can't shake it, and when
she mentions it, Phillip Adams tells her to stop waiting for someone else and produce it herself.
So in 1973 she options the film rights. One hundred dollars, for three months.
One hundred dollars. For what becomes, by official vote, the best film this country has ever
made. Set in motion by the lady from Mr Squiggle, on the side. Hold your super. Buy books
instead.
She hires a director in his late twenties named Peter Weir, off the back of a strange little film
called Homesdale. At this point Weir's only feature, The Cars That Ate Paris, hasn't recovered
its costs. He is, on paper, a flop.
For the script, first choice is David Williamson, the biggest playwright in the country. He's busy.
He recommends a television writer named Cliff Green. And here's a detail I love: Lindsay had
approval over who adapted her book, written into the deal. She approved Green. The clockless
woman signed off personally.
Green's job is brutal, when you think about it. The novel reads like Agatha Christie wandered
into a seance. A contemporary critic described Lindsay's style as combining, quote, "the
omniscient condescension of an Agatha Christie with a streak of purple pantheism." All class
comedy and servants and social machinery, with something ancient humming underneath.
Green strips the machinery and keeps the hum. Where the book explains, the film shows.
There's a moment in the novel where Miss McCraw, the maths teacher, explains they should go
home "by the third side of a triangle." In the film, nobody says it. Weir just quietly fills the picnic
frames with triangles and trusts you to feel the geometry closing in.
They raise about four hundred and forty thousand dollars. Six week shoot, February 1975.
Martindale Hall in South Australia plays the school. And the Rock plays itself.
Weir said the crew arrived treating the whole thing as a lark, and the Rock sorted that out fast.
Quote: "There is just something about the area that is oppressive and depressing. Absolutely
nothing unusual happened while we were there, but everyone was nervous while we were
there, and we were all glad to get away at last."
Nothing unusual happened. Everyone was nervous anyway. Remember that sentence, because
it's also a review of the finished film.
Now, the craft. Because this is where Picnic stops being a nice period drama and becomes a
machine for producing dread.
Start with the look. Weir and his cinematographer Russell Boyd want the film to look like a
Heidelberg School painting, all golden Victorian light, McCubbin country. And they get it by
borrowing a trick from the photographer David Hamilton. Boyd drapes bridal veil over the
camera lens. Different thicknesses for different scenes. That famous glow, that hazy, heatstruck shimmer? Wedding fabric. On a film about girls who vanish on the day lovers pair off.
Boyd won the BAFTA for it.
Then the sound. And this is the fact I'd put on the poster. Those long, sunlit picnic scenes, the
ones that feel wrong in a way you cannot name? Weir buried a recording of an earthquake
under them. Slowed down, pitched to the edge of hearing. Your eyes are getting a postcard.
Your body is getting a natural disaster. That's why your skin crawls while nothing happens.
Nothing unusual is happening. Everyone is nervous anyway.
He ran the cameras at strange speeds too. The girls drifting up the Rock are in slow motion so
gentle you don't clock it as an effect. You just feel the day thickening.
And one more, which stayed secret for over thirty years. Weir cast the schoolgirls for their
faces, not their acting. So several of them were dubbed. Secretly. By adult voice actors who
never got a credit. Every single word spoken by Edith, the whiny one who comes back down
screaming, is a voice actress named Barbara Llewellyn. She didn't tell anyone until decades
later. Some of the girls on that hillside are miming.
Weir was completely upfront about what all of this was for. Here he is in 1976, and this is the
quote of the episode: "We worked very hard at creating an hallucinatory mesmeric rhythm, so
that you lost awareness of facts, you stopped adding things up. I did everything in my power to
hypnotise the audience away from the possibility of solutions."
Read that again. He's not hiding an answer from you. He's anaesthetising the part of your brain
that asks the question. Every director since who's mumbled about ambiguity is standing on
that sentence.
And over the top of it all, those pan pipes. Gheorghe Zamfir, a Romanian master, with an
organist in a Swiss church. Here's your pub trivia: the theme was released as a single in 1976
and went to number fifteen on the Australian charts. The sound of four people evaporating,
sitting in the top twenty next to disco.
One more story from the shoot, and it's the one that gets me.
Joan Lindsay visits the set. She meets Anne-Louise Lambert, the twenty-year-old cast as
Miranda, the golden girl at the centre of the vanishing. And Lambert wasn't even the first
choice; another actress had the role until Weir recast it mid-rehearsals. So Lindsay has never
seen this young woman before in her life.
She walks straight up to her. Puts her arms around her. She's shaking. And she says, "Oh
Miranda. It's been so long."
They both stood there on the Rock and cried.
Make of that what you want. Lambert's own take was that whatever the facts were, the story
was true for Joan. Somewhere it was true.
The film opens in Adelaide in August 1975 and Australia falls, hard. Five million dollars at the
local box office off a four hundred and forty thousand dollar budget. The Australian New Wave
suddenly has a flagship, and the world starts paying attention.
America takes a little longer. Weir loved telling this story: at an early US screening, a distributor
sat through the whole film waiting for the reveal, got to the end, and threw his coffee cup at the
screen. Because he'd wasted two hours of his life on, quote, "a mystery without a goddamn
solution."
That man wanted an ending.
Here's the thing nobody in that room knew. There was one.
Joan Lindsay wrote an ending.
It was there in the manuscript. Chapter eighteen. The mystery of Hanging Rock, solved by the
woman who created it, in about twelve pages. And before publication, her publisher's side
asked her to cut it. She agreed. The book went out into the world with seventeen chapters and
a hole where the answer used to be. And the answer sat in a drawer for twenty years, until
1987, three years after her death, when it was finally published as a slim little book called The
Secret of Hanging Rock.
So what's in it?
The girls reach the upper slopes. Miss McCraw appears, except the chapter doesn't quite call
her Miss McCraw anymore; she's become something else on the way up. The girls take off
their corsets and throw them over the edge. And the corsets don't fall. They hang there.
Suspended mid-air, frozen, like the day has stopped accepting instructions. Time, as one of the
girls observes, has stopped behaving. And then, near the monolith, something opens in the
rock. Described almost like a fold in space. A hole in the world. Marion goes through. The
teacher goes through. Miranda follows. And Irma, the one who hesitates, the one who stays, is
the one they find alive a week later, remembering nothing.
It's not a killer. It's not a kidnapping. It's physics giving way. Which, if you've been paying
attention to the woman with no clocks, is the only ending she was ever going to write.
Now sit with what this means. The defining ambiguity of Australian cinema. The refusal to
explain that made that distributor throw his coffee. The mystery a whole nation treated as
folklore. It was an edit. Somebody in a publishing office read the answer and said, this is better
without it. And, this hurts to admit, they were right. Lindsay agreed to the cut, kept the secret
for the rest of her life, and the hole in the book is exactly what made it immortal. The most
influential creative decision in Australian screen history might belong to an editor whose name
most people will never know.
But there's a second thing that got cut from this story. And nobody published that one in 1987.
The Rock is real. It's a volcanic formation about six million years old, standing on the plains
northwest of Melbourne. And people have been there, on it and around it, for tens of
thousands of years. It sits near the boundary of three peoples of the Kulin nation: Dja Dja
Wurrung, Taungurung and Wurundjeri country. It was a meeting place. A ceremonial ground
between nations. Archaeological evidence at the site goes back at least ten thousand years.
It had a name. In the 1850s a German naturalist called William Blandowski made an engraving
of the Rock and recorded the name as "Anneyelong." Linguists today think he misheard
something closer to "Ngannelong," and I'll flag it straight: that's a reconstruction, not a
certainty. We are not even sure of the Rock's real name. And that uncertainty isn't a footnote.
It's the whole point. The name is missing because the people were removed.
Within a couple of decades of settlement, frontier violence, disease and forced relocation to
missions like Coranderrk had emptied that country of the nations who met there. A real
vanishing. At the exact site where Australia would spend the next century lovingly maintaining
a fictional one. Tourist signs about Miranda. Annual picnics in white dresses. A rock famous for
four made-up disappearances, silent about the real ones. In 2017 an artist named Amy Spiers
started a campaign called Miranda Must Go, arguing exactly this: that the fiction has been
allowed to stand in for the history.
Now, here's where I have to be honest with you about the film, because the truth is stranger
than the take.
Peter Weir saw this theme. And he chose to walk away from it. His words, 1976: "I could have
placed more emphasis on the outpost of Empire in the bush, the invaders in an alien
landscape, the repressive nature of this little piece of Empire. But as the atmosphere resulting
from the disappearances became my central interest, these themes disappeared from view."
Disappeared from view. His phrase. In this story, even the themes vanish.
And yet. Watch the film. It's all still there. The girls in white lace, dressed for a European garden
party, moving through country that predates Europe by geological time. The Rock treating them
like weather. Roger Ebert, reviewing it decades later, saw it immediately; he said the film
captures, quote, "the chasm between settlers from Europe and the mysteries of their ancient
new home."
That's my reading too, and I'll own it as a reading: the dread in Picnic at Hanging Rock is
colonial guilt with the sound turned off. Weir aimed the camera away from the theme and it
soaked into the film anyway, because it was already in the land, and the land is in every frame.
The Rock isn't hiding what happened to Miranda. The Rock is withholding, because something
was taken from it. Australia made a horror classic about a place keeping a secret, and never
noticed it was ours.
So why does this film still hold the crown?
In 1996, the industry voted. Critics, academics, the guilds, the Australian Film Institute. Best
Australian film of all time: Picnic at Hanging Rock.
But the vote undersells it. Look at the bloodline instead. Wolf Creek is this film with the
politeness removed, and I love the casting rhyme: John Jarratt is in both. He's Albert, the
sweet stablehand searching the Rock in 1975. Thirty years later he's Mick Taylor. Same actor,
same landscape, the dread finally given a face and a laugh. [9] Lake Mungo is this film's direct
grandchild: a vanished girl, a family that can't stop searching, and no comfort at the end. Sofia
Coppola built The Virgin Suicides from its gauze and its vanishing girls. Damon Lindelof says it
shaped The Leftovers, which took the premise planetary. [26] And fifty years on, in 2025, it
went back into cinemas in a new 4K restoration, supervised by Weir himself, scanned from the
original negative held at the National Film and Sound Archive. It never left.
And one last detail for the road. In 1998, Weir revisited the film and released a director's cut.
Directors do this all the time. They add scenes, restore darlings, pad the runtime. Weir cut
seven minutes out. The director's cut is shorter. Twenty three years later, his only note was:
more mystery.
Back to Mulberry Hill. A woman with no clocks in her house, dreaming a story about time
stopping, in a country that took her dream and used it, for fifty years, as a beautiful way of not
looking at its own history. At the picnic, remember, every watch stops at exactly noon.
I'd argue ours did too. And no editor is coming to cut us an ending.
Picnic at Hanging Rock is in the Vault at strangecountry.com.au, along with Lake Mungo, Wolf
Creek, and everything else that walked down off that rock. Trailers, streaming links, the lot. And
if you want to argue about what happened to Miranda, Ricky's in there too. He has theories. Of
course he does.
Now. Next time on Strange Country.
If this episode taught you anything, it's that the dread gets in through your ears. The
earthquake under the picnic. Pan pipes in the top twenty. So next episode, we turn the
speakers all the way up. The Music of the Movies. Brian May. No, not that one. The other one,
the one who scored Mad Max, Patrick, Roadgames, Razorback, and made an entire era of
Australian film sound like a threat. And Jed Kurzel, who made The Babadook sound like a held
breath. How this country learned to sound haunted. That's next time.
And in the meantime, over on Late Fees. Remember the grandchild? Lake Mungo. The
vanished girl, the family that can't stop looking, no comfort at the end. Umbrella has just given
it the send-off it deserves, and I mean that kindly. Three discs. 4K. A hardback book, the
original shooting script, and a three hour retrospective with Mike Flanagan, Justin Kurzel and
Eduardo Sánchez. I'm opening the box on Late Fees. Bring tissues, not popcorn.
I'm Mat Dalby. This has been Strange Country. Watch your watch.