Look at the picture. What do you see? That’s right. Five white schoolgirls…
Why do we still do – and want to see – Australian historical drama that looks like this? And by that I mean, Australian historical drama that looks, and is, White British.
The show explodes onto the stage, from a pre-show disco music sample to a vast, nothingness theatrical bush landscape with a tableau of Australian schoolgirls. The school uniform is contemporary Australian. This is not the white Victorian frocks of the movie, one of the hugely influential Australian ‘New Wave’ films of the 1970s that were based on historical novels and looked to the Australian Impressionist art of the 1880s for their aesthetic. These films reinforced the national narrative of settler colonial Australia and gave White Australians of British descent a visual image of their heroic settler past. (A national narrative that some Australian artists and writers are still trying to dismantle and rebuild – it’s very complicated, which is why I am doing a PhD on it.)
This line of girls in school uniform provokes and intrigues, their stillness and their purposeful, almost imperceptible shifts in weight sending tension into the theatre. These uniforms are saying yes, these schoolgirls might be from 1900 but they are Australian schoolgirls and there is a continuity between schoolgirls then and school girls now. It’s very creepy. But the hair! So much hair. Thick, curly, all of it below shoulder length. The hair is from the movie and the uniforms are from Summer Bay High.
I reflect on my own school, established by a determined Scottish woman in the 1880s in her father’s house. My similar school uniform, from the 1980s. The school prefect in me wants to give these schoolgirls uniform detentions for hair that touches the collar. The Old Girl in me is proud that we now give boarding scholarships to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, and I think of them in that same uniform.
Click to see Indigenous Australian schoolgirls in their uniforms, with hats and without hats.
The show is structured as a serious of scenes about the event – a school picnic on Valentine’s Day 1900 from which most of them did not return – and is mostly set in a sparse room with panelled walls that echoes the entrance hall of a Victorian house, the only furniture a large mahogany plant stand. The performers speak as if they are testifying, they are witnesses to the action, and change roles frequently. Each scene comes with a title projected from a digital box above the stage. The titles themselves are factual and poetic. ‘St Valentine’s Day, 1900’, ‘The Pattern of the Picnic’ and so on.
It is Edith’s version of events that is the most moving and most compelling. She retraces her steps, each footstep on the soft carpeted stage sounding as if she is crushing twigs and gum leaves underfoot. It is a fascinating theatrical effect, real theatrical magic. All that is missing is the unmistakably Australian bush scent of crushed dry eucalyptus leaves…
There is more theatrical magic when the search is re-enacted. Distance and space is evoked by short scenes with static performers who disappear and then reappear. In one seen we were given a glimpse of a girl with long blond hair in a white dress – it is as if the film is also haunting this show. And then the blond girl in the white dress is gone again. Disappeared. Never to be seen again.
The story peaks in a glorious fight scene that starts with a strange, almost-Victorian fitness class with the girls demanding that the survivor, Irma Leopold, should tell them what happened. They claw at her. First the hat goes, the hair comes down, then they tear at her clothes, gloves and sleeves go flying as a ball of anger rolls thrashing around the stage. Eventually Irma shrieks “This country!” and jumps off the stage and runs out of the stalls. It is a frenetic, beautiful scene. The frustrating, controlled stillness of the other scenes has been released.
The anthropocene, and the crucial engagement with the environment that is emerging more and more in Australian literature and theatre, is a dominating feature of the story. There are constant, detailed references to Australian trees and land formations. Words like ‘portals’ and ‘gateways’ are used to describe the Australian landscape.
Australian historical representations grapple with the absence of the Indigenous Australian. Here it is the over-emphasis on the extraordinariness of the natural world, the constant references, that begin to remind us that the Indigenous Australian is absent. Or are they perhaps included in the natural world? The play goes further into discussions about settlers arriving and life back in England and the role of the English school teacher in Australia – at one point the Headmistress reflects on what it seemed like to the new arrivals from England who had no names for things they had never seen and this is contrasted with the way they felt in Bournemouth. But the Indigenous presence is missing. Indigenous Australians were classified as flora and fauna by the White British colonisers, only becoming Australian citizens in the 1960s. The emphasis on the natural world and its reminder of the Indigenous Australians who are absent, is problematic.
Despite enjoying the show, I do wonder why on earth Australian theatre makers and funders want to do a show about five white school girls in 1900. Not even colourblind casting nor an Inclusion Rider could have changed the fact that this is an adaptation of a novel about five white girls lost in the bush. Especially after all the recent fuss over Banished. Why do we keep repeating ourselves, when there are so many other stories that we could tell. Tanya Dalziell’s programme essay addresses the place of Picnic At Hanging Rock in the Australian imagination and mentions the #MirandaMustGo campaign by artist Amy Spiers, which calls for ‘an end to what they see as the ongoing, uncritical recycling of colonial myths of white female vanishings’.
For an alternative view of what the heroic Australian past looks like, both White British and Indigenous, go and see Warwick Thornton’s Sweet Country. In cinemas now.
And for an alternative view of what Australian schoolgirls look like, with hats and without hats
Colorblind casting
