Sunday, 10 March 2002
No picnic. At onepotmeal, Steve concludes his perceptive analysis of Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock with a request:
And if any Australian bloggers are reading this, please tell me if I'm way off-base - I'm not trying to position myself as an expert in anything, except my own dumb dream about Charlie Sheen.
Right on target, I'd say. Though it's a long time since I watched Picnic at Hanging Rock, Steve's essay brought the film back to me afresh -- particularly the attempts of the newly-arrived settlers to make the Australian landscape conform to their European memories.
During my career as a photographer, I had the good fortune of being granted a contract to photograph cultural artifacts in the Mitchell Library in Sydney, the most important archive of early Australiana. Over a period of seven years I recorded all manner of objects: sketchbooks, journals, posters, manuscripts, jewellery, weapons, china, maps, manacles, paintings, photographs, scrimshaw, prints... The one connecting thread in all the works I photographed was this: the utter disorientation of the immigrants and their poignant desire to make sense of the harsh, alien environment into which they found themselves cast. Steve describes their (and our) predicament:
The choice faced by me, by the characters in Picnic at Hanging Rock, by anyone who moves into a new world of some kind, is whether to stand recalcitrant in who and what you are, even if that rigidity costs you your life, or to bend, to shift, to fall into step with that new place as much as is humanly possible.
Most of us still haven't come to terms with this new world, as we continue to find refuge in the coastal cities. The vast interior doesn't reveal its secrets for the price of a seven-day/six-night tour.
11:47:00 PM 
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© Copyright 2002 Jonathon Delacour
