Picnic at Hanging Rock

"This is the masterpiece of my adopted country, Australia. It’s set at a boarding school for girls – a very proper, very English boarding school of the kind that you only see in Australia, where people try almost too hard to become English. It’s about a school excursion. The girls go and have a picnic at a local geological formation called Hanging Rock, which actually exists. A few of the girls go climbing up the rock, and they never return. The book is about the aftermath of their disappearance and its effect on the people around them. Little hints at what might have happened to them leak out and drive people literally insane. It’s as if it were the story of Narnia, but turned inside out. It’s about what would happen to the people from whose lives the children disappeared, and the ways in which they would fall apart, trying to understand where they had gone and what had happened to them. It’s an amazing book, which I think is also about colonialism, and the attempt to impose order and a particular naive Western idea of civilization on a place which is wild and foreign to it. There’s a very famous movie made of it as well. As for its place in dark academia… It has these wonderful trappings of an English boarding school, with everybody speaking in a certain way and wearing the uniforms and going about the rituals of being a sporting English school student, but you’re overwhelmingly aware of this darkness very near to them, and they’re aware of it too. They can’t make any sense out of the disappearance of the girls. And, spoiler alert, we’re never told what happens to them, and they never return – or rather, one of them returns, but can’t remember what happened to her. And that’s the end. It’s all about what happens when people stare into this unsolvable mystery, and the havoc it wreaks on them. It’s a truly unique book and a genuine masterpiece. I think Joan Lindsay was something like seventy when she wrote it, so there’s hope for us all! Except for the girls who went up Hanging Rock. There’s no hope for them. Oh, of course – once I learned it was out there, I couldn’t stop myself. But whoever advised her to leave it out gave her very good advice. It’s certainly interesting, and I think it has to do with her trying to introduce into the story some of the indigenous Australian mythology. The girls go into a dream-time-like world where time doesn’t exist, and vistas of knowledge open up to them. It’s actually a little bit of a happy ending, in that the girls are not at all saddened by their fate, and they have no desire to return home. It’s a funny turn from the darkness of the rest of the book, and I think it would detract from the power of the whole – it would be a different book if she’d left it in. It’s funny, I find myself turning over this idea of dark academia… Once you think of it as a category, it turns out to be everywhere. It exists purely as an aesthetic, apart from any actual books, and there are plenty of people who just think of it as a way of dressing and photographing themselves. But when you look back, so many works retroactively fall into the ‘dark academia’ category. I almost put Frankenstein on the list, for example, in that it is a story about the pursuit of knowledge that leads one into forbidden territories. I feel like it’s not as sexy as dark academia is supposed to be. But there’s this very primal mythological story about knowledge leading to the fall, which dark academia has its roots in – the Bible is dark academia. Dark academia has been taken to this very specific, wonderfully aestheticised place. The idea has become extra-refined now because it is specifically about knowledge that does not exist on computers or in digital form – it’s the kind of knowledge that you’d only find in books, and nowhere else. And the pervasiveness of empty digital information makes us yearn even more for this kind of knowledge."