The Wild Reed: Australian Sojourn

Monday, May 06, 2024

Australian Sojourn – April-May 2024

Part 3: Hanging Rock

My 2024 Australian sojourn continues! . . .

Last Wednesday I travelled from “Australia’s oldest inland city” of Goulburn to the geological site of Hanging Rock in rural Victoria. Accompanying me on this trip was my Minnesota friend Kate.

This was my fourth visit to Hanging Rock. My first was in 1985 as a 19-year-old college student; my second was in April of 2003, during a visit home to Australia from the U.S.; and the third was during my May 2016 Australian sojourn (documented here).

My interest in and attraction to Hanging Rock began when, as a 10-year-old boy in Australia, I saw Peter Weir’s film Picnic at Hanging Rock. This was in 1975, when Weir’s adaptation of Joan Lindsay's novel (also titled Picnic at Hanging Rock) was first released. Both Lindsay’s book and Weir’s film tell the story of a group of students from an exclusive girls’ boarding school who mysteriously vanish from a picnic on St. Valentine’s Day 1900. Weir’s film is widely credited as a key work in the “Australian film renaissance” of the mid-1970s. It was also the first Australian film of its era to both gain critical praise and be given a substantial international theatrical release.

Often described as “lush,” “atmospheric,” and “Gothic,” the haunting qualities of Picnic at Hanging Rock certainly left a deep and long-lasting impression on me as a child. Later, as I grew into awareness of my sexuality, the film’s themes of oppression and liberation became meaningfully and appealingly apparent to me. I wrote the first version of my essay Rock of Ages: Theological Reflections on Picnic at Hanging Rock in 1996 for Vertigo, a journal of thought and reflection on sexuality and spirituality published by the theology department of the College of St. Catherine, St. Paul. A second version (which can be found at The Wild Reed here) was written in 2002 as part of my studies in film and theology at United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities.

For all these reasons, and for the sheer beauty and uniqueness of the place, Hanging Rock is a very special place for me; a sacred place, really.

Above: At Hanging Rock in 2016.

Here’s a little of what Wikipedia has to say about the “geological marvel” that is Hanging Rock:

Hanging Rock (also known as Dryden’s Mount or Dryden’s Rock, and to some Aboriginal Australians as Ngannelong) is a distinctive geological formation in central Victoria, Australia. A former volcano, it lies 718 metres above sea level on the plain between the two small townships of Newham and Hesket, approximately 70 km north-west of Melbourne and a few kilometres north of Mount Macedon.

In the middle of the 19th century, the original occupants of the area – tribes of the Dja Dja Wurrung, Woi Wurrung and Taungurung – were forced from it. They had been its occupants for thousands of years and, colonisation notwithstanding, continue to maintain cultural and spiritual connections to it.

In the late 20th century, the area became widely known as the setting of Joan Lindsay’s novel Picnic at Hanging Rock.

Attempts to uncover Hanging Rock’s Aboriginal name have proven difficult. Some think it is “Anneyelong” because of an inscription underneath an engraving of the rock made by German naturalist William Blandowski during an expedition in 1855–56. Historian and toponymist Ian D. Clark believes Blandowski misheard the name, and the word was possibly “Ngannelong” or something similar. The name ”Diogenes Mount” was bestowed on the rock by the surveyor Robert Hoddle in 1843, in keeping with the spirit of several ancient Macedonian names given by Major Thomas Mitchell during his expedition through Victoria in 1836, which passed close to Hanging Rock. Others include Mount Macedon, Mount Alexander, and the Campaspe River. Six other European names (Mount Diogenes, Diogenes’ Head, Diogenes Monument, Dryden’s Rock, Dryden’s Monument and Hanging Rock) have also been recorded.

Hanging Rock is a mamelon, created 6.25 million years ago by stiff magma pouring from a vent and congealing in place. Often thought to be a volcanic plug, it is not. Two other mamelons exist nearby, created in the same period: Camels Hump, to the south on Mount Macedon and, to the east, Crozier’s Rocks. All three mamelons are made of solvsbergite, a form of trachyte only found in two or three other places in the world. As Hanging Rock’s magma cooled and contracted it split into rough columns. These weathered over time into the many pinnacles that can be seen today.

The three mamelons demonstrate the mechanism of plate tectonics. As the Australian Plate moved northwards towards East Asia over 27 million years, it passed over a volcanic hotspot. This resulted in a chain of volcanoes stretching from Hillsborough (33 million years ago) in Northern Queensland to Hanging Rock (6.5 million years ago), which is part of the southernmost end of this volcanic activity. This chain also includes the Warrumbungles (New South Wales, 15.5 million years ago) and the Glass House Mountains (Southern Queensland, 24.3 million years ago). These volcanoes all have the same chemical composition.

Hanging Rock contains numerous distinctive rock formations, including the “Hanging Rock” itself (a boulder suspended between other boulders, under which is the main entrance path), the Colonnade, the Eagle, and the UFO. Hanging Rock’s highest point is 718 metres above sea level and 105 metres above the plain below.

. . . Hanging Rock is the centrepiece for the Hanging Rock Recreation Reserve, a public reserve managed by the Macedon Ranges Shire Council. The reserve includes a horse racing track, picnic grounds, creek, interpretation centre and cafe. The reserve is a habitat for endemic flora and fauna, including koalas, wallabies, possums, phascogales, wedge-tailed eagles and kookaburras.

Above: An image of Hanging Rock from the website of the Macedon Ranges Shire Council. (Photographer unknown)

Following are more images from my May 1, 2024 visit to Hanging Rock . . .

Above: My friend Kate at Hanging Rock – May 1, 2024.

On the steep southern facade the play of golden light and deep violet shade revealed the intricate construction of long vertical slabs; some smooth as giant tombstones, others grooved and fluted by prehistoric architecture of wind and water, ice and fire. Huge boulders, originally spewed red hot from the boiling bowels of the earth, now come to rest, cooled and rounded in forest shade.

– Joan Lindsay
Excerpted from Picnic at Hanging Rock
p. 29

As the vertical facade of the Rock drew nearer, the massive slabs and soaring rectangles repudiated the easy charms of its fern-clad lower slopes. Now outcrops of prehistoric rock and giant boulders forced their way to the surface above layers of rotting vegetation and animal decay: bones, feathers, birdlime, the sloughed skins of snakes; some with jagged horns and jutting spikes, obscene knobs and scabby carbuncles; others smoothly humped and rounded by the passing of a million years.

– Joan Lindsay
Excerpted from Picnic at Hanging Rock
p. 78

Upon its release, Picnic at Hanging Rock was praised for its atmospheric cinematography – one which captures beautifully and hauntingly, the unique colors, sounds and contours of the Australian bush.

The opening scene for instance, depicts a forest of eucalyptus trees shrouded in an impenetrable mantle of mist. Silently the mist settles, obscuring the trees but revealing the jagged escarpments and pinnacles of Hanging Rock, aglow in the early morning light.

It is an image that exudes a sense of paradox and mystery, for the towering bulk of volcanic rock appears to hover in space, to hang miraculously within the firmament as if suspended in a timeless realm. The silence accompanying this image is broken only by occasional bird song and by a faint yet ominous sound – the source of which seems to be the very core of the Rock itself.

It is a deeply primordal sound – one that will be echoed on the afternoon of the picnic when Miss McCraw’s attention is inexplicibly drawn from her book of trigonometry to the jutting crags of the Rock, and when the schoolgirls Miranda, Marion and Irma explore in awed fascination the time-encoded patterns and formations of the monolith. They are patterns that speak mesmerizingly of transcendence and timelessness, and formations that increasingly seem to invite passage to such realms.

– Michael Bayly
Excerpted from Rock of Ages:
Theological Reflections on Picnic at Hanging Rock

Directly ahead, the grey volcanic mass rose up slabbed and pinnacled like a fortress from the empty yellow plain. [They] could see the vertical lines of the rocky walls, now and then gashed with indigo shade, patches of grey green dogwood, outcrops of boulders even at this distance immense and formidable. At the summit, apparently bare of living vegetation, a jagged line of rock cut across the serene blue of the sky.

– Joan Lindsay
Excerpted from Picnic at Hanging Rock
p. 18