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Series / Picnic at Hanging Rock

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A 2018 TV adaptation of Joan Lindsay's classic 1967 novel for Foxtel Showcase.

In the early 20th century, Mrs. Appleyard (Natalie Dormer) purchases a mansion in rural Australia and turns it into a successful school for young ladies. On a school outing to Hanging Rock, however, a group of girls — freespirited Miranda (Lily Sullivan), rich heiress Irma (Samara Weaving), and intelligent, mixed-race Marion (Madeleine Madden) — and one of the teachers, Greta McCraw (Anna McGahan), mysteriously disappear, and the ramifications affect Mrs. Appleyard, the school, and the local community.


This show provides examples of:

  • Adaptational Sympathy: Mrs. Appleyard is given a far more tragic backstory; she is implied to have been forced into prostitution at a young age.
  • Adaptation Expansion: A 212-page novel, previously made into a two-hour film, is stretched out into five hours of television.
  • All Love Is Unrequited: Irma has a crush on Miranda, who doesn't want to be with anyone, and then on Michael, who is either in love or fascinated with Miranda, and doesn't propose as everyone expects.
  • Ambiguously Evil: Mrs. Appleyard is out for herself above all, but how much empathy she has for others is confusing.
    • The teachers are all women who would be otherwise unemployable due to scandalous backgrounds or limited intelligence. Is this because she wants them to be beholden to her, or because she sympathises with their situations? Or is she afraid to hire anyone too respectable, who might see through her disguise?
    • Does she try to protect Miranda to save her reputation and future, or the school's, or both? Does she try to break her spirit for the same reason? Does she care about the missing girls, or only about the scandal they caused her?
    • She bonds with Sara over her time in the orphanage, and then beats her. And might have killed her. Accidentally. Or not.
    • She stole her fortune from Arthur, but didn't intend to kill him.
  • Arc Words: "Free".
  • Attempted Rape: Miranda defends herself from one. Painfully.
  • Bowdlerise: An in-universe example. The foyer at Appleyard College prominently features two sculptures of nude females, whose bare breasts have been covered up with signs reading "Purity" and "Refinement."
  • Casting Gag: Jewish actress Yael Stone plays fanatical Christian Dora Lumley, who's highly anti-Semitic, calling Jews enemies of God.
  • Child of Two Worlds: Marion is mixed race, with a white father and Aboriginal mother. Due to her rich father paying for it, she's educated at a high society finishing school and mixes with upper class white girls. It's clear though she will never gain full entry among them due to her heritage, since even when offered a teaching position she'd have to always hide when the students' parents came due to their racism.
  • Con Artist: From the very beginning it is made clear to the viewer that Hester Appleyard is not the honorable widow she pretends to be, though her past takes some time to be unraveled. While we see her as a lower-class orphan raised into some kind of thief, it's not entirely clear all the parts she played in scams, or the exact nature of her relationship with Arthur.
  • Damsel out of Distress: Miranda suffers an attempted rape in the stables by a young soldier. She stabs him in the foot with a pitchfork, incapacitating her attacker.
  • Driven to Suicide: Possibly Sara, though her fate is unclear. Hester, on the other hand, very clearly jumped to her death.
  • Fake Aristocrat: Irma, as the one student who actually comes from high society, can easily tell that Mrs. Appleyard does not, due to her failure to follow precise dinner protocols.
  • Half-Breed Discrimination: Marion is the illegitimate daughter of a white judge and an Aboriginal woman. It's made clear that due to her background, she will never be fully accepted into white society.
  • Heteronormative Crusader: Dora Lumley is appalled learning that Marion is seeing Miss McCraw and everyone else besides her friends (one of whom, Irma, is also queer) also reacts with homophobia when they learn about this.
  • Impaled Foot: Miranda drives a pitchfork through the foot of the man who tried to take advantage of her.
  • Jumping Off the Slippery Slope: Mrs. Appleyard walks an ambiguous line until you begin to realise she's lying about Sara's disappearance.
  • Line-of-Sight Name: "Mrs Appleyard" was the mascot of a brand of soap.
  • Lipstick Lesbian: Marion, Miss McCraw and Irma are all proper lady denizens of a finishing school. In the first two cases they're a couple, while the latter shows attraction to girls along with boys.
  • Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: We see watches stopping near Hanging Rock, and several mysterious instances of people falling asleep en masse, and time seeming to overlap during the ending. On the other hand, the characters who disappeared all had very good reasons to run off together.
  • Mistaken for Racist: Played for Drama. When Miss McCraw rebuffs Marion's Valentine, she does so on the grounds that such a student-teacher relationship would be wrong, but unfortunately also makes the mistake of telling Marion to leave "before anyone sees you". As Mrs. Appleyard just made Marion a job offer but said she would have to stay out of sight of parents because of her race, this comes across to Marion as Miss McCraw rejecting her for the same reason and trying to put a fig leaf over it, rather than genuinely trying to avoid a bad power dynamic.
  • My God, What Have I Done?: After Sara has been found dead, Mrs. Appleyard goes to Arthur's home believing that Arthur kidnapped the girls and McCraw to get back at her. However, his assistant reveals the truth: Arthur is dead; when Hester shot him years ago, the wound might have originally been non-fatal, but he developed gangrene and died as a direct result of her shot. Hester is in shock but she turns to despair realising that something else has taken the missing girls and teacher and that she might be the scapegoat for it.
  • Palm Bloodletting: Appears twice in important scenes of bonding among the main trio. First, Miranda's hands are caned until they bleed, and the other girls soothe her. Later, there's a scene where all three slice their palms with rose thorns in order to swear a Blood Oath.
  • Parental Incest: Irma's stepfather made some sort of advances on her, which is why her mother sent her away.
  • No Periods, Period: Averted, Edith's first period (and her limited understanding of the subject) is responsible for her being out of sorts on the day of the picnic.
  • Race Lift: In this version, Marion is biracial, having a white Australian father and an Aboriginal mother.
  • Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: Every major character at Appleyard College is a misfit unwanted by their families or society in general.
  • "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Mlle. Poitiers, gives one to the officers after discovering Sara's death scolding them for believing in the illusion that was the Appleyard College rather than protect Sara.
  • The Reveal: What was inside the little box that Sara stole from Mrs. Appleyard, which made her so upset? It wasn't what was inside it at all, it was the box itself.
  • Sanity Slippage: Mrs. Appleyard is plagued by visions of her dead husband Arthur (although she didn't actually know he was dead at the time) and later, maggots after Sara's death.
  • Secret Relationship: Marion and Miss McCraw have to keep their relationship a secret, not so much due to being a teacher and student but the two both being female. Despite wanting to be with her, Marion is unhappy at the prospect of having to keep this secret forever.
  • Self-Harm: Sara's legs are covered with self-inflicted scratches. She may have killed herself, in the end, though it's never clear, and slightly more likely that Hester knocked her out the window, accidentally or otherwise.
  • Slut-Shaming
    • The reason Irma is at the school: her mother blames her for her stepfather creeping on her, and sent her away to the middle of nowhere.
    • Irma calls Miranda a "saloppe," or slut in French when she perceives Miranda's smile as flirtatious towards Irma's crush, Michael.
    • Deliberately invoked by the French mistress, Mlle. Poitiers. She stays the night at her boyfriend's house and makes very sure everyone sees her leaving in the morning so that the scandalous gossip will cover up the fact she visited the Sheriff to express her concerns about Sara.
  • Spotting the Thread: Irma realizes almost immediately that there's something not quite right about Mrs. Appleyard because of the tiny, almost insignificant protocol mistakes present at the school—serving red wine with fish, bread plates on the wrong side—that someone who was truly born and bred in "high society" would never make.
  • Teacher/Student Romance: Between Marion and Miss McCraw.
  • Toplessness from the Back: Miranda, Irma and Marion are all shown naked from behind when dressing in Episode 3 together.
  • Twofer Token Minority: Marion, a girl with white and Aboriginal parentage, is the school's only person of color. This was very progressive at the time, and her rich father's influence is the reason she's able to access it. She's also secretly involved with a female teacher.
  • The Unreveal: Albert never learns that his sister Sara is a student at Miss Appleyard's, and thus never learns of her death either, meaning that the audience never gets to see the two siblings interact on-screen or see Albert's reaction to either revelation.
  • Uptown Girl: Working class Albert has unrequited feelings for heiress Irma. The wealthy Michael is implied to have feelings for Albert, who appears to reciprocate by the end of the series.
  • Vomit Indiscretion Shot: The series likes to throw some shock imagery, including the vomiting of Miranda's attempted assailant and a close-up view of the man defecating on the school carpet in revenge.
  • You Know I'm Black, Right?: A non-verbal example. Irma makes an off-hand remark about "savages" while the four are walking through the woods, leading Marion to turn around and give her a long, pointed look.

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