Decolonising Ngannelong: A Geocritical Approach to Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock and Its Visual Adaptations

Abstract

ABSTRACT The study involves close readings of Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock 1 and its visual adaptations from a postcolonial feminist and geocritical theoretical framework to analyse how the space operate as a hegemonic tool in reproducing dominance based on gender, race, caste, class, and ethnicity. The comparative study will help to understand the ways in which adaptations of a source narrative to different media modify the landscape and space thereby shifting the gender equations as well. Lindsay’s novel has adaptations (all eponymous) produced during different time periods. The narratives, however, focus on the ‘white vanishing’ trope 2 and fail to acknowledge the Aboriginal significance and sacredness of the space (Ngannelong). By focusing on such fictional disappearances, the trauma of real displacement of the First People got overlooked. This has even resulted in organised campaigns like ‘Miranda Must Go’, 3 against publicising Ngannelong based on the fictional narratives and to restore the Aboriginal sanctity and relevance of the space. Through geocritical approach, the study aims to highlight this manipulation of history with special emphasis on gender and social location by paying attention to the ways in which space and place influence the story, characters and incidents.