We’re overjoyed to present our first publication: Joan Lindsay’s mesmerizing masterpiece, Picnic at Hanging Rock, beautifully translated and offered for the first time in Serbian.
Translated by: Željko V. Mitić
“Hanging Rock” is a volcanic formation about 80 kilometers north of Melbourne in the state of Victoria, Australia. For tens of thousands of years, Hanging Rock was a sacred site for Australian Aborigines. It’s within this environment that Joan Lindsay, following in the footsteps of Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw,” constructs her dreamlike, enigmatic narrative about the unexplained disappearance of several students and their teacher from a nearby repressive Victorian boarding school. The landscape seems to absorb and erase them, almost in an act of resistance against integration into the sanitized colonial order.
Since its first publication in 1967, the mythology surrounding the novel has become inseparably linked to the landscape itself. Despite the narrative’s openness to various interpretations, including post-colonial readings, there have been recent campaigns (“Miranda Must Go!”) aiming to exorcise the landscape from the imaginary (?) disappeared girls and reassociate it with Aboriginal heritage.
The 1975 film adaptation directed by Peter Weir, often hailed as the greatest Australian film of all time, solidified the place of “Picnic at Hanging Rock” as a key element in Australia’s collective cultural imagination.
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