Picnic at Hanging Rock filming locations: the crew crossed a state line, then restarted on Valentine's Day 1975
The rock is in Victoria and the school is in South Australia, and the reason has nothing to do with scenery. Here's how Peter Weir's 1975 film was assembled out of two states, one borrowed mansion and a replica built in a shed in Adelaide.
Two of the film's most recognisable places sit in different states, the better part of a day's drive apart. The reason for that split is written into the budget rather than the script.
Peter Weir's adaptation of Joan Lindsay's 1967 novel opens on Saint Valentine's Day 1900, when a party of schoolgirls goes walking on a volcanic outcrop in the Macedon Ranges and doesn't all come back. Producer Patricia Lovell had bought the rights from Lindsay for A$100. The finished budget came to A$440,000, assembled from the Australian Film Development Corporation, British Empire Films and — crucially for where the cameras ended up — the South Australian Film Corporation, plus A$3,000 from private investors. The SAFC was in its third year and its money came with the expectation that it would be spent in South Australia.
Hanging Rock, Victoria
The Rock is the real thing and it is where you think it is: near Woodend, in the Macedon Ranges north-west of Melbourne, on Wurundjeri country. Weir shot the picnic, the ascent and the disappearance there, under some notable constraints. The equipment had to go up the Rock by helicopter, and a generator was dropped on the way, leaving cinematographer Russell Boyd bouncing light instead. The picnic sequence could only be shot during a single hour each day when the light was right.
"We had limited access to equipment and paraphernalia — not just because it was difficult to get up there on the Rock, but because there wasn't that much equipment to work with in Australia at that time," Weir has said of the shoot.
Boyd stretched bridal veil over the lens in varying thicknesses, in different grades for different scenes, chasing the look of Heidelberg School painting. On the Rock they used Arriflex BL cameras; at the school, Panavision.
Martindale Hall, and the 14 February start
Appleyard College is Martindale Hall, a Georgian-style mansion built in 1879 at Mintaro in South Australia's Clare Valley — roughly 900 kilometres from the Rock. Weir called it an extraordinary building, oddly marooned in the landscape. The crew moved there after finishing the Victorian exteriors and started shooting on 14 February 1975.
Saint Valentine's Day. For a film that opens on Saint Valentine's Day 1900. Nobody involved has ever claimed it was planned.
What the house gave them:
- The central hall and staircase — the spine of almost every interior in the college.
- Upstairs bathrooms and bedrooms — including the dormitory scenes.
- The dining room and smoking room — dressed as college rooms.
- The coach house — pressed into service as the gymnasium.
The building belonged to the University of Adelaide, which had inherited it, and the university drove a firm bargain: it doubled the location fee and asked that Martindale's involvement be kept quiet, with neither the university nor the resident, Dorothy Mortlock, named in publicity. The film consequently preserves wallpaper and fittings that were altered soon afterwards.
The part they built
Mrs Appleyard's study — the room where the headmistress does her worst arithmetic on the school's finances — is not in the house at all. A full replica was constructed at the South Australian Film Corporation's studio at Norwood, in Adelaide. So the college is three places: a Victorian rock, a South Australian mansion and an Adelaide soundstage, cut together into one institution.
The shoot ran roughly five to six weeks. "We set up on a Sunday and started shooting on a Monday," Boyd recalled.
The film premiered at the Greater Union Quad in Adelaide on 8 August 1975 and took A$5.12 million in Australia. In 1996 a poll of critics, journalists and filmmakers voted it the greatest Australian film ever made.
For the record: both locations are open to visitors, and neither has ever recorded a disappearance.