Down Under

AUSTRALIA is a strange piece of land. I spent a year and a half there, on a farm in coastal Victoria. The shire of Orbost, where I lived, has a population of 6000. It is the size of the state of Massachusetts. Three thousand people live in the market town of Orbost, the other 3000 clustered on tiny sawmill settlements and scattered on a few small farms carved out of the dense brush.

Most foreign images of Australia are formed around the outback, that monotonous expanse of brown grassland that stretches inlamd from the eastern mountain chain to the central desert, broken only by equally monotonous and enormous herds of sheep. The Australians' love-hate relationship with this inscrutable piece of earth is well-chronicled.

I lived not in the outback, but in the middle of the luxuriant cosatal forest between the mountains and Bass Strait. The woods were full of tree ferns; the trees were full of parrots. The topsoil was three feet thick. A welcoming kind of land, you would think.

I came to the farm bouncy with optimism. I had lived in the country before. I knew how to ride a horse. I knew Herefords from Holsteins. I liked to climb trees. I could chop wood, remember to close gates, cook on open fires.

But that country eluded me. I lived on the land for a year and it was aloof. I became pregnant. I had strange dreams. I thought about death. I grubbed in the garden, fought blackberries, photographed the green river, sat on top of the hill and looked at the valley in the blinding, opaque Australian sunlight. The land looked back and never blinked. I felt free to roam the cleared fields, but at the edge of the bush I felt an emotional barrier: no humans wanted. The kookaburras cackled derisively, and I inagined how the original settlers must have felt on first hearing that dismembered sound, coming out of the forest like a deranged banshee, a whole ancient continent helpless with mirth at the efforts of these stiff European turkeys to bend it to their will.

On a gray morning in January my baby girl sled into this far-fetched world. No doctors, nurses, hospitals, Representatives of Civilization to take her away and sanitize her, stop me from holding her all wet and hot and squiggly, washing her myself, nesting, bonding. I could look out my window and see the sentinel mahogany gums. They were blue-green, and their branches swam in the clean wind. I didn't want to be anywhere else.

MANY ARTISTS and writers have made the peculiar elusive quality of the Australian land the center of their work. Writers like Patrick White, painters like Sidney Nolan, have celebrated the passive hostility of a continent completely alien and unimaginably ancient. Until recently, there has been no Australian cinema. Peter Weir is one of its pioneers. With the assistance of the South Australian film Corporation, recently established by a culturally alert state Labor government, Weir made Picnic at Hanging Rock. Well-received at the Cannes film Festival in 1976, the film has only recently been released here following the success of Weir's later Last Wave.

The devices Weir uses in the two films to create suspense are similar: a soundtrack with weird geological-sounding noises, slow sequential shots of troubled faces. The Last Wave,however, takes place in the city, with only fleeting shots of the land, and its mystery is more explicitly "solved" than Picnic's.

The story is simple, taken from a novel by Joan Lindsay, who refuses to reveal whether it was based on a true event or not. In the year 1900, a group of school-girls go to Hanging Rock, an ancient volcanic outcropping, for a picnic. Three girls and a teacher disappear. One girl is found a week later, but no teace of the other three is ever seen again.

Weir's film captures so much of what I experienced of Australia. Lovely pale schoolgirls in white dresses climbing on million-year-old frozen lava, a wry picture of the ridiculous Victorian society that tried so desperately to implant itself on so much of the globe, and here more than anywhere else was so out of place, out of time.

The picnic takes place on St. Valentine's Day. The girls exchange flowery, cherub-studded cards in the morning, vow undying love, and set out in their carriage. The mixture of the everyday and the bizarre, so essential to any good horror movie, is achieved perfectly, as the scariest sequences are shot in that stark, glaring Australian daylight. The complicity of the primal landscape with the repressed spirituality and sexuality of the girls always present but never overdone.

The girls are led up the rock by Miranda. She is the loveliest among them. The Frinch schoolmistress compares her to a Botticelli angel as she jumps a stream and disappears between some trees, leading her classmates toward oblicion. They remove their black stockings and shoes to feel the rock on their bare feet. They fall asleep languidly on the warm rock, awaken, and drowsily walk away from the world.

AS I LEFT the Orson Welles, I had a rush of understanding. Australia is the most urbanized country in the world. Eighty per cent of its people live in its cities. Much as we Americans cling to a self-image of rugged individualism while going to work every day for IBM, Australians see themselves as tough rural types bonded by the 'mateship' of the bush. The reality is different. Huddled together in the cities, they turn their backs on the inhospitable and incorruptible land. The ones who choose to live in the wild become the crazies about whom the bush ballads are written, or else they become very strong. But as this movie shows, the bush will not be tamed. It always wins in the end.

Weir refuses to solve the mystery. In the end, the rock is the hero-the rock and the thin, adolescent integrity of the girls.

I returned to America; it seemed that civilization had recaptured me. I had a nice comvinient life before me. Relax for once, after three brain-wracking years at school. Live in Cambridge, maybe have another baby, buy my furniture at Design Research, maybe write, maybe get a job. As I sat watching Picnic at Hanging Rock this future started to look very vapid. Those blue-green gum trees. Gates fastened with rusty coat hangers. That still clean land. I have to go back.