AustLit

'In their introduction to the book Phantom Past, Indigenous Presence, Colleen E. Boyd and Coll Thrush recall the recurring nature of the ‘Indian burial ground’ (vii) cliché in popular culture. As Boyd and Thrush see it, the Aboriginal burial ground as the rationale for a piece of land being uncanny or haunted has become ‘a tried-and-true element of the cultural industry’ (vii). Boyd and Thrush argue that possessed, sacred Aboriginal territory or the ‘Indian uncanny’ (ix) remains one of the most common explanations for the supernatural attributes of a house or other physical site in texts produced in ‘settler colonies’ (Ashcroft 133) such as Australia, Canada, and the United States, ‘[w]hether . . . the haunted house down the dirt lane, the spectral woods behind the subdivision or the seemingly cursed stretch of highway up the canyon’ (Boyd vii).' (Introduction)

'[...]in Picnic, Joan Lindsay reconceptualizes what Coss calls the "familiar device" (101) of the sentient house to fit an Australian context. [...]while the haunted house can stand in as an easy metaphor for numerous concerns such as the "haunted" nation, the sentient house, on the other hand, challenges the metaphorical value of "hauntedness." (5-6) As I mentioned earlier, Bailey is referring exclusively to sentient houses in American fiction, but aside from the lack of an explicit "prosaic description" of Appleyard College as "malign," the house in Picnic at Hanging Rock fits the numerous criteria of Bailey's "formula" almost perfectly: the enterprising English widow Mrs. Appleyard moves into a "misfit" and "anachronistic" Australian mansion, unconcerned that the "forgotten" first owner sold the house after only "a year or two" (8); she populates it with a symbolic "family" in the form of her students and employees; "fault lines" appear in the "family" with the mysterious disappearance of the mathematics teacher, Greta McCraw, and three students, Miranda, Irma, and Marion, while on a picnic at the nearby Hanging Rock; and because of "gradually escalating assaults"- including the discovery of a dead pupil in the garden-at the end of the novel Mrs. Appleyard commits suicide, and the house is destroyed in a bushfire. [...]thing theory can only be used to a certain extent when examining the symbolic impact of the house in the novel because the house is not in fact "largely inconsequential in the rhetorical hierarchy of the text" (Freedgood 2).' (Publication abstract)