In the summer of 1900 three girls from a private school and their teacher unaccountably vanish on a St Valentine’s Day school picnic to a mysterious rock in the midst of the Australian bush. The Victorian girls’ school for the daughters of the privileged gradually becomes contaminated and destroyed from within by its inability to understand the forces confronting it. Based on a novel which mythologises the emergence of sexuality, the film atmospherically follows various tangents without distilling a sense of explanation. Unease is evoked by the horror of not knowing. Based on the novel by Joan Lindsay. Cast includes Rachel Roberts, Dominic Guard, Helen Morse and Jacki Weaver.
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Collection
In ACMI's collection
Credits
Collection metadata
ACMI Identifier
324618
Language
English
Subject categories
Climate, Environment, Natural Resources & Disasters → Landscape - Australia
Feature films → Feature films - Australia
Literature → Australian literature - Film and video adaptations
Sound/audio
Captioned
Colour
Colour
Holdings
VHS; Access Print (Section 1)