Imagining the secondary school: the 'pictorial turn' and representations of secondary schools in two Australian feature films of the 1970s.

Abstract

Derrick Armstrong (2003) recently wrote that: 'History lives through the forms of its representations.' (1) Increasingly the most common representation of historical knowledge is derived from the visual media. This trend has been called the 'pictorial turn'. Rosenstone has argued that historians need to consider historical film as another way of 'doing history' with its own conventions, styles and 'language'. (2) This article engages with the cinematic history of Australian education by examining the historical representation of secondary schools in a number of Australian feature films of the 1970s. By what narrative strategies, metaphors and understandings were Australian high schools encoded into images and how might these interpretations differ from written accounts of the secondary schools? Specifically the analysis centres on two seminal films: Picnic at Hanging Rock (Weir, 1975) and The Getting of Wisdom (Beresford, 1977). These films of the 'New Wave' cinema revival have usually been interpreted as discussions about Australian national identity, and the historical settings of secondary schools have not been foregrounded. This article however focuses on the social and material worlds of the schools. It reflects on the types of education depicted and the characterisations of teachers and students. The analysis includes consideration of gender, class, and sexualities. Finally, the article asks: what was the historical understanding of secondary schools that made them so attractive for cinematic explorations of Australian national identity in the 1970s?

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Until very recently academic historians have largely ignored, or, if not ignored, then pilloried, film as a way of interpreting the past. Fischman has maintained that educational researchers have a 'blind spot' regarding visual culture. (3) This is the case even though a number of historians have been warning that 'something significant is going on' and that film has slipped under the historian of education's radar and 'seems like a relentless force moving across academe'. (4) W.J.T. Mitchell has asserted that the 'long dominance of the book is giving way to the picture ... as the determining factor in our culture' and he has labelled this phenomenon, the pictorial turn.' (5) The image is pervasive and film has become the lingua franca by which most people learn about history. John O'Connor, after directing a project for the American Historical Association on the moving image, asserted that visual literacy should be on every methods course for research historians. (6)

Engagement with the field of History and Film challenges thinking about 'doing history'. Filmic history has its own conventions, styles and 'language'. This includes the use of camera angles, colour, setting, music and editing. Filmic history attempts to communicate an understanding about the past by embracing the personal and the emotional in (usually) a seamless and closed narrative about particular people in the past. The people in historical films can be real historical figures, or, as they are in the two films discussed here, they can be representatives of a class of persons, for example, students or teachers. Compression, condensation, invention and stereotypes are often employed as a form of cinematic shorthand to convey whole sets of information about the past. Further, because of the immediacy of films as representations of history, they pull the past into the present, and thereby bring the past into relationship with the present. (7) They come alongside. All this opens up new questions regarding the history of Australian education, especially about the nature of filmic representations of Australian education. What happens to the history of education when it escapes the academy? How are schools depicted by those who would visualise the educational past?

While in the history of education, the scholarly study of the cartoon and photograph has been foregrounded, (8) this article begins to investigate the longstanding interest of Australian filmmakers in stories that feature schools of one type or another. (9) It presents an exploratory discussion on the nature of filmic representations of secondary schools in two influential films of the 1970s nouvelle vague Australian cinema: Picnic at Hanging Rock and The Getting of Wisdom. These films have usually been interpreted as products of a particular cultural moment and as discussions about Australian national identity. The historical settings of secondary schools which the films share have not been foregrounded. This analysis, however, focuses on the social and material worlds of the schools. It reflects on the types of education depicted and the characterisations of teachers and students. The analysis includes consideration of gender, class, and sexualities. Race is not discussed except to say here that it is a non-issue and is dissolved into normative, unproblematic whiteness. The race politics of the 1970s were not reflected in the films' meditations on Australian national identity. (10) The article also comments on the historical understanding of secondary schools that made them so attractive for cinematic explorations of Australian national identity in the 1970s.

The article argues that the films identify the late nineteenth century schools with conservatism, with British colonisation and identity, middle class aspirational culture and with repressive notions of gender and sexuality. (11) Most written histories of Australian secondary education support such an interpretation. It will show how in these films at least the schools' primary function is to provide galling limitations against which the young protagonists test themselves. The school, in much the same way as the army in Gallipoli (Weir, 1981) and Breaker Morant (Beresford, 1979), provides a convenient symbolic architecture of Britishness against which unique 'Australianness' can be highlighted. Finally it is suggested that the deep ambivalence of the portrayals of the private schools points to the fractured nature of Australian national identity.

The 1970s as a cultural moment

With the assistance of Australian governments a revival of the Australian film industry took place in the 1970s. This revival coincided with radical political and social changes, and the emergence of a renewed cultural nationalism. According to Strohmaier, 'a great amount of hope went into film as a key player in the promotion of an indigenous cultural and national identity, to enable "Australia to talk to itself, recognise itself".' (12) Two main types of films began to emerge: the 'ocker' films (Barry Mackenzie and his friend Alvin Purple for example) and the 'quality' films, (13) sometimes referred to as the AFC genre. (14) The quality films were the flagships of the film revival as well as carrying the burden for communicating the unique nature of Australian identity. To facilitate their mission, the films invariably concerned youth, because Australia is regarded as a 'young' country, and because 'youth' has 'historically served as a metaphor for social change'. (15) Cunningham sketched the typical narrative arc employed in these films:

   Prototypically, we are invited to follow the growth through
   childhood/adolescence/struggling young maturity of a central
   character against the background of personalism, made all the
   stronger by the placement of a character or groups of characters
   in a privileged position--and the corresponding invitation for
   audience identification with this position. (16)

Further, the films encouraged the audience to engage with history. They utilised history, not just as set decoration, as backdrop, although there was meticulous attention to the historical authenticity of bric-a-brac and costumes, but as a driving narrative element. The past was literally re-membered and possessed as an authentic Australian past: 'The films' history--the youthful passage to maturity in the nostalgia films--is linked to the emergence of Australian culture and nationalism.' (17) For New Wave director Phillip Noyce this has been:

   one of the principle functions of the new Australian cinema.
   It essentially underpins the success of such films as Picnic
   at Hanging Rock, Caddie, Gallipoli, My Brilliant Career and
   Newsfront. The success of those films was due in part to an
   audience who wanted to look at themselves in the mirror. (18)

What is interesting for historians of education is that, in creating the mirror in films such as Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Getting of Wisdom and Schepisi's The Devil's Playground, filmmakers constructed education in the broadest sense as framing device and schools in particular as reflective surfaces for the mirroring to occur. By the mid 1980s, however, the cultural moment expressed in the 1970s new wave cinema had passed. Australian society became more confident and outgoing. Films no longer were required to carry the burden of explaining Australia to itself, and became more heterogeneous and internationalist in narrative and stylistic genres. (19) And the comprehensive state high school could at last be occasionally examined in feature films such as Puberty Blues (Beresford 1981), rather than only on television.

The films

The two films discussed here are highly acclaimed representatives of the cultural moment of the 1970s. They are fin de siecle period films: Picnic at Hanging Rock is set in 1900 and The Getting of Wisdom in 1897. The schools depicted in the two films share a number of characteristics. They are single-sex, private girls boarding schools housed in historic old buildings. The world of the schools is depicted as isolated from society. Appleyard Ladies College in Picnic at Hanging Rock is set in the countryside and The Ladies College in The Getting of Wisdom, while urban, is depicted as a closed society. The schools have a strong Protestant religious aspect. They are home to foreign/ non-Indigenous knowledges and ideologies against which the young individuals define--or lose--themselves. They are hothouses of erotic sexual energy (20) and at the same time purveyors of repressive routines and repetitious, irrelevant learning. The schools represent Britishness. Although the schools represent authority and act as architectures of limitation, they are portrayed in an ambivalent way. They are simultaneously terrible and beautiful. According to Singh and Henry, the coloniser:

   fixes the Other not only by its hostility, aggression and violence,
   but in the ambiguity and ambivalence of its desirability ... the
   ambivalence of identification with sexist, racist and aristocratic
   ideologies on the one hand, and the desire for power, success and
   knowledge on the other. (21)

As these films demonstrate, they might have written the same for the post-colonised. Further the schools deal with adolescence, an ambivalent stage of life, also beautiful and terrible. Nowhere is the ambivalence towards colonisation, schools and adolescence explicated and aestheticised more than in Picnic at Hanging Rock.

Picnic at Hanging Rock

Ina Bertrand recently wrote that Picnic at Hanging Rock is the first film mentioned when a person of 'a certain age' is asked which film made them realise that films were being made in Australia at all. (22) The film was directed by Peter Weir and released in 1975. The novel from which the film was adapted was written by Joan Lindsay and the screenplay by Cliff Green. The story concerns the disappearance at Hanging Rock in Victoria of several schoolgirls and a teacher from Appleyard College on St. Valentine's Day (14 February), 1900. The events or something like them may have happened, although many people believed that the film was based on historical events. (23) The distinguished cast included English actress Rachel Roberts as the school's owner and principal, Mrs. Appleyard, and Vivean Gray as her trusted deputy, and the teacher who goes missing, Miss McCraw. Other cast members include Helen Morse as the French teacher, Mademoiselle Dianne de Poitiers, Jacki Weaver as the school's maid, Minnie, and Anne Lambert as the 'Boticelli Angel', Miranda.

In Picnic at Hanging Rock Appleyard Ladies College is meticulously created. The camera seems to love the spaces in the school and it is shown as richly appointed. Indeed the school building is the visual representation of the ambiguity at the centre of the postcolonial subject's consciousness: it is desirable and despised. Appleyard College is a rigidly gentile place where wealthy Australian girls can learn to partake of the power of the colonising culture, and where they learn the strict rules of Victorian womanhood. According to Wainwright, the School is posited as 'world' which includes civilisation, knowledge, and consciousness, in juxtaposition to 'Earth', including nature, the Rock, sexuality, the mystery of life, and unconsciousness. (24)

The chief colonising agents are the teachers. In both films the teachers embody authority, class snobbery, conservatism and Britishness. In general they are a fairly unattractive lot, with a few ineffectual exceptions. They are often either outright mad or malevolent or both. Mrs Appleyard, the owner and Principal of Appleyard Ladies College, is both. She is demonised, (25) and, in the narrative, the loss of the girls and her trusted deputy Miss McCraw at Hanging Rock is the penultimate stage in the descent of her character, and her enterprise. After the mysterious events at Hanging Rock, her school begins to lose reputation, students and money. The last tragic, almost Shakespearean, stage in her ruin is her suicide at Hanging Rock. This trajectory is portrayed in the language of cinema. First, her day costume becomes darker as the film continues, ending in black. Second, her hair, which by its severity of style, symbolises her punishing personality and is her 'crowning glory', becomes more disheveled with time. Third, the camera angles chart her decline--at first she is 'on top', looking down on the girls and her establishment but as the film proceeds, she is shown more in close-up, or on an equal level with others. Fourth, the mise-en-scene underscores her increasing vulnerability: she moves from inside the school where she can control the environment, to the outside of the school and her ultimate capitulation at The Rock.

Other teachers are stereotypical representatives of whole types of teachers: Mademoiselle de Poitiers is the French, French teacher, the 'lovely' one whom the girls adore. Miss McCraw is the aging spinster teacher, conversant with the 'masculine' knowledge of science and the capable deputy to her mistress, Mrs Appleyard. She is dispassionate, manly even, and therefore is doomed to the Rock. Miss Dora Lumley is the pitiful teacher, not much more than a girl herself. These teachers, and those in the other film according to Myers, 'attempt to impose sexual repression on adolescents [which] results either in outbursts of sexual hysteria or in lesbianism'. (26)

The most important group of people in narrative terms in both films is the students. The interactions between them and the events that occur to them are at the heart of the films. The Appleyard girls are rich, with the exception of the charity orphan Sarah, who has a sad lesbian crush on the Sapphic, or Delphic, (27) Miranda. The other main students represent stereotypes: the brainy one (Marion), the beautiful, confident rich one (Irma), and the dumpy one (Edith). Appleyard Ladies College has as its core mission the reproduction of class and gender regimes and the repression of female sexuality. The girls are shown reading poetry, exchanging love tokens on Valentine's Day, exercising in the Temple of Calisthenics, and voyeuristically, lacing up their corsets. According to Ian Hunter: 'Binding the female body, preventing its free movement, hopelessly deforming it, was the way the culture enacted the myth of the young girl as spiritual redeemer of the society.' (28) The students are dressed in virginal white for the picnic, ready for the sacrifice at the Rock. As they leave the school behind they progressively strip their gloves, their hats, and eventually their stockings: all symbols of their 'unnatural' repression. Of the three students who disappear into the monolith, Miranda and Marion do not return. Irma is found a week later, without her corset, and next appears fully clothed in red. The colour red symbolises that she is no longer a girl, having partaken of the masculine essence of the Rock. This is strange stuff. Sarah commits suicide, unable to live without Miranda and with the threats of return to the orphanage made by the distracted and financially strapped Mrs Appleyard. Sarah jumps off the school roof and crashes through the glass of the hothouse, exposing the delicate blooms to harmful natural light and air. The school is doomed.

As well as a film about the alien and unwanted (but seductive) British colonial culture, Picnic at Hanging Rock is a film about lost and abused children. The maid Minnie, played by Jackie Weaver, says at one stage that she feels sorry for 'the poor little devils, here at the College.' She is the narrative 'other' of the students: working class, egalitarian, sexually uninhibited (we see her twice in bed with the gardener), uneducated and going nowhere. She can see the extent of the abuse that the school imposes. In his meditation on the the Australian anxiety of the lost child, Peter Pierce said that the loss of the girls on the Rock embraces the 'mystification of the Australian landscape' and tells of 'the anxious suspicion that Europeans do not belong in this country'. (29)

The contribution Picnic at Hanging Rock makes to the history of education is to imagine the repression of the Victorian private girls' school, and to chart some aspects of the sexually charged affective atmosphere found in them. These schools were maintained often by women who were single or widowed. The owners aimed to keep their clientele small and increasingly select. They taught a curriculum based on the British private girls' school model aimed at the maintenance of class and gender ideologies. Their role was to create ladies. As Theobald wrote:

   The ladies' schools were institutions which helped to reproduce the
   dominant culture in its dimensions of class and gender. The ideal
   female type (dependent, chaste, domesticated and cultured) was
   vital in the maintenance of capitalist and patriarchal
   relationships. The hothouse world of the ladies' school withheld
   male knowledge and replicated the confined moral space of
   women.' (30)

Further, comparison of the images and depiction of Appleyard's Ladies College with, for example, the historical depiction of the prestigious private girls school, Ascham, in Sydney can underscore how close the film was in terms of setting, costume, routines and ideology. Ascham was established in 1886 by an ethnic German, Miss Marie Wallis, whose motto was 'Repetition is the mother of learning.' By 1902 the school had changed hands once and premises twice and was by then housed in the impressive Mount Adelaide (later known as Babworth House). The girls wore a blue and white uniform with a straw hat, and white was worn on outings and to church. White lace blouses were worn at dinner. At meals only French was allowed to be spoken. (31) When some of the girls sought to acquire blazers for the tennis team, in the manner of the Presbyterian Ladies College team, one girl recalled being told that: 'it was to be hoped that Ascham girls would never wear anything so distressingly masculine--almost as bad as those dreadful suffragettes causing so much trouble in England.' (32) Fortunately for Ascham there was no volcanic monolith nearby and the school prospers still.

The Getting of Wisdom

The second film, The Getting of Wisdom, was adapted from the semi-autobiographical novel of the same name by Henry Handel Richardson. The story of the heroine however only barely resembles the brilliant school career of its author Ethel (Etta) Lindesay Richardson. (33) Rather than aiming at biographical accuracy, Richardson claimed that she was aiming for 'psychological' truth. (34) The novel is a damning portrait of boarding school life, as is the film. The Getting of Wisdom was directed by Bruce Beresford and released in 1977. It starred a then unknown Melbourne schoolgirl, Susannah Fowle, as Laura. The cast included Sheila Helpmann as the school's lady superintendent, Mrs Gurley,

Barry Humphries as Reverend Strachey, Monica Maughm as Miss Day, the deputy, and John Waters as the object of the girls' desire, Reverend Shepherd. Other cast members include Candy Raymond as Miss Zelinski, Hilary Ryan as Evelyn, and Sigrid Thornton and Kerry Armstrong as students.

The Getting of Wisdom tells of the secondary education of Laura Tweedle Rambotham, an intelligent, imaginative but poor, girl from the country, who has musical talent. The story is set in 1897 at The Ladies College, a boarding school, in Melbourne--a thinly disguised fictional portrait of Richardson's alma mater, Presbyterian Ladies College, Melbourne. As with Picnic at Hanging Rock, the school buildings have been carefully represented in The Getting of Wisdom. For period verisimilitude, the exteriors were filmed at the Methodist Ladies College Melbourne and the interiors at Mandeville Hall, also in Melbourne. The park scenes were filmed in Ballarat Gardens, doubling for Melbourne's Fitzroy Gardens. The tale could be described as a 'portrait of the artist as young woman' and her triumph over restriction, class and normality. (35) It has also been called a 'female rites-of-passage' film. (36) The script follows the chronological sequence of the book, presenting Laura's early school experiences, her attempt to garner favour through an invented romance with the Reverend Shepherd, and eventually her concentration on success and a lesbian affair with the older upper class girl, Evelyn. The Getting of Wisdom takes up the themes of class, gender, sexual repression/expression, and national identity dealt with in Picnic at Hanging Rock, but gives them a harder, social realist and comic edge.

The dominant theme in the film is the cruelty of class relations. The fact that Laura is a poor girl at a rich girls' school is a source of shame and produces the narrative driver of her desire 'to belong.' At one stage she prays: 'I want to belong. I'll remember dates and only play the right music and try to behave like a lady ... I'll try and try.' (37) This theme of class, with its allied shame, is established in the early scenes of the film as Laura's struggling widow mother prepares her daughter's clothes, including a wildly inappropriate hat, for her journey to the Ladies College. This garish apparel makes her the immediate object of pain-inducing ridicule. Indeed the most important aspect of the Ladies College depicted in the film is the often poisonous and unambitious culture of the peer group. The upper class girls at the Ladies College police their class boundaries with soviet vigour. Their weapons are ridicule and ostracism. No matter how much she toadies, Laura is excluded--until, that is, she brings her formidable imagination into play, converted into a talent for deception. Lying is the shield that she employs to hide her shame, and it works--for a time. Inventing an affair with the handsome and youthful Reverend Shepherd does make Laura the centre of the in-group. Once she discovers his cold and tyrannical nature after a visit at the home he shares with his browbeaten wife and sister, and her lie is uncovered, she once again is ostracised. Talent is the weapon of the poor, and the best revenge is success, so Laura concentrates on her studies and her music. If cheating is required, as it is in her final history examination on the topic of Cromwell's foreign policy, then cheating is perfectly reasonable. The irony is that Laura is awarded the Woodfall Scholarship for Musicianship anyway, and her passport 'out' is achieved. Class mobility is the private secondary school's great gift. Laura's achievement is charted visually by mise-en-scene: she begins the film in the drought-affected bush and ends it running through the green grass and flower beds of the park. The camera also is employed to underscore her growth: first, Laura is shown as very small within the spaces of the grand school and at the end she is on the stage, dwarfing her audience.

Another dominant theme in The Getting of Wisdom is sexuality. The teachers are stereotyped as frustrated spinsters who are jealous of their charges' futures as society wives. They are unhappy with their lot, hopeful like Miss Zelinski who reads romance novels, or twisted beyond recognition as is the case of the 'old brimstone beast', Mrs Gurley. Miss Chapman, the deputy and devoted teacher, never achieves her ambition to run the school. Teachers are people who would rather be somewhere or someone else, preferably married. The students meanwhile are avid for information about sex. They plumb the good book for its lascivious content. They gather in the bathroom to speculate and exchange the little incorrect knowledge they have: Deuteronomy 22 the source of sniggling. Laura scandalises the Reverend Strachey by quoting the Song of Solomon as her text for the day. And then there is lesbianism, or what director Beresford called the 'Sapphic overtones' in the film. (38) Through Laura's admiration for the rich beautiful student Evelyn, their mutual isolation and detestation of the prison of the school, as well as by their musicianship, Laura and Evelyn are drawn together. 'Nobody talks to Laura and Evelyn talks to nobody' is how the English Mistress, Miss Hicks, wittily explained away the implausability of their relationship. Evelyn, after parading seductively naked in front of Laura, recites the Bible verse she has chosen for the day: Proverbs, Chapter 8, Verse 17: 'I love them that love me; and those that seek me early shall find me.' (39) Evelyn takes Laura to her bed, even though both know that she is to leave and will be married. In the end, after Evelyn's departure from the school, and at Laura's farewell recital to celebrate her scholarship to Leipzig, and her 'getting of wisdom', Laura plays not the announced Beethoven Sonata 21 in C Major, but the Schubert Impromptu she helped Evelyn to learn. The lesbianism suggested in this film and in Picnic at Hanging Rock, however, should be historicised. According to Bromberg, 'A century ago female emotions and sexuality were expressed in very different ways ... It was not uncommon for women and girls to write passionately of their love for one another; shower each other with physical affection; or share the same bed.' (40) In their depiction of female homosocial relationships, the films reflect research on the history of emotions.

Like Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Getting of Wisdom is a complex historical text. Through the 'language' of film it portrays Victorian regimes of class, gender and sexuality. It offers an interpretation of elite schooling in Australia at Federation that in its large interpretative framework and in the minutiae of its settings, props, and costumes reflects the known history. The film tries to do more though, in that it also concerns the definition of Australian national identity. British culture is shown as a dead hand on the young who survive despite, not because of, it. When Laura leaves the Ladies College for the last time her defiant run through the park is a rejection of the prison of the (British) culture that had confined her. So Australia in the 1970s was old enough to break free of the inauthentic colonising culture and embrace its own.

Conclusion

Graeme Turner wrote that: 'Cultures define themselves in opposition to other cultures, by establishing what they are not. In most cultural arenas, Australia had articulated its national identity through the opposition to Britain or Europe.' (41) Scholarly analysis of the New Wave films has tended to focus on this theme. The schools and their teachers represent British culture, against which the youthful Australia defines itself. The setting in late nineteenth century private boarding schools, which were total institutions based on British models, facilitated the necessary simplification of narrative juxtapositions--culture versus nature, British versus Australian, age versus youth--that defined the problematic. Also the use of schools as backdrops for a filmic discussion of Australian national identity points to their central importance as institutions in the national life and in the propagation of identities--an importance that is rarely reflected in the general histories of Australia.

Questions need to be asked though about the filmic representation of the educational past in these and other Australian films. Rogoff suggests that we start with considerations of:

   Who we see and who we do not see: who is privileged within the
   regime of specularity; which aspects of the historical past
   actually have circulating visual representations and which not;
   whose fantasies of what [are] fed by which visual images? (42)

Paradoxically these nationalist films may have reinforced the very institutions that they sought to critique. That is, the so-called 'quality' films examined here point to, perhaps subliminally, the 'quality' of private secondary schools. Weir's film in particular aesthetises (even at times fetishises) the fin de siecle private school, the repressive gender/sexual order it enforced, and the lost world of a more decorous past. Even the harder nosed The Getting of Wisdom shows that the school provided Laura with social mobility--the scholarship to Leipzig to study music--which her hard working aspirational mother knew it would. Further, a rough count of feature films in Australia that deal with secondary schools clearly shows that representations of private schools occur far more than state schools where the bulk of the population--still--are educated. More studies are needed of the types of schools, narrative content, depictions of youth and teachers, styles of films and historical interpretations in feature films and in television programs dealing with educational subjects.

Finally, the ambivalent portrayals of the private schools as both beautiful and terrible in the two films reinforces the postcolonial ambiguity toward Britain as coloniser. The ambiguity also exists at the heart of the national identity forged in opposition to British culture and centred on an 'egalitarian' Australian ethos. Private schools have been, and are, a driving engine of the Anglo-Protestant ascendancy and mainstay of the Australian class system. And the growth of the private system over many years suggests that many Australians want class mobility before they want a society based on egalitarian mythologies. In holding up the mirror, how could these films fail to reflect this fundamental fracture at the heart of the Australian national identity?

(1) D. Armstrong, 'Historical voices: philosophical idealism and the methodology of 'voice' in the history of education', History of Education, vol. 32, no. 2, 2003, p. 201.

(2) R.A. Rosenstone, Visions of the Past. The challenge of film to our idea of history, Cambridge Mass., Harvard University Press, 1995, pp. 34-37.

(3) G.E. Fischman, 'Reflections about images, visual culture, and educational research, Educational Researcher, November 2001, 28-33, p.28.

(4) S. Cohen, 'Essay Review: an innocent eye: the "pictorial turn", film studies, and history', History of Education Quarterly, vol. 43, Issue 2, Summer 2003, 9 pages, http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/heq/43.2/cohen.html accessed October 2004. Cohen notes that as early as 1986, Burstyn prophesied that: 'The accretion of power to those who construct knowledge is likely to be challenged in the future by people controlling the use of the new technologies. Outside educational institutions, a new means of transmitting knowledge has arisen through the media of film and television ... new technologies ... have the potential to democratize the construction and distribution of knowledge, just as the printing press, introduced to Europe five centuries ago, eventually democratised the construction and distribution of knowledge throughout the world.'

(5) Cohen, 2003.

(6) J.E. O'Connor, 'History in images/images in history: reflections on the importance of film and television study for an understanding of the past', American Historical Review, Forum, 2001, pp. 1200-1209, p.1207.

(7) Rosenstone, Visions of the Past. The challenge of film to our idea of history, Cambridge Mass., Harvard University Press, 1995, pp. 54-68

(8) See A. Novoa, 'Ways of saying, ways of seeing: public images of teachers (19-20th centuries). Paedagogica Historica, vol. 36, no. 1, 2000, pp. 21-52; I. Grosvenor and M. Lawn, 'Ways of seeing in education and schooling: emerging historiographies', History of Education, vol.30, no.2, 2001, pp. 105-108. A. Holbrook and J. May, 'Making an impression: teachers' use of the 'visual' in Australian classrooms classrooms 1920s-1950s'. Paper presented at ISCHE XX, XXth International Standing Conference for the History of Education, Belgium, 1998.

(9) Even a brief survey of Australian feature films since the advent of the New Wave Australian cinema in the 1970s will confirm this observation. A list, by no means exhaustive, includes such films as The Devil's Playground (1976, The Film House), Flirting (1989, Kennedy-Miller Productions), Girl (1996, David Hannay & Phillip Emmanuel Productions), The Getting of Wisdom (1977, Southern Cross Film Productions), The Heartbreak Kid (1993, Beyond Films), Looking for Alibrandi (2000, Kate Woods dir.), The Mango Tree (1977, Pisces Productions), Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975, South Australian Film Corporation), Puberty Blues (1981, Limelight Productions), Shine (1996, Momentum Films Pty Ltd), The Year My Voice Broke (1987, Kennedy-Miller Productions), Wide Sargasso Sea (1992, Sargasso Productions/ A Laughing Kookaburra Production), Only the Brave (1994, Anna Kokkinos, AFC). Teachers and teaching are also depicted in Summerfield (1977, Clare Beach Films), Wake in Fright (1971, NLT/Group W Production), My Brilliant Career (1979, Margaret Fink Films) and Travelling Light (2003, Helen Bowden Producer). University education is the context for films such as Petersen (1974, Hexagon Productions), Love and Other Catastrophes (1996, Beyond Films), The Nostradamus Kid (1992, Simpson Le Mesurier Films) and My Mother Frank (2000, Beyond Films).

(10) Colonisation is depicted as the British assumption of the landscape, not the dispossession of the Indigenous peoples, although the directors of the two films under discussion made distinguished contributions to the raising of consciousness about the plight of Aboriginal people. Peter Weir visited the topic in apocalyptic fashion in The Last Wave (1977) and Beresford made The Fringe Dwellers in 1986.

(11) Cohen has argued in a similar vein in his analysis of a later film by Peter Weir, Dead Poets Society (1989). 'The movie portrays the battle between two educational approaches--conservatism and progressivism--and the triumph of the latter, in a New England elite secondary school ... The end of the story remains open, but the message against traditional education is made clear. Source: S. Cohen 'Postmodernism, The New Cultural History, Film: resisting images of education' Paedagogica Historica, vol. 32, 1996, pp. 395-420. In D. Schugurensky (ed.), History of Education: Selected Moments of the 20th Century, [Online]. Available at: http://fcis.oise.utoronto.ca/~daniel_schugurensky/assignment1/File [accessed 2 October 2004]

(12) P. Strohmaier, 'Metacriticism in Australian film reviewing in the 1970s' Antipodes, December 1999, pp. 73-77, p.73.

(13) T. O'Regan, 'Film in the 1970s: The Ocker and the quality film' From: Australian Feature Films, CD ROM produced by RMIT and The Australian Catalogue of New Films & Videos 1995.

(14) S. Dermody and E. Jacka, The Screening of Australia. Volume 2 Anatomy of a National Cinema, Sydney, Currency Press, 1988, pp. 28-38.

(15) E. Cohen, 'From solitary vice to split mind: psychiatric discourses of male sexuality and coming of age, 1918-1938', Australian Historical Studies, vol.112, 1999, pp. 79-95, p.94.

(16) S. Cunningham quoted in T. O'Regan, 1995.

(17) O'Regan, 1995.

(18) H. Cordaiy, 'The truth of the matter: an interview with Phillip Noyce', Metro Magazine, no.131/132, November 2001, pp.126-132.

(19) G. Turner, 'The genres are American: Australian narrative, Australian film, and the problem of genre', Literature Film Quarterly, vol. 21, Issue 2, 1993, pp.102-112.

(20) S. Dermody and E. Jacka, p. 106.

(21) M. Singh and C. Henry, 'The cinematic and curriculum production of Australians', Unicorn, vol.24, no.1, April 1998, pp. 30-45, p.32.

(22) I. Bertrand, '"Good taste at Hanging Rock" : historical nostalgia in the films of the Australian revival', Metro Magazine, no.140, 2004, pp. 42-48, p.44.

(23) P. Lovell, the film's producer, claimed to have found some similar events in 1867 newspapers. The author of the novel, Joan Lindsay, was inconclusive about the factual basis of her story. See 'The making of Picnic at Hanging Rock', documentary feature film, Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Director's Cut, DVD, Picnic Productions, 2004.

(24) J.A. Wainwright, 'Desolation Angels--world and earth in Picnic at Hanging Rock', Antipodes, vol.10, no.2, December 1996, pp.121-123, p.121.

(25) Wainwright, p.122.

(26) D. Myers, Bleeding Battlers from Ironbark: Australian myths in fiction and film 1890s-1980s, Rockhampton Qld, Capricornia Institute Publications, 1987, p.88.

(27) The dialogue hints that the dreamy Miranda sees the future. In an early scene, Miranda tells Sarah: 'You must learn to love someone else apart from me Sarah, I won't be here much longer.' The audience has been forewarned in the opening sequence that a party of schoolgirls disappeared at Hanging Rock, so it has been prepared to receive Miranda's words as a 'prediction'.

(28) Myers, p.114.

(29) P. Pierce, The Country of the Lost Children, Cambridge, UK, Cambridge University Press, 1999, p.164.

(30) M.R Theobald, 'Mere accomplishments?' Melbourne's early ladies' schools reconsidered' in A. Prentice and M. Theobald (eds.) Women Who Taught: perspectives on the history of women and teaching, A. Prentice and M.R. Theobald (eds), Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1991, p.85. See also P. Russell, 'A Wish of Distinction': colonial gentility and femininity, Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 1994.

(31) C. Fairfax Simpson, A. Fielding-Jones Dupree and B. Winn Ferguson (eds.), Ascham Remembered 1886-1986, Sydney, The Fine Arts Press, 1986, pp. 1-14.

(32) Fairfax Simpson et. al., p.14.

(33) K. Fitzpatrick, PLC Melbourne The First Century, 1875-1975, Burwood, Presbyterian Ladies College, 1975, p.88.

(34) M. Ackland, 'A School of Authority: Richardson's personal investment in The Getting of Wisdom,' Southerly, vol.59, issue 2, Winter 1999, pp.1-6, p.6.

(35) Myers, p.82; C. Pratt, 'Fictions of development--Henry Handel Richardson's The Getting of Wisdom', Antipodes, vol.9, no.1, June 1995, pp. 3-9; Ackland, p.6.

(36) J. Robson and B. Zalcock, Girls' Own Stories: Australian and New Zealand women's films, London, Scarlet Press, 1997, p.9.

(37) J. Rayner, Contemporary Australian Cinema: an introduction, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2000, p.73.

(38) P. Coleman, Bruce Beresford: instincts of the heart, Sydney, Angus and Robertson, 1992, p.111.

(39) All of the girls at the Ladies College must choose a Bible Verse for the day and recite it to Reverend Strachey.

(40) J. Jacobs Bromberg, 'Girl history: social change and female sexuality in the 20th century', Youth Studies Australia, vol. 19, no.4, December 2000, pp. 19-21, p.20.

(41) G. Turner, 1993, p.107.

(42) Rogoff quoted in Fischman, pp.31-32.

Dr. Josephine May lectures in Australian History at the Ourimbah Campus of the University of Newcastle, Australia. Her research interests include the history of Australian education and childhood and youth histories encompassing gender, race, class and age perspectives. Recently she has been focusing on representations of schooling, childhood and youth in Australian feature film. Email: [e-mail]

JOSEPHINE MAY

University of Newcastle, Australia