In 1976, at the tender age of 13, “me and a few mates” decided to go to “the pictures” one Saturday afternoon. This was in the days when friendships were being forged over shared interests: music, books and, of course, movies. The problem was that they decided that the best choice on offer that day was a double bill of the feature length film versions of two popular TV sitcoms Bless This House, starring Sid James, plus The Likely Lads with James Bolam and Rodney Bewes. But, for reasons long-forgotten (maybe I’d already seen them? Maybe I didn’t want to? Maybe there’s such a thing as fate?) I recall deciding not to join my pals and, to this day, I can still see them all tramping up the stairs to Screen One (the “big” screen) of the Rochester Odeon, whilst I found myself alone and temporarily friendless, in the cinema foyer, wondering how to spend the afternoon (it’s possible we all agreed to meet up after the film, but age plays havoc with your memories).

You can probably see where this is heading.

The tiny Screen Three was usually devoted to soft-core (Adventures of a Handy Man) smut in the 1970s and had a bit of a reputation for attracting “the dirty raincoat brigade.” That Saturday, however, a film I’d never heard of was playing and the poster looked intriguing – its tagline “On St Valentine’s Day in 1900 a party of school girls set out to picnic at Hanging Rock…..Some were never to return.”

So I bought my ticket and wandered into the darkness and, in my own way, was never to return either.

The phrase “changed my life” gets bandied around far too often when people discuss their favourite music artists, films, books and TV shows etc.. Depending on who you are talking to, everyone from Bob Dylan to The Beatles; to Bowie, Amy Winehouse and Dua Lupa have had a huge impact on someone or other’s worldview and countless individuals believe that they finally saw the light when they first watched Star Wars, Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings or Wicked. Or Breaking Bad. A few of us can even throw Keats or Wordsworth, Hardy or Eliot or Raymond Carver into the mix, but we may well be a dying breed.

How much any work of art can “change your life” and in what ways, is a moot point and something which is innately subjective. It certainly is the case, however, that in order to measure the extent to which something might have affected us profoundly, we actually need to have lived a significant part of our lives, and anything exhorted “in the heat of the moment” is likely to be mere hyperbole.

But when, like SE Hinton’s 14 year old greaser narrator Pony Boy, in her brilliant debut novel The Outsiders, “I stepped out into the sunlight from the darkness of the movie house” a few hours later, I knew one thing for sure: I had found a new love and that love was called Cinema.

In a transformative moment, a cinephile was born. I had genuinely never seen anything like Picnic at Hanging Rock.

From Gheorhe Zamfir’s stunning pan pipes soundtrack, to its elliptical and ambiguous ending; from its unworldly and deeply alien “outback” landscape to its enigmatic dialogue and slow motion shots of beautiful young women on the verge of adulthood in a repressive school – Weir’s film haunted me with its dreamlike imagery; its sense of deep rooted earth mystery and, the fact, that it appeared to be based on a true story (which, of course, it wasn’t – much like the Coen’s Fargo is palpably fictional).

Actually, it was based on a novel by Joan Lindsay, first published in 1967 and it was not director Peter Weir’s debut – he’d already made the cult drama The Cars that Ate Paris in 1974, after working in both Australian television and documentary for many years. However, it did mark the first time he worked with the cinematographer Russell Boyd, who shot practically all of his subsequent films, including, amongst others, The Last Wave (1977), Gallipoli (1981), The Year of Living Dangerously (1982), Master and Commander and Weir’s final film, the very disappointing The Way Back in 2010. Weir also found time to direct Oscar nominated (and sometimes winning) Witness in 1985 with Harrison Ford and the Amish; Dead Poets Society with Robin Williams, at the top of his game, in 1989; 1993’s under-rated Fearless starring Jeff Bridges and the prophetic Jim Carrey comedy drama The Truman Show (1998) in a career which, when looked back on is a pretty remarkable one.

Weir himself was finally awarded an honorary Oscar in 2022, having never actually won for best director, in spite of helming a large number of heavy hitters which, somewhat unusually, proved popular with both audiences as well as the critics.

And there are a lot of good movies in his filmography which have certainly stood time’s test – you can take your pick (as an occasional English teacher I guess I have to admit having a soft spot for Dead Poets – although not everyone in my profession agrees on this one). However, for me, he’d never make a film as good as Picnic ever again. Hell, could anyone?

In the early 1970s Australia was very much a “foreign country,” if you grew up in the UK and your knowledge of the world was made up from the films you saw. Tony Richardson had taken us there (alongside Mick Jagger) in his 1970s flop Ned Kelly (which almost everyone disowned) and Nic Roeg had also wandered there in 1971’s Walkabout but, believe it or believe it not, when Mad Max was first released in 1979, the film was dubbed for both American and British audiences, who might have found the accents “a bit hard” to comprehend.

However, Picnic is now considered at the forefront of what became known as the “New Wave” of Australian cinema – a “movement” which gradually introduced international audiences to some mighty late 70s films including The Getting of Wisdom (1977), The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith (1978), Newsfront (1978), My Brilliant Career and The Odd Angry Shot (both 1979); some talented new actors (Mel Gibson, Sam Neill, Judy Davis, to name just three) and some great directors (Gillian Armstrong, Bruce Beresford, Fred Schepisi and Phillip Noyce, amongst them). It’s almost as if the “freewheeling” style of the Movie Brats in America, which had fallen by the wayside in the era of blockbusters like Jaws, and the directors who made those great, loose, hip and genuinely original films (Altman, Scorsese, Malick, Hopper, Nichols et al) had upped camp; moved to Sydney or Melbourne or Adelaide or even Perth and carried on making exactly the same kind of left-field, off-beat movies that had once dominated American cinema in the late 60s and early 70s (now, rightly dubbed its second Golden Age).

In the UK, the Australian Film Commission (which funded a great many of these films) and the BBC obviously had connections because I recall a significant number of Australian “New Wave” movies being screened on TV in the mid 70s – many being given their UK debut on the small screen (it’s funny to look back and think that there once was a time when the BBC could be relied upon to provide audiences with, amongst other things, a cinematic education, rather than an endless diet of soap operas, reality shows and Strictly -but that’s another story).

So it’s largely because of Picnic at Hanging Rock that I ended up being one of the first people in the country to study Film at University in the early 1980s; did a Doctorate about Film and Media education and have spent nearly 40 years in the classroom, sharing my passion for cinema with young people: a lifetime in the darkness, alone or with friends or family; always with strangers, watching films on the big screen.

My motto? Find something you love to do and then work out a way of getting paid to do it. I consider myself extremely lucky that I have managed to devote my life to the movies, and whilst Picnic remains my first love (the one you can never get over), to quote Wordsworth’s masterpiece Tintern Abbey:

Other gifts
Have followed, for such loss, I would believe,
Abundant recompense.

So, as I head off into the sunset, with the words “The End” beckoning on the distant horizon, it is really interesting to reflect upon how life seems to have so many cyclical elements and, when I re-watch Picnic at Hanging Rock in May at the UPP, for the first time on the big screen since I first watched it as a boy nearly 50 years ago, I hope I can be proud that I have passed down this cinephilia to subsequent generations and, like Wordsworth also puts it, remained:

Unwearied in that service: rather say
With warmer love, oh! With far deeper zeal
Of holier love.

And if the film has a similar impact upon just one of its viewers in 2025, then that love will become, as the poem concludes, “more dear” and “for thy sake.”

In my end is my beginning, Mr Eliot? Too darned right.

Dr Andrew C Webber is a Film teacher and examiner with 39 years’ experience. He currently contributes to both the Cinema of the 70s and 80s magazines (available on Amazon); cassette gazette fanzine (available from cassette pirate on e-bay) and the Low Noise music podcast available on Spotify and Apple podcasts.