I have appeared in more productions at the Sydney Opera House than I have watched. Hell, I’ve had my lunch stolen by seagulls outside the Opera House more times than I’ve paid money to see shows there.

Dodging amateur photographers and small gambolling children, I can already hear one of my mother’s oft-spoken pearls of wisdom- “It gets cold by the water.” I take up my position, halfway up the shallow steps, and wait for her, my just-in-case cardigan around my shoulders.

The last time I stood on the steps of the Opera House, it was in the divine presence of Australian Idol Guy Sebastian.

I spent a lot of time in random troupes as a child. Recorder ensembles, dance groups, and choirs, randomly gathered for events on a fairly regular basis. Perhaps it was our status as an inner-city public school, filling some quota - because, for no clear reason, on a too-hot random Friday in 2008, I was sitting on these steps in my school culottes, watching Guy Sebastian sing in front of TV cameras, here, at the Opera House.

The sky is shiny like glass now, the grey monoliths of a dozen new skyscrapers holding up the sky. I feel a twist of almost-empathy for the tourists who dragged themselves all the way to Australia to take a photo next to the Opera House. It looks washed out and lusterless this evening.

I never “hang out” at the Opera House. I don’t know anyone who does or ever did. To a young, poor Sydneysider it was a closed-off place. The Botanical Gardens? Free entry and plenty of space to picnic. The MCA? Lots for little aesthetes to amuse themselves with. Luna Park? The Promised Land of rich kid birthday parties. But the Opera House offered nothing, even though I was born only 5 km away and spent an entire childhood in this city.

Sydney is in my bones.

That’s no exaggeration - our old Chippendale terrace house was contaminated with lead paint. My dad told me that the heavy metals eventually accumulate in your bones. I could leave Sydney, but it will never leave me.

Mum texts me - she’s close by. I glance at the colossal bone-beige shells behind me. It’s hard not to think about Sydney’s history when standing on these steps. There is its white history, as the gem of the Great Southern Colony, and my small history, a product of that first one, and then there is the deeper one seeping out of the gaps in the pink granite. The sandstone walls they quarried away just beyond the steps that weep brown, drip bare under the weight of the botanical gardens. The history of Tubowgule, "where the knowledge waters meet" in Darug language- a place of cultural sharing and celebration.

It's a good time to try and remember the plot of Picnic at Hanging Rock.

I liked the movie as a teenager. It was unsettling. But what really fucked me up was what came after. The movie never shows what actually happens to Miranda, Irma, Marion, and Miss McCraw. The mystery scratches at you long after the credits roll.

That night, with the itch too much to bear, my siblings and I huddled together in the light of my iPod Touch, reading the book’s Wikipedia page. Author Joan Lindsay wrote a conclusion to the mystery, but it was removed before publication… released only upon her death. It was the last hope of a good night’s sleep, so we read it together with bated breath -

The girls remove their corsets and throw them off the cliff. The woman [presumed to be Miss McCraw] points out that the corsets appear to hover in mid-air as if stuck in time and that they cast no shadows. She and the girls continue together. The girls then encounter what is described as "a hole in space", by which they physically enter a crack in the rock following a lizard; the unnamed woman disappears into the rock.

I saw the girls, eyes bulging, crawling hand over foot, up the side of the steep rock like a lizard would. I looked at my wide-eyed brother and sister, their pale faces in the white light of my iPod. Even now, the picture I conjured makes my skin crawl.

It is a myth now, Picnic at Hanging Rock. A great Australian classic, up there with My Brilliant Career or The Harp in the South. It's also the ultimate 'Australian Gothic' text. It illustrates an inherent anxiety about a colonial presence on this ancient land. A presence founded on the very public lie that the land was uninhabited. A lie which led to paranoia; malicious intent hallucinated onto a place and a people that did nothing to us, but exist, before and well after.

Picnic at Hanging Rock becomes Wake In Fright becomes Wolf Creek - wwhite folks lost in a rusty expanse, facing their dwindling humanity with abject terror. A series of ‘Australian’ myths revealing the most frightful truth of all: we’re not meant to be here.

Watching the film at 15, I could understand the “innocence” of white girlhood, the tragedy of their fates fueled by their otherness in a land that isn’t theirs. But, truth be told, I was more distracted by my desire for a white colonial outfit of my own. I found a pair of those Victorian-style walking boots at Kmart and wore them down until my toes poked through the ends.

Prim girls possessed to walk barefoot across hot rocks baking in the sun are supposed to be unnerving, but it’s only unnerving if you have never pulled off your socks and scraped your feet on a boulder and caught your dress on a spiky bush.

I scan the crowd again and spot my mum, waving with a bright smile on her face. The show starts in 15 minutes.

Is Picnic at Hanging Rock any good?

Yes- but you need the appetite for the kind of theatre it dishes up.

Directed by Ian Michael, a performer, writer and Noongar man, this production does away with the trappings of narrative to instead focus on crystallising the horrors of Hanging Rock into an intentionally land-focused work. It’s a trite expression, but the Rock becomes a presence - a churning, intentional, consuming mass whose small part in what happens is made apparent from the very beginning.

The post-dramatic mode that Michael and his creative team shift into for this work helps to uncouple the original postcolonial text from its central tragic figures, instead showing the girls more as unknowing cogs in the machines that undid them. As always, post-dramatic theatre teases its audience with the pull between the comforts of naturalism and the jagged cacophony of sound, movement, and text left consciously unconnected. The desire for character was strong for me at the start of my viewing, and I’ll admit, the opening sequence had me worried that STC had finally turned into a theatre company that just charges $100+ to read a public domain book at you. This is occasionally true, though Picnic at Hanging Rock has more important duties to complete.

A few moments in this production dragged new strangeness out of Australia’s strangest classic text. Its greatest strength is the ensemble, especially Masego Pitso and Kirsty Marillier, who conjure terrifying tableaus - bright flashes of Irma, clad in 20th-century underwear, screaming at her would-be saviours, or Sarah’s deranged laughter and open face of horror as Hanging Rock takes hold. Some of the production’s most magical stagecraft is located within an ominous white space hanging above the stage, where projected text helps to unravel the tightly wound mass of pain that throbs at the centre of the performance. The modern schoolgirl uniforms that sometimes shifted to period white dresses elicited a folding quality of personas and dimensions collapsing in on the ancient, churning heat of Hanging Rock. The girls are no longer hapless victims of a foreign landscape. Their fates are horrific, but we are not encouraged to suspiciously eye the land that ‘took’ them.

To watch an iconic white Australian tale in an imported European theatre style, performed in an iconic Australian building and directed by a Noongar man feels like an impossible puzzle of the styles and influences that came before. I saw Hanging Rock as a story of justice, demonstrating that while the land certainly played a role in their downfall, it was only a catalyst for a decay that was set in motion the moment that the girl’s forefathers set foot on this ancient land.

The original text gives almost nothing away about the mystery of what happened on the Rock that summer's day, but for visions of an impossible red cloud forming over the girls as their lives are stripped away. Michael’s miraculous production conjured this central image hauntingly - a feat of stage magic that firmly cements this adaptation as a significant one in the history of postcolonial Australian storytelling.

THE SPIRALLING CAR PARK UNDER THE SHELLS OF THE OPERA HOUSE. DOWN DOWN DOWN TO GO UP UP UP AGAIN.

MUM: Yes, you did. But also, your Dad often would take you on those adventures.

UNDER THE LOOMING BUILDINGS OF WYNDHAM STREET THAT GATHER LIKE STORM CLOUDS ABOVE.

INNER CITY TURNS OUTWARDS AND BUSINESS PARKS BECOME REGULAR PARKS.

POST DRAMATIC PEELS BACK EVERYTHING. ALMOST HOME. I ASKED ABOUT THE HOUSE WITH LEAD IN IT'S BONES.

SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE WAS 4.2 KM AWAY, HOVERING JUST OUT OF EYELINE.

THE MATHS KEEPS GOING BACKWARD TO THE MAGMA AND HOT RED START.

MUM: It does happen. But I think that tradition is passing. Like The Harp in the South stories are still happening, they're just not happening to white people in the city anymore. They're happening to people of color in suburbs. You know, the well-educated white people of Australia don't get to have that story anymore, but the story is still happening.

NO WHITE DRESSES - ONLY KMART LEGGINGS GETTING LOST IN THE TREES - A STRANGE RED CLOUD FORMING AT THE EDGE OF THE OUTER WEST.