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Game of Thrones star Natalie Dormer stands front and centre of Foxtel’s impressive big-budget miniseries Picnic at Hanging Rock.

The first scene of the six-part series, made by Fremantle Australia and since picked up by Amazon in the US and the BBC in the UK among others, is of Dormer’s Mrs Appleyard, seen from behind, framed by a large Victorian window and bathed in golden light.

If first impressions count, and they do, this one is a beauty.

The first episode of the highly anticipated series was unveiled this week at a special event in Macedon, just down the road from the setting of Joan Lindsay’s 1967 novel (the events of which are entirely fictitious, contrary to popular misconception).

Dormer, 36, plays an Englishwoman seemingly fresh off the boat in the colonies, a well-bred widow still in mourning but determined to build a new life every bit as substantial and imposing as the mansion in the middle of nowhere that she buys with what we assume is her inheritance.

The building becomes the site of Appleyard College, an elite boarding school. Chief among its students are Miranda Reid (Lily Sullivan), a headstrong country girl bridling at the prospect of being “finished” just so she can become someone’s wife; Marion Quade (Madeleine Madden), blessed with brains and beauty but cursed by dint of being the illegitimate half-caste daughter of a high-ranking colonial officer; and Irma Leopold (Samara Weaving), a young lady from “home” rather appalled to find herself in the Victorian bush rather than in the salons of Paris.

These three, of course, will all go missing on the day of the fateful picnic, St Valentine’s Day 1900.