Picnic at Hanging Rock

Joan Lindsay

You’re probably familiar with the outline of this modern classic: Twenty schoolgirls and two governesses from Mrs. Appleyard’s College for Young Ladies set out for a picnic at the mystical Hanging Rock. By the end of the day, three girls and a chaperone have vanished into the wilderness.

This simple premise is magicked into something complex and layered as the remainder of the book reckons with their disappearance and the ripple effects it has on the community for decades afterward. As the narrator tells us, ‘Unseen, unrecorded, the pattern of the picnic continued to darken and spread.’

An aside about the narrator: The story unfurl with the perfect amount of voiciness. The narrator is a presence, of the story but not in the story. An observant one-person Greek chorus of dry wry and light ruefulness.

Which gives just the right tone to this dark fairytale drenched in sunshine. The sensation of reading this book is like peering at a vista through gauze. Even descriptions of things generally understood to be nice — flowers blooming, birdsong in the air, affection among the girls — thrum with a sense of dread. The wilderness is menacing. Dreams are fraught with foreboding. Subtext lurks within every sentence of conversation.

There’s a languidness about the whole enterprise — both in the telling and the plot. During the outing, the sun leaches away the schoolgirls’ energy. The picnic leaves them in a stupor, their spirit of happy anticipation depleted. Later, after the disappearance, they have trouble recalling details — the whole day seeming like a dream.

The true-crime-ish plot unfolds in 224 moody, precisely drawn pages. It’s unsettling and weird and beautiful, while also being quite suspenseful. But it’s not just a mystery. Subtle jabs at colonialism, classism, Victorian mores, the plight of women, and the ephemeral bonds of friendship are woven into the narrative. All smart, all well handled. No soapbox, just needle-sharp observations.

The story becomes even more intriguing when you learn how Joan Lindsay came to write it.

The author was 71 years old when she published this book. She’d been a working writer for decades before writing this, her most famous work. And from the age of 13, she attended a boarding school not unlike the one in the book — Clyde Girls Grammar School, which later moved to a location near Hanging Rock. Lindsay was coy in interviews about how much the story drew on her real life, and the book opens with these words:

Whether Picnic at Hanging Rock is fact or fiction, my readers must decide for themselves. As the fateful picnic took place in the year 1900, and all the characters who appear in this book are long since dead, it hardly seems important.

Whether the Headmistress of Appleyard College (as the local white elephant was at once re-christened in gold lettering on a handsome board at the big iron gates) had any previous experience in the educational field, was never divulged. It was unnecessary. With her high-piled greying pompadour and ample bosom, as rigidly controlled and disciplined as her private ambitions, the cameo portrait of her late husband flat on her respectable chest, the stately stranger looked precisely what the parents expected of an English Headmistress. And as looking the part is well known to be more than half the battle in any form of business enterprise from Punch and Judy to floating a loan on the Stock Exchange, the College, from the very first day, was a success; and by the end of the first year, showing a gratifying profit. All this was nearly six years before this chronicle begins. — Joan Lindsay

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