On St Valentine’s Day, 1900, a party of teachers and schoolgirls from a prestigious boarding school escape their usual suffocating routine with a late summer picnic at Hanging Rock, a former volcano 70 kilometres north of Melbourne. After a long journey through hot, dry country, the party arrives in time for lunch and settles under a canopy of eucalyptus trees at the base of the rock. It is a sultry and languorous afternoon. The ‘well fed girls’ lounge in the shade, insulated from nature’s ‘earth, air and sunlight’ by their corsets and ‘voluminous clothing’,

no more a part of their environment than figures in a photograph album, arbitrarily posed against a backcloth of cork rocks and cardboard trees.

The much loved French mistress permits four of the girls to leave the group and explore the base of the rock. But, transfixed by the rocky peaks, Miranda, Marion, Irma and Edith have soon wandered much farther than the few hundred yards they had promised Mademoiselle.

On the steep southern facade the play of golden light and deep violet shade revealed the intricate construction of long vertical slabs; some smooth as giant tombstones, others grooved and fluted by prehistoric architecture of wind and water, ice and fire. Huge boulders, originally spewed red hot from the boiling bowels of the earth, now come to rest, cooled and rounded in forest shade.

As they climb higher, the youngest of them, Edith, senses impending doom and begs them to turn back. They do not seem to hear her. They head toward the glittering peaks, ‘sliding over the stones on their bare feet as if they were on a drawing-room carpet.’ Edith watches in horror as one by one, the girls slip from view behind the monolith. With a blood curdling cry she plunges back down the rock, ‘stumbling and screaming towards the plain.’

Miranda and Marion are never seen again, nor is their mathematics mistress Miss McCraw, who had followed them up the rock a short time later. Within a week of the disappearance, Irma Leopold, an heiress with black curls, is found alive, lying face downwards on a rock ledge. Curiously, her corset is missing yet she is otherwise fully dressed. She has no recollection of what had occurred during her disappearance.

Most of the book deals with the aftermath of this event as its consequences ripple and reverberate through the lives of all those left behind. ‘The shadow of the rock lay with an almost physical weight upon their hearts.’ In the repressed atmosphere of the boarding school a ‘miasma of hidden fears’ builds. It darkens and explodes as the reputation of the school is ruined and one by one the parents of the girls order them home. A series of gory deaths follow, lending the book even deeper shades of gothic horror.

The mystery of the disappearance of Miranda, Marion and Miss McCraw remains unsolved, although a posthumously published final chapter does offer a fantastical explanation. Most believe it had been a sound decision on the part of Joan Lindsay’s editor to omit this chapter when the book was first published.

Early Influences

Joan Lindsay said she wrote Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967) in two weeks after experiencing a series of powerful dreams. But the story had lingered in her mind long before that as she had been obsessed with Hanging Rock from a very early age. Her family used to visit the area every summer and enjoyed annual picnics there. The first she could remember took place when she was four years old, in 1900 (the year she set the book). Joan claimed to recall every detail of this visit and while on set for the filming of the novel, she confided to the artist Martin Sharp (an expert on Lindsay’s book and ‘artistic advisor’ for the film) that it had been a profoundly mysterious experience. Sharp never elaborated on what she had shared with him, other than to say that the incident had involved some sort of time slippage. This became an important element in her book.

The mystery of the rock held a grip on Joan into adulthood and she kept a print of the 1875 painting of ‘At the Hanging Rock’ (sometimes referred to as ‘Picnic at Hanging Rock’) by William Ford. She wanted to write a story about it, and more generally an iconic book about Australia, but was uncertain where to begin.

The Story Emerges

On a winter’s day in 1966, when Joan was sixty-eight, she awoke from a strange dream about school girls in ethereal muslim dresses, climbing Hanging Rock. The dream felt so real that she told her housekeeper she could still feel the hot summer breeze through the gum trees, sense the girls’ lightness of being and hear their peals of laughter as they made their way up a steep track. She knew at once that she had the beginnings of a book, and the more she wrote down what she could remember of the dream, the more details came back to her.

Over the course of the following week, Lindsay dreamed the chapters sequentially. Each morning she would go straight to her writing room and sit on the floor, her papers all around her, and ‘write like a demon’. She knew exactly what would happen next; she said it was almost as though she had been watching a film the night before.

Joan’s housekeeper Rae Clements later described how Joan would come downstairs each morning, swept up by the characters and her love for them: the elegant French teacher; the student Miranda whom Mademoiselle had likened to a Botticelli angel, and the orphaned Sara who loved her.

After completing the book Joan opted to borrow its title from the William Ford painting. It was the perfect paradox: a simple, pretty title that belied the novel’s gothic creepiness. Sometimes a disappearance can haunt and shock far more than an apparition.

Joan was unsure what sort of book she had written – a novel without an ending? A mystery with no solution? Despite some notable reviews its publication made little impact at first. One critic called it ‘mythopoetic’ and another likened it to a ‘faded watercolour’. After languishing for a year, it was picked up by Penguin and once it was properly marketed, sales began to soar.

The story has played a significant role in the history of Australian film. Picnic at Hanging Rock premiered in 1975 and spearheaded what became known as Australia’s New Wave of cinema. It was that rare thing: both an arthouse film and a blockbuster. Fifty years after its release, it continues to have a cult following, described by one reviewer as ‘Twin Peaks by way of John Keats’, and another as ‘a wild fever dream’.

Fact or Fiction?

At the beginning of the novel Joan Lindsay teases readers with this note:

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

According to a friend, Joan Lindsay could be ‘playful’ when talking about events that were real or imagined. One of the reasons the story has fascinated readers and viewers is the illusion it generates  of being true. It is set in a real place: Hanging Rock is a site of geological and indigenous spiritual significance. Its events are given specific dates, and the book features extracts from letters, newspaper articles and police reports that give it the feel of a documentary. During the height of the story’s popularity, the State Library of Victoria was inundated with letters from people requesting more information about the disappearances. Library staff duly searched the relevant newspapers for February 1900 but could find no reference to the missing girls.

When director Peter Weir, keen to secure rights to make the film, met with Joan together with his producer, Pat Lovell, he was warned by Joan’s publisher not to ask whether the story was true. It was obviously a touchy subject, yet he said this was the one question he felt he had to ask, regardless of whether or not he was given the job. Pat Lovell said that Joan ‘hedged’, and ‘mulled over his question’ before answering: ‘It’s based on fact.’ Weir then asked her if she thought what had happened was wide open, ‘I mean, in your mind, do you think they fell down a hole; do you think, for example, they were abducted by aliens?’ Joan replied: ‘Any of the above.’

When asked the truth question, Joan Lindsay would always give an ambiguous response. As her editor Sandra Forbes said, ‘the truth for Joan was different to the rest of us. She was never straightforward about it.’

A curious and telling incident about the issue of truth occurred at the Rock during filming, when Anne-Louise Lambert, who played the part of Miranda, met Joan Lindsay for the first time. The day had been a challenging one for Lambert: Peter Weir had asked her to repeat a particular scene over and over again. It was the scene where Miranda says to the other three girls: ‘Look up there, up there in the sky.’ She couldn’t seem to get it right and it had rocked her confidence. After finally shooting that scene, an emotional Lambert headed off into the bush in full costume for some time alone. Shortly afterwards a woman approached whom she recognised as Joan Lindsay. Lambert said:

We had this extraordinary meeting as though we knew each other very well. I went to hold out my hand, but she walked straight up to me, put her arms around me, and said in a very emotional way: ‘Oh Miranda, it’s been so long!’ She was shaking like a leaf.

After a time, Lambert introduced herself but Joan dismissed this with a wave of her hand. She simply repeated ‘Miranda’, and clung onto her tightly. Lambert hugged her back and they both started to cry. The incident made Lambert think that, regardless of facts, there was great emotional truth in the story for Joan. She also felt reassured; if Joan Lindsay believed she was Miranda, she must have been doing a pretty good job.

Despite his tricky question, Peter Weir and Pat Lovell hit it off with Joan, who thought they would do well by her novel. And he came to terms with the mystery. In an interview for Sight & Sound, a year after the film’s release, he said:

I always found it the most satisfying and fascinating aspect of the film. I usually find endings disappointing: they’re totally unnatural. You are creating life off the screen, and life doesn’t have endings. It’s always moving on to something else and there are always unexplained elements.

The film’s fan base keeps growing. Weir recently attended a screening of Picnic at the Cinemathèque française in Paris, and estimated that approximately 80% of the audience were young. He puts its continued success down to the fact that ‘Not only is the mystery at the heart of the film unsolved, but there is no message in the film. No lecture, no polemic. Picnic belongs to the viewer.’ This lack of an ending leaves us to grapple alone with our own projections and fantasies.

One of the few people who was not won over by the film was Joan Lindsay. In an interview with Film Quarterly in 1980, Weir remembered that she had ‘considerable reservations’ about it. The film focuses on the burgeoning sexuality of the girls, their sensual pleasures, their beauty, whereas in her novel Lindsay is more intent on the unravelling of social mores. ‘You’ve changed the tone’, she told him. ‘I didn’t write it with that kind of feeling.’

Playing with Time

When the writer, filmmaker and broadcaster Phillip Adams visited Joan Lindsay’s home, she told him she had no clocks in her house: ‘I do not wear a watch. Clocks, watches, simply stop when I’m around. And, of course, my autobiography is called Time without Clocks.’

Joan believed that time is a commodity that clocks cannot weigh or measure. For her it was not linear but on a continuum: she felt it was all around her; that she was in the middle of it, surrounded by the past, present and future. She also believed that the magnetic forces emitted from the volcanic monolith of Hanging Rock could interfere with time.

This becomes a key concept her novel. During the picnic at the base of the rock, Miss McGraw and Mr Hussey discover their watches have both stopped at twelve. The others do not have their watches for various reasons. From that point, only the travelling shadow of Hanging Rock becomes a measure of time and it begins to cast a spell. Initially the girls who have ventured off refer to the passing of time in minutes. Miranda keeps reminding them they must get back soon. But the deeper up the rock they go, the more their sense of time appears to vanish. They lose their inhibitions, take off their shoes and dance on the rocks. We are given a sense that the rock might offer a portal to another time. Tom Wright, who adapted the novel for the stage, makes a salient point about the way Joan plays with time in the book:

If you aren’t prepared to enter into the spirit of a defiance of time, and a sense of the eternity telescoping, [it] will end up becoming a fairly banal, late twentieth century novel. But when you read it in terms of the magnificence of time, and the way in which white people coming into contact with an ancient continent has caused a crisis of time in all our imaginations, at that point it becomes a magnificent book.

Vanishing

Whether or not it was intentional, Picnic at Hanging Rock touches on a core colonial anxiety related to the horror of erasure. As Tom Wright points out, missing children would not just die in this landscape, they could be completely annihilated by it. A toddler might leave the farmyard and wander out into the bush, but unlike the old country, where the body might be found a day or so later, he or she could simply vanish. Wright adds:

The vastness of the landscape and the nature of the terrain meant that you could lose sight of the thing that kept you civilised, very very quickly.

The Lost Child (1886) which Frederick McCubbin painted fourteen years prior to the setting of the novel, refers to this anxiety. Joan knew the painting well, as McCubbin, a gentle and gifted teacher had taught her at the National Gallery School. He encouraged her to paint en plein air, which had intensified her love of the bush.

McCubbin was one of several important Australian painters (also Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton) who based themselves in the bushland of Heidelberg, Victoria in the late nineteenth century. About fifty miles from Hanging Rock, the Heidelberg painters created lyrical, almost Impressionistic studies of the Australian landscape. Their paintings were saturated in romantic light and they often shared a theme about the proximity of beauty to danger. McCubbin’s painting The Lost Child is full of mystery and ambivalence. A soft light envelops the child’s small body almost reassuringly, yet he is completely enclosed by saplings, suspended in a timeless land. There appears to be no way out for him. Joan was deeply moved by this painting and wrote about it as seeing ‘the human element [as] strangely at one with the rustling silence of the bush’.

This anxiety over being lost in the bush became a significant part of white settlers’ mythic subculture and such vanishings, although relatively rare, were retold and intensively fictionalised. Cultural theorist Elspeth Tilley expands on white anxiety in her book White Vanishing: Rethinking Australia’s Lost in the Bush Myth. (2012): ‘European people bring Cartesian ideas of time when they come and colonise’ and in their imposition of such foreign concepts, ‘there’s always an underlying anxiety or recognition’ about the arbitrary nature of what they have imposed, and a ‘repressed knowledge about the massacres and atrocities that were perpetrated on Aboriginal people’.

The Life

This story about a disappearance made Joan Lindsay famous. Perhaps one reason it was so convincing was because Joan herself was an expert at disappearing. Her childhood had been characterised by a combination of privilege and neglect. She was the inconsequential third daughter of a wealthy, well connected couple who had longed for a boy. Her older sisters were inseparable companions, her parents usually busy and emotionally absent, and Joan was often left to her own devices in the vast twenty-four rooms of their hideously furnished house in St Kilda, shaped as she later said, like a ‘collapsed soufflé’.

She had always loved to write, draw and paint. Her older sister had been sent to a good boarding school but by the time it came to consider Joan, she was given a governess whom she said taught her virtually nothing. When at the age of thirteen she was sent to a small local girls’ school (much like Appleyard College), she was ashamed and humiliated to discover that in most subjects she came bottom of the class. Joan resolved to catch up, eventually becoming dux of the school, but that initial sense of failure endured. Many years later she used these early painful emotions for the misfit character of Appleyard College, the orphan Sara Waybourne. She also used Appleyard College to voice her criticism about the type of education she had received. Mrs Appleyard prizes the rote learning of a minor poet above Sara’s far more creative act of producing an original poem. This was an education that had more to do with mindless repetition, deportment and manners, with little scope for genuine inquiry.

It was not until she went to art school at the National Gallery of Victoria that Joan felt she was finally in her ‘native element, as a fish swims out of a tank into the sea’. While waiting to enrol at the school of drawing, she watched from the doorway the room she was about to enter as a budding artist:

I looked at these talented creatures in their overalls busy with charcoal and pieces of bread before immense easels…From the moment I sniffed the still remembered air of the Drawing School – a combination of stale bread, stale air, mice, spirit fixative and not always well washed humanity – I loved every inch of the place.

Here Joan met her future husband Daryl Lindsay, who was also studying at the school. He was the ninth of ten remarkable children of a country doctor from Ballarat and his irrepressible wife. From the age of twelve, Joan had been captivated by the famous bohemian Lindsay brothers, four of whom became professional artists. They were a refreshing contrast to the stuffy, privileged people who were regulars at her childhood home. Darryl was tall and handsome and just back from the war. She resolved to marry him.

After art school, an early exhibition of Joan’s landscape paintings received good reviews and in the early twenties, she and writer and artist Maie Ryan shared an inner Melbourne art studio. Yet despite her hard work, she remained determined to catch Darryl, and she chased him to London where he had been staying indefinitely. Within weeks of her arrival, they were engaged.

Soon after marriage, Joan abandoned her career as a painter. What followed was a life of travel and meeting fascinating people. She and Daryl transformed an old farmhouse in Langwarrin on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula into a spacious home which they called Mulberry Hill. It features heavily in her memoir, Time Without Clocks (1962):

Neither the kitchen clock nor the figured squares of the calendar could measure our first golden summers at Mulberry Hill. They were the timeless clockless summers of a dream.

In Time Without Clocks Lindsay writes lovingly of the renovation of their home and the succession of visitors they received there, among them, Dame Nellie Melba, the Prime Minister Robert Menzies, and Joan’s close friend Elisabeth Murdoch (mother of Rupert), who owned a home nearby. The Australian landscape was Joan’s lodestar and she recalled that wherever she found herself in the world, ‘Australia was always just below the surface, waiting to break through at absurdly inappropriate moments’. While travelling on a bus in fog bound London, for instance, she could suddenly be struck by a vision from the Mornington Peninsula, of her neighbour’s cows

drinking from a raspberry vinegar pool at sunset, or a certain kind of north wind, travelling across the paddocks, curling and uncurling the grasses as it went, wave after wave on a brittle yellow sea.

And although such days of fierce winds might bear the menace of bushfires in the Dandenongs, they were hers in a way that the gentle green of English summer days could never be.

Charming as these recollections are, the curious thing about the book is the absence of Joan Lindsay. She failed to provide any account of her inner life, and barely anything about her relationship with Daryl. So many questions were left hanging. What was important to her? What mattered creatively? And why had she so quickly given up her painting? Although she documents a period in which she wrote a novel and a series of plays, they are never mentioned. Just once she mentioned that she sat at her typewriter, but failed to say what came next. To me the memoir felt like a smokescreen, leaving me even more curious about this vivacious, yet enigmatic woman. Then earlier this year came the publication of Brenda Niall’s biography: Joan Lindsay: The Hidden life of the woman who wrote Picnic at Hanging Rock (2025) I leapt on it.

Darker Aspects

Niall is quick to point out that she did not have a great deal to work from in the form of private papers. Joan had destroyed most of her correspondence, leaving behind a self-curated image for the general public and for this reason she remains a largely enigmatic and elusive figure. But it is clear that Joan Lindsay had lived in the shadow of her husband Daryl who, after a false start as a painter, became a high achiever in the art world as a gallery director, networker and entrepreneur: ‘Joan entertained for Sir Daryl, supported his career, and was known as much for her flower arrangements as for her ideas’, writes Niall. What followed was sometimes depressing reading.

At the start of their marriage, Joan had been the more promising artist of the two. But after two joint exhibitions with Daryl, when she was the one who had received the encouraging reviews, Joan stepped aside: ‘One artist in the family is enough’, she said. And as Niall notes, with that act of wifely self abnegation, she buried her career as a painter. However in an interview that took place around 1973-4, just before the release of the film, Joan said that although she had been able to adequately paint trees, she had always wanted to paint people but never could. Ultimately she says, trees were not enough for her. Turning to journalism, she wrote travel pieces, interviews and reviews but they often suffered from being hastily dashed off to pay household bills (the Lindsays’ finances were precarious in their early years). Her attempts at serious writing did not succeed until she wrote Time Without Clocks in her sixties.

When Daryl became director of the National Gallery of Victoria (from 1942 to 1955), Joan was expected to be an attentive hostess to a long stream of guests. She was a shy and introverted person and this role often sapped her energy. Joan took on a position at the National Gallery of Victoria too, working three days per week as a writer (and sometimes tea lady), for which extraordinarily she was not paid. As Daryl’s life expanded, hers contracted. It would appear he was unfaithful on a number of occasions, including a sustained and intimate relationship with a colleague at the gallery. Joan turned a blind eye and kept up appearances but these betrayals must have been acutely painful. She confided to a friend that she had experienced depressive episodes, which Niall surmises may have blocked her creativity.

Daryl Lindsay had been good company when young but as he grew older, many found him aggressive and opinionated. Shortly after Joan wrote Time without Clocks, he countered with a memoir of his own, The Leafy Tree (1965). In it he said little about Joan, but made one public putdown about her painting: ‘[Joan’s] was only a minor talent’. Niall wonders whether it is possible that, like the time when she had been labelled the class dunce, Joan rebelled a second time and,

out of the tangled emotions of anger and humiliation that she had spent her marriage containing or denying, Joan began to write something that astonished her with a power she hadn’t known she possessed.

In the Limelight

Picnic at Hanging Rock became a phenomenon, especially with the release of the film. Joan blossomed in these last years of her life. Success made her happy and animated and newly confident. She was less likely to defer to others for their opinions, giving her own quite bluntly. She wondered, for instance, about her close friend and neighbour Elisabeth Murdoch: how was it possible she asked, that she had ‘spawned Rupert?’.

During filming she familiarised herself with all parts of the process and read every draft of the script. Some members of the film crew set up camp at Mulberry Hill and her ideas were sought after. Weir said of Joan that she ‘was a woman refinement, of elegance, a woman from a world as vanished as is the world of the characters in Hanging Rock.’ Cliff Green, the scriptwriter, said later that Joan had influenced them all:

Knowing she herself had been a painter until she was in her mid twenties and then going in and out of that house, which is like a museum of Australian paintings, affected us all deeply. Unquestionably, that atmosphere affected the writing of the screenplay in terms of its visual Australian Impressionist feel.

They were keen to incorporate the painterly feeling in the film that Joan had achieved in the novel. After much discussion and experimentation, cinematographer Russell Boyd succeeded in achieving a diffused, soft focus light by fastening a piece of vintage bridal veil over the lens of his camera. It created a glowing atmosphere, which gave the early scenes a soporific, dream-like feeling: a visual echo of Miranda’s paraphrasing of a poem by Edgar Allan Poe at the start of the film: ‘What we see or what we seem are but a dream, a dream within a dream.’ As with figures in the Heidelberg paintings, the girls seem suspended in the landscape in liquid, golden pools of light, and there is the same juxtaposition of beauty and unease.

Just as Joan’s life was opening up, Daryl’s was contracting. In response to her success, a friend said he was ‘peeved’. He had grown deaf, was in poor health and had begun to drink heavily. Friends who visited Mulberry Hill now talked only to Joan. By the time of the film’s preview, Daryl was increasingly confused and had started to slip into dementia. ‘Bloody awful’, he cried out at one point. It must have saddened Joan that he was unable to rejoice when it was finally her turn.

The couple had become too frail to run Mulberry Hill on their own and just before Daryl died, friends introduced them to the painter Rick Amor, his wife and two children. In exchange for helping around the home, they came to live rent free in a cottage on the property. The family brought immense happiness for Joan (who had longed for children) and in turn Amor’s children experienced a ‘magical childhood’. In her last years Joan Lindsay became a much loved and cherished member of a family. She briefly resumed painting, and after being almost extinguished by her role as wife and hostess, her creative spirit triumphed.

Music

Flute De Pan, Gheorge Zamfir

When it came time to decide on the theme music for the film, composer Bruce Smeaton says that he and director Peter Weir considered music by Palestrina, Chopin, Stravinsky, Debussy, Pink Floyd and Hawkwind before choosing ‘Flute De Pan’ by Zamfir, a Romanian musician. Weir felt that the ethereal pipes and sustained organ chords evoked ‘pagan feelings of the old Gods.’ This piece is part of a Romanian folk song tradition called ‘doina’.

Connection

Hanging Rock is a six-million-year old extinct volcano, 105 metres high, within Wurundjeri territory, near Victoria’s Macedon ranges. The outcrop is both a dividing and a meeting point for a number of First Nations groups: Dja Dja Wurrung, Woi Wurrung and Taungurung, who have been the traditional owners and custodians since at least the end of the last Ice Age. It is considered a sacred site for all these groups, and was used for lawmaking, initiation, corrobborees and trade and relationship building. The Rock is believed to hold so much power that some indigenous people refuse to climb it.

In 2016, in response to what she called the ‘habitual retelling’ of a white vanishing myth that ignores and displaces Aboriginal people and their culture, artist and RMIT researcher Amy Spiers started a campaign called ‘Miranda Must Go’. Spiers was particularly disturbed by the almost cult-like following of Picnic. Some visitors had taken to screaming Miranda’s name as they climbed the Rock, and the information centre featured elaborate displays about Lindsay’s book and the subsequent film, while making only a ‘cursory’ mention of its Indigenous history.

Spiers’ campaign was designed to generate awareness of white Australians’ preference for ‘fairytales’ about white suffering, instead of facing up to our past. It is not widely known, for instance, that in 1836 explorer Major Thomas Mitchell noticed smallpox scars on Indigenous people in the area surrounding Hanging Rock that devastated this population, or that in 1863 the last remaining Aborigines in the area were rounded up and taken off their country to Coranderrk mission, north-east of Melbourne. Once removed from their country, traditional owners usually lost their culture too because they were strictly forbidden by the missions to speak their own language. This effectively wiped out generations of oral tradition in the form of important stories told and remembered.

Spiers and cultural theorist Elspeth Tilley among others, argue that by the glorification of a fictional mystery, one culture has been upheld at the expense of another, ignoring a crime with its origins in a colonial history that white Australians can still barely face, let alone begin to recompense.