Of course, the events are not true. The story of Picnic at Hanging Rock is fictional, no matter how many readers believe it to be otherwise. Admittedly, my first reading of the novel as an adolescent left me convinced the events described were true. Lost among Lindsay’s police statements, letters, and newspaper extracts, in an era before the internet, I had limited access to information that could qualify her story. Like so many readers, I was left with the ambiguity posed at the beginning of the novel: ‘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.’ As an older reader, I know the story is fictional. I am surprised at the grown-ups who resist the fiction and cling to the romance of a factual basis. I am equally delighted at younger readers whose initial response is belief.

Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock turns fifty this year, a mere drop in the ocean in a country that has been settled for over 40,000 years. Yet its place in Australian literature, itself a sapling in an old growth forest, is remarkable, powerfully influential, and without generic peer. Amid a tradition of male voices, bush ballads, wilderness idylls, and the hardships of conquering nature, the novel is both traditional and innovative. Picnic at Hanging Rock is ground-breaking in its exposé of an introduced species’ tenuous occupation of an environment. Likewise, the novel’s focus on the repercussions of losing the girls is a break with familiar tropes. Picnic marks the changes in the country that spawned it between the years of its setting and publication. Laid out for measurement under Lindsay’s literary magnifying glass are themes of gender and sexuality, chronicled as innate, constructed, fluid, and contested.

Diogenes Monument 'Anneyelong' looking south towards Mt Macedon, sketch by William von Blandowski, 1855-56 (State Library of Victoria)

Lindsay’s protagonist is Hanging Rock, the European name for a cluster of gigantean boulders that forms part of Mount Diogenes in Victoria’s Macedon Ranges. Hanging Rock essentially ‘hangs’ between its companions, hence its name and, by extension, that of the supporting boulders. Suspended unexpectedly and low, it forms a natural gateway, a mesmeric liminal point. In the language of the Wurundjeri people, this 6.25 million-year-old volcanic formation may have been called Geboor, Tarehewait, or Anneyelong. Through its gateway was a place of initiation for Aboriginal men. Sadly, by 1900, the year in which Lindsay’s novel is set, the widespread death and dispossession of the traditional owners of the region, the Dja Dja Wurrung, Taungurung, and Wurundjeri, meant that the initiations had long since ceased. The last recorded ceremony took place in 1851.

Records from the mid-1800s include geographical and geological surveys, accounts of picnics, and reports of disappearances. When German zoologist and engineer William von Blandowski explored the Macedon Ranges in the 1850s, he documented the Rock’s geological features with the occasional romantic flourish. Images based on his sketches, admittedly with the engravers’ artistic licence, show a dramatic, alien and threatening monument.

In 1864, the first communal picnic was recorded, and in 1867 the disappearance of a three-year-old boy was reported. Mount Diogenes and its Hanging Rock had begun to garner a reputation as a site not only of joyous days but of devastating mishaps, becoming the backdrop to stories of trauma, disappearance, and homicide, real and imagined. In 1891, the first instalment of Ivan Dexter’s serialised novel The Mount Macedon Mystery appeared in a New South Wales newspaper. While Dexter’s tale is one of mundane murder, not metaphysical mayhem, he shares with Lindsay a need to associate the area with a chaos inextricably linked to colonial anxiety concerning the Australian bush.

Lindsay (1896–1984) was fascinated by Hanging Rock. Her own childhood days included holidays in its vicinity, and she had powerful memories of an early Christmas holiday in the Macedon Ranges with the pungent smell of pansies, over which she claims to have uttered her first word – ‘beautiful’. Lindsay was four years old, and as Christmas rolled into New Year’s Day 1900 she was taken on the annual picnic at Hanging Rock. While she never elaborated further on this visit to the Rock, she did explain that it was a dream about the site that was the primary inspiration for the novel. As she continued to dream of the Rock, the girls’ story came to her in instalments.

Another source of inspiration was her connection to Clyde Girls’ Grammar School, which she attended when it was in East St Kilda. The contrasts that exist between Clyde Grammar and Appleyard College may initially suggest that Lindsay’s school was not an influence on the dreaded institution in the novel. Yet there are traces of Clyde in Lindsay’s use of the surname of one of the teachers, ‘McCraw’, borrowed from Miss Helen McCraw who was a general secondary teacher at Clyde during and after Lindsay’s time there. While far from a mathematical genius and a strange, masculine woman like her fictional namesake, Helen McCraw was involved in leading excursions to Hanging Rock after the school was relocated to Woodend in 1919. The first venture to the Rock in 1919 took place at dusk, with the dishevelled and overexcited group not returning until midnight. We do not know whether something strange occurred that evening, although it did enter Clyde legend. The school then held an annual picnic at the Rock for the next forty years, with each return trip accompanied by ghost stories.

Lindsay was also intrigued by William Ford’s painting At the Hanging Rock (1875), purchased by the National Gallery of Victoria on the recommendation of her husband, Daryl Lindsay, during his time there as director. This oil depicts a decidedly colonial interpretation of the Australian landscape, including signs that the London-born Ford struggled to bond with the bush, which he rendered in varying shades of khaki. The attempt to understand, indeed to tame, the landscape is evident in Ford’s decision to populate it with ‘civilised’ picnickers. Of course, this fails; the mostly female cast appears out of place in their frocks and hats. There is, however, one noticeable picnicker, a young woman who brings the only splash of colour to the dreary scene; she stands left of centre with her back towards the viewer, adorned in a blue coat and matching blue hair ribbon, taller than her conversational partner and with long red curls down her back. She is a likely prototype of Miranda, who alludes to the painting as she traverses the path to the Rock: ‘I remember my father showing me a picture of people in old-fashioned dresses having a picnic at the Rock. I wish I knew where it was painted.’

At the Hanging Rock, William Ford, oil on canvas, 1875 (National Gallery of Victoria, Wikimedia Commons)

Lindsay repeatedly returns to Hanging Rock in her novel, describing and redescribing it, searching for a definitive meaning. Is Hanging Rock nothing more than a mysterious volcanic mass? Is it threatening and destructive? Does it possess a strange sentience that portends malevolence or transcendence, or both? Lindsay certainly evokes a sinister aura around the Rock, evident in the description of its first sighting by the schoolgirls. It appears suddenly and startlingly; a massive ‘fortress’, ‘walls gashed with indigo shade’, ‘immense and formidable’, ‘jagged’. It is frightening and unknowable, ‘appearing and disappearing with every turn of the road’.

Hanging Rock and its surrounds are consistently contrasted with the genteel, ‘civilised’ worlds of contained gardens and manicured lawns. This is part of an overarching theme of the novel; namely the uneasy and contested displacement of one environment by another. Of course, such displacement is a lost cause. No matter how many rose gardens and picnic spots are created on cleared bush and native habitats, the Australian landscape fights back. Sometimes it wins in the most ruthless of ways. Like the bushfires that devastate homes and their occupants, and the storms that destroy ships and their human cargo, Hanging Rock takes people and vanishes them. Lindsay does a post-colonial turn before the term was invented, by continuously referencing the imperial lack-of-fit with the bush. This disjuncture, as Lindsay implies, borders on hubris. As the sensible mathematics mistress comments: ‘“And this we do for pleasure,” Greta McCraw muttered from the shadows, “so that we may shortly be at the mercy of venomous snakes and poisonous ants ... how foolish can human creatures be!”’

Despite Miss McCraw’s disdain for the bush, the schoolgirls are excited about a day out. This is hardly surprising, as Appleyard College, an imposing Victorian mansion, is a site of suffocation. Furnished with marble mantelpieces imported from Italy, heavy Axminster carpet, and hemmed in with sculptured flowerbeds and manicured lawns, it radiates resistance to youthful exuberance and passion. Lindsay describes the school as ‘an architectural anachronism in the Australian bush – a hopeless misfit in time and place ... like exotic fungi following the finding of gold’.

Miranda is the most enthusiastic of the escapees on Valentine’s Day. Her otherness, her other-worldliness, are symbolised by her affinity with nature. Unlike the very English and very European characters in the novel, whose collective motivation is to re-establish the environments and cultures of the old worlds in the new one, Miranda is free of tradition. The child of a Northern Queensland grazier and ‘well used to the Bush’, she took as much pleasure in ‘a bunch of wildflowers’ pinned to her coat, ‘as a breathtaking diamond brooch’. As such, she is ripe for the taking by a brooding, mysterious geological formation. It is through Miranda that the enigmatic power of the Rock is principally evoked. Even before the day begins, Miranda confides to her roommate Sara Waybourne that she won’t be here much longer, as if she knows she won’t return.

Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay, 1st edition, published by F.W. Cheshire, Melbourne (1967)On the day of the picnic, Hanging Rock ‘had been creeping down towards the Picnic Grounds’, as if to call Miranda and her companions to its secrets. The studious and mathematically gifted Marion Quade requests a closer look ‘to make a few measurements’, and Miranda and the beautiful heiress Irma Leopold ask to join her. They are given approval by their guardians for the day, Miss McCraw and the French mistress, Mademoiselle de Poitiers. The three senior girls allow Edith Horton, a younger boarder and ‘the college dunce’, to tag along. While Marion initiated the exploration, Miranda leads it. More than once she is described as being ahead of her three companions, as if the Rock relies on her to deliver the girls to it. Indeed, it is Miranda who opens the gate into the picnic area at the beginning of the day, heralding the entry into the uncanny and unfamiliar.

Arguably, Lindsay herself did not understand what it was she was writing – or trying to communicate – in the long scenes culminating in the disappearance of the girls. For pages, she grapples with the innate mystery of the Rock and its unexplained role in the event. Her befuddlement at her own mystery is represented in the novel by Michael Fitzhubert’s obsession with the girls’ disappearance. Fresh from England, and a witness to the girls making their way through the bush, he is subsequently haunted by strange dreams, apparitions, and a jumble of overwhelming emotions he cannot comprehend or articulate.

Perhaps in a declaration of defeat in her quest to communicate the incommunicable, Lindsay focuses on the responses of the girls as they edge closer to vanishing – describing, not interpreting. They are silent, unconscious to anything around them as they continue their ascent. There are moments of epiphany; Irma dances – no, she floats – shedding her stockings and shoes, and Marion discards her pencil and notebook, symbols of her intellect and logic. Lindsay refers to their enchantment, increasing lassitude, and longing to sleep, which culminates in their strange collapse. Miranda wakes in a transcendental state of heightened awareness and insight: ‘Everything, if only you could see it clearly enough, is beautiful and complete.’ Edith is the only one who fights against the force of the Rock. Resisting at every turn, whining and proclaiming illness, she is the hysterical witness to the disappearance of the senior girls ‘behind the monolith’. It is this terror-induced resistance to the expedition she so desperately pleaded to join, and her abhorrence at the increasing power of the Rock, that ultimately result in Edith’s return to the group of picnickers. Is the ‘the college dunce’ found an unsuitable offering to the undeclared needs of Hanging Rock?

Lost, Frederick McCubbin, 1886, oil on canvas (National Gallery of Victoria, Wikimedia Commons)Lindsay plays with ideas of European vulnerability in the Australian bush. This underlying tension is achieved with ease in the novel because of our familiarity with the motif of the lost white woman or child. This is a colonial response to the bush, haunting the literature and art of the nineteenth century, and not without reason. Men also got lost, but their stories seemed to lack the pathos to be immortalised by artists such as Frederick McCubbin (Lindsay’s teacher at the National Gallery of Victoria School), whose Lost (1886) shows a bereft girl standing in the bush. McCubbin returned to the theme again in 1907 in another Lost, in which a boy is depicted crying amid a lonely landscape later identified by his daughter as the bush near Hanging Rock.

But the differences between McCubbin’s paintings and Lindsay’s novel are as powerful as the similarities. His figures wait for rescue, her girls are driven onward. For all their sentimentality and artistry, the paintings lack the mysticism and otherworldliness of the novel. No sentient rocks or natural forces pull the artist’s lost children into the unknown. Unlike Miranda and Marion, the two girls who never return from Hanging Rock, the audience can at least see McCubbin’s figures – they are tangible, almost touchable, thus rescuable – whereas Lindsay’s have vanished, never to be seen again. This is emphasised by the absence of tracks on the Rock; as if something or someone obliterated the girls’ footprints, or as if there were none left in the first place. Perhaps, as in Irma’s epiphany, they all floated, which is implied in Edith’s observation that the three girls were ‘hardly walking – sliding over the stones on their bare feet as if they were on a drawing-room carpet’. Interestingly, when Irma is found alive eight days later, her bare feet are impeccably clean, without any injuries, despite cuts and bruising to her face and hands.

Like the gothic grandeur of Appleyard College squatting awkwardly in cleared bushland, Lindsay’s deference to the pastoral genre is more at home in the literature of Europe and Britain. And, like the college landscape in which the girls and their teachers are cloistered, the inclusion of the pastoral is a device to explore gender and sexuality.

In Picnic at Hanging Rock, the pastoral manifests in all its Classical glory, reminiscent of the Greek Golden Age, complete with virgins in the wilderness, mythical allusions, a pervading sense of the mystical, and a displacement of time and space. Even the ‘misty summit of Mount Macedon rising up’ renders it an Australian Mount Olympus. And as Greece’s highest mountain was once home to ancient gods, Hanging Rock, towering at its peak at 718 meters above sea level, houses supernatural forces hidden from the uninitiated.

Per the literary rules of pastoral, women are young, beautiful, and on the brink of sexual awakening. Lindsay establishes the sensuality of the nascent sexuality of her girls through Miranda, whose desirability and inherent charm are symbolised by the meaning of her name; from the Latin, ‘she who must be marvelled at’. Her pre-eminence as the embodiment of Venus is introduced early in the novel with the reference to Valentine’s Day and its eponymous patron: ‘Saint Valentine is impartial in his favours, and not only the young and beautiful were kept busy opening their cards this morning. Miranda as usual had a drawer of her wardrobe filled with lace-trimmed pledges of affection ...’

The languid, fluid sensuality of the schoolgirls echoes the theme of innocent sexual awakenings characteristic of the pastoral genre. The orphan girl, Sara, loves and is in love with Miranda, her passion being the subject of the students’ casual gossip. Such romantic, perhaps erotic expressions underlie the world of the school, extending to subtle moments of intense reciprocal admiration of female beauty, and tenderness between women. Indeed, Lindsay’s exploration of the sexuality of turn-of-the-century women is masterful. Applegate College is a sequestered feminine enclave where the girls’ inner lives are comparable to the dreamy, romanticised world of the Greek poet Sappho’s imaginary school for girls, once believed to be nestled away on the island of Lesbos. Lindsay, much like Sappho, may be somewhat coy on details, but ultimately that is the point of such romantic friendships; they embody sensuality, mild eroticism, burgeoning sexual awareness, but usually not sex. This is not about lesbianism in the modern sense, nor was the original Sappho for that matter, but rather an intense female awareness and love of feminine beauty, which Lindsay herself understood and experienced. In this way, she deftly avoids anachronistic renditions of same-sex desires in the late Victorian age, which is quite an achievement for a novel published in 1967.

Sappho, Heva Coomans, 1894 (Die Gartenlaube, Wikimedia Commons)The allusions to Sappho are not far-fetched in view of Lindsay’s intertextual reference to the English poet Mrs Felicia Hemans. Author of ‘Casabianca’, better known as ‘The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck’, Hemans was also known for her poems on female death, particularly suicide, cast in a Classical tenor. ‘The Last Song of Sappho’ is typical of such works, and chronicles the overdone, apocryphal story of the broken-hearted poet’s suicidal leap off the Leucadian Cliff. Lindsay mentions Hemans in a strange scene of incorrect referencing, suggestive of unhinged behaviour, when the headmistress, Mrs Appleyard, and Sara lock horns. Sara is prevented from attending the picnic due to her failure to recite Longfellow’s ‘The Wreck of the Hesperus’ the day before. Her punishment entails sitting in the schoolroom on Valentine’s Day ‘committing the hated masterpiece to memory’. While Sara is aware of the task at hand, Mrs Appleyard is clearly confused: ‘You little ignoramus! Evidently you don’t know that Mrs Felicia Hemans is considered one of the finest of our English poets!’ Mrs Appleyard’s conflation of Longfellow’s ‘The Wreck of the Hesperus’ with Hemans’s ‘The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck’ is a complex intertextual game on Lindsay’s part. The headmistress’s error may denote nothing more than a tenuous grasp on literature, which ironically renders her the ‘ignoramus’. But it may also hint at her increasingly strained state of mind; the sight of Sara, the object of Mrs Appleyard’s hatred, provoking fantasies of a deliciously imagined end for the obstinate girl.

As it transpires, the poetry of Felicia Hemans hits more than a poetic nerve with Mrs Appleyard. Inspiring more than morbid fantasies of heroines like Hemans’s Sappho throwing themselves off cliffs, the poetry materialises later in the novel when Mrs Appleyard pushes Sara to her death ‘from the wall directly below the tower’, and not long afterwards hurls herself from the Rock.

It is not only Sara’s love for Miranda that plays with Sapphic idealism. Irma also engenders sensual female admiration, overtly in Mademoiselle de Poitiers. It is Mademoiselle who explains to Irma that Valentine is the Patron Saint of Lovers, and in Lindsay’s introduction to the young teacher she implies her comfort with same-sex desire with a deftness of sly syntax: ‘Thus Saint Valentine reminded the inmates of Appleyard College of the colour and variety of love. Mademoiselle de Poitiers, who taught dancing and French conversation and attended to the boarders’ wardrobes, was bustling about in a fever of delighted anticipation.’

This literary style of expressing the sensuality of the feminine gaze is again employed in a scene of reverie, as Lindsay evokes Mademoiselle’s favouritism of Irma:

‘Depêchez-vous, mes enfants, depêchez-vous. Tais-toi, Irma,’ chirped the light canary voice of Mademoiselle, for whom la petite Irma could do no wrong. The girl’s voluptuous little breasts, her dimples, full red lips, naughty black eyes and glossy black ringlets, were a continual source of aesthetic pleasure. Sometimes in the dingy schoolroom the Frenchwoman, brought up amongst the great European galleries, would look up from her desk and see her against a background of cherries and pineapples, cherubs and golden flagons, surrounded by elegant young men in velvets and satins ...

As a European who knows her art, Mademoiselle pictures Irma as a model for Baroque artists, situating her amid erotic pastorals of cherubs, possibly Bacchus with his ‘golden flagons’, ever the subject of the erotic gaze. It is also Mademoiselle’s keen eye for artistic comparisons that casts Miranda as ‘a Botticelli angel from the Uffizi’, one of the novel’s most famous similes. Of course, this comparison is off-kilter. Tired, dozing, perhaps overwhelmed by the girl or simply forgetful of her cultural touchstones, Mademoiselle conflates the surfeit of European angels with Botticelli’s Venus. Much later in the novel, Lindsay clarifies Mademoiselle’s error in the form of Michael’s vision of ‘a girl in a white dress ... standing beside a giant clamshell that served as a birdbath’. As he moves towards the apparition, he sees a white swan, drinking from the basin, then flying away. The vision casts Miranda as Botticelli’s Venus, who is depicted emerging from a clamshell. The swan, Venus’s sacred bird, further connects the girl to the goddess. In Peter Weir’s 1975 film, the scene shows Mademoiselle resting a book on her lap, open at a page showing The Birth of Venus, simultaneously illustrating and correcting the schoolmistress’s slip.

Valentine’s Day, cherubs, angels, and Venus combine to imbue Mademoiselle with a dreamy sensuality of Classical freedom and ambiguities. As she is drawn to the voluptuousness of Irma and the erotic appeal of Miranda in all her purity, she is also aroused by thoughts of her beau, Monsieur Louis Montpelier, whom she later marries. Indeed, daydreams of her watchmaker fiancé from Bendigo, turning the key of a Sèvres clock with experienced hands, have her close to fainting.

Even the landscape around Hanging Rock is endowed with a sexual energy. Lindsay points out the ‘romantic summer villas’ that ‘hinted at far off adult delights’ as the carriage takes its passengers through the village to the picnic site. This reference to ‘adult delights’ suggests freedom, and also a less romantic, less idealised sensuality; alluding to expressions of illicit desire afforded by remote settings. The observation, brief and casual, adds a knowing, unsettling element to the narrative; a presage of the prurient theories surrounding the disappearances.

The pastoral setting is traditionally one of both beauty and potential danger. Accordingly, part of the fear and mystery generated by Picnic at Hanging Rock originates from suggestions of the girls’ abduction, rape, and murder. Gossip travels quickly, indifferent to the rigid class-based categories that maintain a stuffy social order in the region. When Irma is found alive, Lindsay chronicles the inherent anxieties of Australian readers anticipating revelations of rape. There are whispers of Irma’s missing corset, politely kept from the police, but ‘the body’ of the living girl is confirmed to be ‘unblemished and virginal’. However, this does not stop speculation about the fate of Miranda, Marion, and Miss McCraw. When Edith finally confesses to seeing the mathematics mistress on the Rock, she reluctantly confides that Greta McCraw was without her skirt, wearing only pantaloons. The loss of clothing, symbolic of a suspicious sexual encounter – criminal or otherwise – characterises accounts, interpretations, and theories. Mrs Appleyard, usually cold and aloof in the face of scrutiny, momentarily loses her composure when a detective from Melbourne concludes that the girls were most likely ‘abducted, lured away, robbed – or worse’. It transpires that ‘worse’ entails working at a Sydney brothel, being ‘raped by a drunken seaman’. The claim, which he quickly dismisses, comes from a misogyny, articulated silently in idle musings as he speaks with the headmistress: ‘These perfect ladies were the Devil. Dirty minded as they come, he wouldn’t mind betting.’ Even Greta McCraw becomes a suspect in her own disappearance when Constable Bumphers puts it to Mrs Appleyard that she may have planned ‘some private arrangements of her own’.

In keeping with the complexities of late-Victorian sensibilities and morals, Lindsay treats sexual expression and gender binaries in muffled and indirect ways. By adopting the mannered obliqueness of the age, Lindsay is free to explore a range of relationships, including those between men. The most fascinating male relationship is between Michael and Albert. In terms of the era, the friendship they develop is particularly unusual because of the class disparity; Michael is the Honourable Michael Fitzhubert, nephew of Colonel and Mrs Fitzhubert, and Albert Crundall is their coachman. Their friendship is cemented on the day the girls go missing, a catastrophic event that locks them in a bond both fated and unbreakable.

Observing the four girls crossing the creek at the base of Hanging Rock, Michael and Albert become unfortunate participants in the mystery. Albert whistles at the girls, Michael reprimands him, and their lives are changed forever. On seeing Miranda, nameless and unknown to him, Michael immediately knows he will live out the rest of his life in Australia. What he does not know at the time, however, is the reason; ‘the tall pale girl with straight yellow hair, who had gone skimming over the water like one of the white swans on his uncle’s lake’. Michael’s overwhelming feelings for Miranda are inexplicable and irrational in a manner reminiscent of the ancient Greek belief in the force of Eros, the god of passion and desire. While later subsumed by the charming figure of Cupid, Saint Valentine’s less threatening companion, Eros was the embodiment of the overwhelming power of unquenchable love; as one of Sappho’s fragments attests: ‘Eros the loosener of limbs once again shakes me, / that bittersweet, utterly irresistible little beast.’

As the mystery that engulfs Michael and Albert deepens, their friendship grows and they become ‘at one’. Despite their closeness in age, the young coachman cares for his master’s nephew as if he were an adopted charge. Albert’s intense feelings for Michael extend beyond his assigned role in the Fitzhubert’s household and are matched by the powerful emotions of his friend. There are elements of mateship in the bond between them, but there is also something else. Lindsay sees Michael through Albert’s gaze, describing his ‘slim boyish figure gracefully clearing the creek and striding off’. Like the representation of the sexuality of her female characters, which is complex, rich, and varied, Lindsay’s evocation of the bond between the two men is one of subtle homoeroticism, which also has a place in the pastoral tradition. The socially awkward nature of the friendship means that much of their contact takes place in private, away from the disapproval of Colonel and Mrs Fitzhubert, which augments its latent eroticism.

It is the heroic Albert who saves Michael from the Rock when he loses his way in a vainglorious attempt to find Miranda (and the others). When Albert sees Michael, unconscious and beaten by his experience on the Rock, and remembers the little white flags he had left in a hopeless attempt to mark his trail, his overwhelming emotions ‘made him go over to the bed and gently stroke the limp blue-veined hand on the coverlet’. And when Michael awakes from his ordeal, Albert is the only person he wishes to see.

Hanging Rock (photograph by Robert Lynch)

Picnic at Hanging Rock opens with the girls of Appleyard College ‘fluttering about in their holiday muslins like a flock of excited butterflies’. The simile references the beauty of feminine adolescence but also its brevity, and the brevity of life itself. The image further implies that the girls are fragile and in need of protection. Throughout the course of the novel, Lindsay conversely reinforces and destabilises this stereotype of femininity.

For the most part, Lindsay’s women function independently of men, who tend to occupy utilitarian roles to facilitate the smooth running of the school. Mrs Appleyard, though missing her long-dead husband and sexually frustrated, can maintain an unyielding order at the school as long as she has Greta McCraw by her side. Indeed, the headmistress’s descent into alcohol-fuelled madness is more a case of a flawed character than any notion of feminine weakness, and is accelerated by Miss McCraw’s disappearance: ‘It was inconceivable that this woman of masculine intellect on whom she had come to rely in the last years should have allowed herself to be spirited away, lost, raped, murdered in cold blood like an innocent schoolgirl, on the Hanging Rock.’

The mathematics mistress’s intellectual acumen, which challenges traditional claims that such qualities belong to men alone, liberates her from the social constraints of gender. Her eccentric appearance and indifference to style – ‘coarse greying hair perched like an untidy bird’s nest on top of her head’ and an ‘outlandish wardrobe’ – may suggest she is a bluestocking. She is shown directing, contradicting, and dismissing the local coachman, Mr Hussey as she assumes the dominant role during the picnic. An erstwhile figure of both awe and quiet mockery among her students, Miss McCraw, who listened to ‘the Music of the Spheres in her own head’, was a ‘brilliant mathematician – far too brilliant for her poorly paid job at the College’. Here, Lindsay shows the complexities of gender in 1900; Greta McCraw has a degree of agency because of her intellect and education, but her full potential is unrealised. This is not just about the limitations of class – all is ‘an accident of birth’ – juxtaposed with the optimism inherent in female access to education, but also the social restraints faced by Australian women in 1900. And while Lindsay realises that education can be a means of escape from marriage and motherhood, the reality is that the pupils of Appleyard College are being prepared, ultimately, to assume their allotted role in life.

But this reality is not something Lindsay blithely accepts; her protestations can be detected in the symbolic use of clothing (and its shedding) in the novel. Lindsay protests the restrictive attire of her characters, describing the girls as ‘[i]nsulated from natural contacts with earth, air and sunlight, by corsets pressing on the solar plexus, by voluminous petticoats, cotton stockings and kid boots’. Likewise, Irma complains: ‘Whoever invented female fashions for nineteen hundred should be made to walk through bracken fern in three layers of petticoats.’ Appropriately, when Irma experiences the uncanny power of the Rock, which is liberating as well as frightening, she does so without gloves, shoes, stockings, and corset.

Joan Lindsay c.1920 (Wikimedia Commons)It may be argued that Lindsay’s fascination with mysticism, which she explicitly aligns with the feminine, contributes to the muting of feminism in the novel. Mysticism is partly expressed through the theme of liminality. The event occurs on Valentine’s Day, a time when, according to Lindsay’s friend, Phillip Adams, she believed ‘the commonplace [is] ... overwhelmed by the extraordinary’. It is also a millennial year, a time characterised by the uncanny and the foreboding as well as the anticipated and optimistic. And while this focus on a world betwixt and between may suggest that 1900 symbolically marks a new epoch for Australian women, with Miranda, Marion, and Miss McCraw ultimately entering an enlightened space, such a reading is problematic. This is not only because it may be over-interpretation, or that female agency via mysticism is more disempowering than liberating, but because it also implies the élitism of utopian visions of female illumination and emancipation. If the reading were adopted, then the novel explicitly and significantly depicts the selection of those defined as ‘special’: Miranda is miraculous, and both Marion and Miss McCraw possess extraordinary intellects. It would follow that there is no place for the likes of Edith or Minnie, one of the school’s domestic staff, or even the beautiful and wealthy Irma, who is ultimately rejected by whatever mysterious force it is that takes (and keeps) the other three. If the strange events on Valentine’s Day 1900 mark a new beginning for Australian women in Picnic at Hanging Rock, the world presaged is not for the ordinary. As Irma becomes increasingly irritated by Edith, she muses: ‘why was it ... that God made some people so plain and disagreeable and others beautiful and kind like Miranda’.

Lindsay’s muslin-clad schoolgirls are in stark contrast to the lives of women in 1967 Australia, a time of radical change and reform that arguably laid the foundations of the Whitlam government five years later. A major referendum resulted in the recognition of Australia’s First Nation Peoples as citizens, although it took several more years before any significant changes began to take effect. The year also heralded the federal government’s announcement that it would not ban the contraceptive pill. Women actively protested the Vietnam War; lobbied governments for equal rights in marriage, the workplace, education, politics, sport, and the arts.

Although Lindsay wrote Picnic at Hanging Rock at a time when many victories had been won for women, and in a decade of advances in liberation, she appears to have missed most of the action. It may not be an exaggeration to suggest that Lindsay was indifferent to women’s rights, not out of any antagonism for the movement but because she did not perceive herself as needing feminism. She was the child of a privileged Melbourne family. Her mother, Anne Sophie Hamilton, a gifted pianist, grew up in Dublin Castle where her father, Sir Robert Hamilton served as under-secretary for Ireland, and later became governor of Tasmania. Lindsay’s father, Theyre à Beckett Weigall, Australian-born, was a King’s Counsel. Lindsay was cherished, well-educated, encouraged to pursue her artistic talents, and to travel overseas.

Yet, as with many aspects of her life, Lindsay’s feminism – or lack thereof – may not be quite so clear-cut. The major clue to this mystery, like so much else, lies in the novel. Throughout Picnic at Hanging Rock, Lindsay is damning of the academic deficits of Appleyard College and the lack of compassion of its headmistress. Despite Mrs Appleyard’s commercially driven promotion of the scholastic merits of her College for Young Ladies, she is indifferent to the reforms of the female curriculum of the Victorian era. She barely provides anything resembling instruction in the more traditional skills of feminine accomplishment. Indeed, besides the brilliant Marion Quade it would be highly unlikely that any graduate of the school would have met the matriculation requirements to enter the University of Melbourne when its Council agreed to permit women to sit the examination in 1871. In contrast to Lindsay’s more rigorous education at Clyde, Appleyard College is a sham. This contrast, and the intense anxiety that Lindsay evokes in her descriptions of the fictional school, may be the unexpected feminist twist in the novel. The stifling, unimaginative, unacademic, rigid, and sometimes cruel school environment, with its obsession with marriage – for the girls, for Mademoiselle de Poitiers – symbolises a powerful lack of freedom that the self-identified libertine would have found an anathema. From a free, somewhat bohemian family, and well-educated, her depiction of the school may be a powerful reminder in 1967 of those unacceptable institutions for women in the not-so-distant past. Perhaps, by making Miranda vanish, Lindsay has ensured her escape from a future life of marriage and children as the wife of a Queensland grazier or, worse still, as a beautiful bird in a cage in a Melbourne mansion.

Clyde was not exactly traditional in some respects, and Lindsay was at times critical of it. Nevertheless, in her autobiography, Time Without Clocks (1962), she indirectly reflects on the benefits afforded a woman of solid education and liberal upbringing, albeit ones predicated on class. Her marriage to Daryl Lindsay in London on Saint Valentine’s Day, 1922, which opens the book, denotes Lindsay and her new husband as modern people; they marry in a registry office, without family. In the early part of the autobiography, Lindsay blithely depicts herself as unfit for the traditional role of wife; she cannot cook and has no interest in housekeeping. Instead, she works at her art and writing with Daryl, the two of them focusing on creativity, entertaining and being at the heart of Melbourne’s cultural élite. Far from disappointing her eminent, well-heeled parents, Lindsay is indulged as much as an adult as she was as a child. Her life, as outlined in Time Without Clocks, is full of art, music, literature, family, friends, and her husband. It seems to be a blessed existence. However, as with much of Lindsay’s public persona, this is a stringently edited version of a life constructed for public reading. This approach ensures that any unpleasantness or sadness she may have experienced during those early years at Mulberry Hill, her home for most of her married life, is never mentioned. She is more forthcoming in Facts Soft and Hard (1964), which tells of the time she and Daryl spent in the United States – ‘I had only the vaguest idea of what it means to be a museum wife’ – but not much.

Likewise, Lindsay’s interest in the metaphysical, one not shared with, or appreciated by Daryl, is a subject never breached. Thus, for those of us interested in her providing insights into her views on the mystery of Picnic at Hanging Rock, the novel and a few fleeting interviews – during which she regularly and tantalisingly would state that ‘something did happen’ – are essentially all we have.

Hanging Rock, 2017 (photograph by Kate Johnson)

It is happening now. As it has been happening ever since Edith Horton ran stumbling and screaming towards the plain. As it will go on happening until the end of time. The scene is never varied by so much as the falling of a leaf or the flight of a bird. To the four people on the Rock it is always acted out in the tepid twilight of a present without a past. Their joys and agonies are forever new.

We have one additional insight into the mystery of Picnic at Hanging Rock, the much discussed and sometimes rejected final chapter.

The Secret of Hanging Rock, chapter eighteen of the original novel, was published posthumously in 1987 by Lindsay’s literary agent, John Taylor, to whom she had assigned the rights. As Lindsay was originally persuaded by her publishers to remove chapter eighteen, parts of it were put into chapter three (the main narrative concerning the girls’ experience on the Rock). Thus, parts of chapter three read complicatedly and chapter eighteen repeats passages from it.

The Secret of Hanging Rock opens as above, with time happening now, then, later and forever. It is presented, for the most part, from the point of view of the beautiful but ultimately unextraordinary Irma. She cannot understand or participate in the complete experience of that Valentine’s Day, and is finally left behind. As recounted in the strange images and metaphors of chapter three, chapter eighteen confirms that the Rock pulls Miranda and Marion into it, pulling them ‘like a tide’, pulling them ‘inside out’. The mystery of Miss McCraw is also solved in the most fantastical of ways with her manifesting as ‘a clown-like figure dressed in a torn calico camisole and long calico drawers’. Manic and distressed, the creature who was once the unflappable mathematics mistress, eventually lays down with the semi-catatonic girls and sleeps. And like Miranda and Marion, she awakes with heightened perceptions: ‘Anything is possible, unless it is proved impossible. And sometimes even then.’ She also has extrasensory perception, being able to see Marion’s brilliant mind and Miranda’s pure heart. And with that, the three chosen ones step through into ‘a hole in space’, leaving Irma, waiting – rightly so – on the earthly plane. Like McCubbin’s figures, Irma is (merely) lost, waiting for rescue.

The mystery of Picnic at Hanging Rock is no mystery at all. It never was. Even without chapter eighteen, with its additional details, the novel stands alone – explicable, complete, and containing most of what a reader needed to know in the first place. The only real mystery lies in Lindsay’s belief that her fiction was fact: ‘I can only say that for me fact and fiction are so closely aligned that some of it really happened and some of it didn’t. And to me it all happened. It was all terribly true to me.’ Lindsay’s words, from a 1974 interview for the (then) Arts Australia Council record, was a consistent response to her own creation: ‘it all happened’.

Making my way through the tourists at Hanging Rock one brisk winter’s morning, I witness parents pointing out the site of the alleged vanishing to their children. I watch people from around the world take photos of the scene of Lindsay’s fictional mystery. I hear tales of more recent incidents, such as the death of a twelve-year-old boy in 2002. I observe my daughter, a thoroughly modern Miranda, moving defiantly through the landscape. Like the others, we are drawn in, encouraged to move forward, onwards, upwards. There is no sense of menace, but with so many people around it is impossible to imagine the environment in other settings – at night, at dawn, without tourists and picnickers.

Lindsay not only wrote a novel, she reinscribed a landscape. As my visit to Hanging Rock revealed, a once secluded, spiritual site has been transformed into a busy tourist spot. In the visitor’s centre, tourists can read about the history of the region, from its geological origins to its original owners to colonial picnics and, finally, to the novel itself. Sightseers can walk along the path to Hanging Rock and take their photos before settling down to afternoon tea at the café.

Peter Weir’s film, released eight years after the publication of the novel, made use of Hanging Rock and the Macedon Ranges, augmenting the region’s fictional identity and fame in a way the author could never have anticipated, and subsequently heralding the era now known as the ‘Golden Age’ of Australian cinema.

The ripples continue. The novel has been adapted by playwrights for both dramatic and musical theatre, including Tom Wright’s version, which premièred in 2016. Ursula Dubosarsky’s young adult novel The Golden Day (2011) was inspired by Picnic at Hanging Rock. A miniseries has also been scheduled for release in 2018. As the miniseries garners media coverage, intensified by the novel’s fiftieth anniversary, comments continue to be made about the ‘truth’ behind the story. Lindsay’s ripples extend, so it seems, to the manifestation of a strange psychological landscape in the form of an enclave of Australians who, like Lindsay, believe that fiction is fact.

The cast of Foxtel Showcase's upcoming 2018 mini series adaptation of Picnic at Hanging Rock (© FOXTEL, photograph by Ben King)

Next day I visit Mulberry Hill, Lindsay’s home on the Mornington Peninsula. Built in 1926 as an addition to a small cottage, Mulberry Hill – an American colonial-style house – was the Lindsay residence before it was bequeathed to the National Trust. Perhaps because it was built for the couple and owned only by them, Mulberry Hill exudes a palpable energy. In Daryl’s art studio, a list of handwritten telephone numbers is still attached to the wall, and a small notebook of contacts lies open on a bookcase. Upstairs, where the spacious main bedroom sits across the landing from the writing room, Joan’s presence is intense. Time has stopped. A sparse, square room, the writing studio remains as she left it: a low table covered with a makeshift cardboard top holds her typewriter, glasses case, a sheaf of papers, and a tray of seashells. This ‘unstuffy’, eclectic ensemble sits on top of an old Persian rug, marking the domestic landscape in which Joan, sitting on the floor, wrote her tale of another landscape.

While Mulberry Hill is trapped in time, Hanging Rock is timeless. And, Picnic at Hanging Rock, the bridge between these two worlds, casts its long, rippling shadows across Australia, extending across the globe, going on forever – shaped by the Australian landscape and in turn having shaped it.

Marguerite Johnson is Professor of Classics at The University of Newcastle. She is a writer and academic specialising in the widespread influences of the ancient Mediterranean on post-antiquity. Her focus is on the reception of Greek and Roman cultures in colonial Australia, including literature and art. Marguerite is the author of several scholarly books, numerous articles and chapters, and has also published a series of short stories. She is a regular contributor to The Conversation and the ABC.

Acknowledgments

Thank you to ABR Patron Emeritus Professor Anne Edwards AO; ABR Editor Peter Rose; Valerie Laycock, Mornington Peninsula Properties Manager, The National Trust of Australia (Victoria); Professor Ian D. Clark, Federation University Australia; and Leni and Kate Johnson.

The ABR Gender Fellowship was generously funded by Emeritus Professor Anne Edwards AO.