Picnic at Hanging Rock

This mysterious novel, published in 1967, was well-known in Australia before being made famous internationally by Peter Weir’s film of 1975. The plot centres on a school for young ladies in rural Victoria, based on the author’s own alma mater, Clyde Girls’ Grammar School. The mysterious events that happen when the schoolchildren are taken on an outing to Hanging Rock, a nearby geological attraction, occur in February 1900.

The author, Joan Lindsay (née Weigall, born 16 November 1896), spent much of the First World War as a student at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School in Melbourne. As part of her introduction to the novel, she attempts to add to the mystery of the story:
“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.”
The disappearance of several of the girls and one of the members of staff is left unexplained at the end of the novel. The publisher decided that this would make the novel more effective as a mystery (the final chapter of the author’s original text, with partial explanation of what had happened on Hanging Rock, was excluded and suppressed until it was published in 1987).

Set during the Boer War, in which 600 Australians were killed, the author’s concern with disappearance and loss is reflective of the experience of her generation in losing so many (60,000) young men (brothers, cousins, husbands) in the First World War and a further 40,000 (sons, nephews) in the Second World War. The author makes occasional references to the conflict in South Africa:
“The Fitzhuberts and their friends were a smug little community, well served... pleasant comfortable people for whom the current Boer War was the most catastrophic event since the Flood”
“An uneasy silence accompanied the mousse of tongue despite the host’s monologues on rose growing and the outrageous ingratitude of the Boers towards Our Gracious Queen.”

The typical preservation of the room of a son killed in the war is represented in the perceived sanctity of lost Miranda’s belongings in the room she shared with her friend Sara:
“Nothing had been changed since the day of the picnic... Miranda’s soft pretty dresses still hung in orderly rows in the cedar cupboard from which the child invariably averted her eyes. Miranda’s tennis racquet still leaned against the wall exactly as it did when its owner, flushed and radiant, came running upstairs after a game with Marion on a summer evening. The treasured photograph of Miranda in an oval silver frame on the mantelpiece, the bureau still stuffed with Miranda’s Valentines, the dressing table where she had always put a flower in Miranda’s little crystal vase.”