ABR GENDER FELLOWSHIP ESSAY
Picnic at Hanging Rock ifty years on
by Marguerite Johnson
Everyone agreed that the day was just right for the picnic
to Hanging Rock – a shimmering summer morning warm
and still …
F
ar from being a limsy, frilly story for women
full of antique charm and middle-class manners,
Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock is a novel of
sharp social observations and nuanced critique; subtle
and sometimes latent sensuality; and layered, intricate
allegory. he ‘shimmering summer morning warm and
still’ brings the opposite to what it promises. Life is
more complex and unstable in Lindsay’s world. Whoever
would have thought that a picnic on Valentine’s Day 1900
would go so horribly wrong for the students and teachers
of Appleyard College, or that the picnickers would return
to the school with three senior girls and one teacher
missing at Hanging Rock?
Of course, the events are not true. he story of Picnic
at Hanging Rock is ictional, no matter how many readers
believe it to be otherwise. Admittedly, my irst reading of
the novel as an adolescent left me convinced the events
described were true. Lost among Lindsay’s police state-
ments, 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 iction, 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 ictional. I am surprised at the grown-ups who re-
sist the iction 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 ifty 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 re-
markable, powerfully inluential, 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, luid,
and contested.
L
indsay’s protagonist is Hanging Rock, the Euro-
pean name for a cluster of gigantean boulders that
forms part of Mount Diogenes in Victoria’s Mac-
edon 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. hrough 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, Taungu-
rung, and Wurundjeri, meant that the initiations had
long since ceased. he last recorded ceremony took
place in 1851.
E S S AY 49
 Records from the mid-1800s include geographical then held an annual picnic at the Rock for the next forty
and geological surveys, accounts of picnics, and reports years, with each return trip accompanied by ghost stories.
of disappearances. When German zoologist and engi- Lindsay was also intrigued by William Ford’s paint-
neer William von Blandowski explored the Macedon ing At the Hanging Rock (1875), purchased by the Na-
Ranges in the 1850s, he documented the Rock’s geo- tional Gallery of Victoria on the recommendation of her
logical features with the occasional romantic lourish. husband, Daryl Lindsay, during his time there as direc-
Images based on his sketches, admittedly with the tor. his oil depicts a decidedly colonial interpretation of
engravers’ artistic licence, show a dramatic, alien and the Australian landscape, including signs that the Lon-
threatening monument. don-born Ford struggled to bond with the bush, which
In 1864, the irst communal picnic was recorded, he rendered in varying shades of khaki. he attempt to
and in 1867 the disappear- understand, indeed to tame,
ance of a three-year-old the landscape is evident in
boy was reported. Mount he story of Picnic at Hanging Ford’s decision to populate
Diogenes and its Hanging Rock is ictional, no matter how many it with ‘civilised’ picnickers.
Rock had begun to garner readers believe otherwise Of course, this fails; the
a reputation as a site not mostly female cast appears
only of joyous days but of out of place in their frocks
devastating mishaps, becoming the backdrop to stories and hats. here is, however, one noticeable picnicker, a
of trauma, disappearance, and homicide, real and im- young woman who brings the only splash of colour to
agined. In 1891, the irst instalment of Ivan Dexter’s the dreary scene; she stands left of centre with her back
serialised novel he Mount Macedon Mystery appeared towards the viewer, adorned in a blue coat and matching
in a New South Wales newspaper. While Dexter’s tale blue hair ribbon, taller than her conversational partner
is one of mundane murder, not metaphysical mayhem, and with long red curls down her back. She is a likely
he shares with Lindsay a need to associate the area with a prototype of Miranda, who alludes to the painting as
chaos inextricably linked to colonial anxiety concerning she traverses the path to the Rock: ‘I remember my
the Australian bush. father showing me a picture of people in old-fashioned
Lindsay (1896–1984) was fascinated by Hanging dresses having a picnic at the Rock. I wish I knew where
Rock. Her own childhood days included holidays in its it was painted.’
vicinity, and she had powerful memories of an early Lindsay repeatedly returns to Hanging Rock in her
Christmas holiday in the Macedon Ranges with the novel, describing and redescribing it, searching for a
pungent smell of pansies, over which she claims to have deinitive meaning. Is Hanging Rock nothing more than
uttered her irst word – ‘beautiful’. Lindsay was four years a mysterious volcanic mass? Is it threatening and destructive?
old, and as Christmas rolled into New Year’s Day 1900 Does it possess a strange sentience that portends malevo-
she was taken on the annual picnic at Hanging Rock. lence or transcendence, or both? Lindsay certainly evokes
While she never elaborated further on this visit to the a sinister aura around the Rock, evident in the description
Rock, she did explain that it was a dream about the site of its irst sighting by the schoolgirls. It appears suddenly
that was the primary inspiration for the novel. As she and startlingly; a massive ‘fortress’, ‘walls gashed with
continued to dream of the Rock, the girls’ story came indigo shade’, ‘immense and formidable’, ‘jagged’. It is
to her in instalments. frightening and unknowable, ‘appearing and disappearing
Another source of inspiration was her connection to with every turn of the road’.
Clyde Girls’ Grammar School, which she attended when Hanging Rock and its surrounds are consistently
it was in East St Kilda. he contrasts that exist between contrasted with the genteel, ‘civilised’ worlds of con-
Clyde Grammar and Appleyard College may initially tained gardens and manicured lawns. his is part of an
suggest that Lindsay’s school was not an inluence on overarching theme of the novel; namely the uneasy and
the dreaded institution in the novel. Yet there are traces contested displacement of one environment by another.
of Clyde in Lindsay’s use of the surname of one of the Of course, such displacement is a lost cause. No matter
teachers, ‘McCraw’, borrowed from Miss Helen McCraw how many rose gardens and picnic spots are created on
who was a general secondary teacher at Clyde during cleared bush and native habitats, the Australian landscape
and after Lindsay’s time there. While far from a math- ights back. Sometimes it wins in the most ruthless of
ematical genius and a strange, masculine woman like ways. Like the bushires that devastate homes and their
her ictional namesake, Helen McCraw was involved in occupants, and the storms that destroy ships and their
leading excursions to Hanging Rock after the school was human cargo, Hanging Rock takes people and vanishes
relocated to Woodend in 1919. he irst venture to the them. Lindsay does a post-colonial turn before the term
Rock in 1919 took place at dusk, with the dishevelled was invented, by continuously referencing the imperial
and overexcited group not returning until midnight. We lack-of-it with the bush. his disjuncture, as Lindsay
do not know whether something strange occurred that implies, borders on hubris. As the sensible mathemat-
evening, although it did enter Clyde legend. he school ics mistress comments: ‘“And this we do for pleasure,”

50 DECEMBER 2017 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

Greta McCraw muttered from the shadows, “so that we uncanny and unfamiliar.
may shortly be at the mercy of venomous snakes and Arguably, Lindsay herself did not understand what it
poisonous ants … how foolish can human creatures be!”’ was she was writing – or trying to communicate – in the
Despite Miss McCraw’s disdain for the bush, the long scenes culminating in the disappearance of the girls.
schoolgirls are excited about a day out. his is hardly For pages, she grapples with the innate mystery of the
surprising, as Appleyard College, an imposing Victorian Rock and its unexplained role in the event. Her befud-
mansion, is a site of sufocation. Furnished with marble dlement at her own mystery is represented in the novel
mantelpieces imported from Italy, heavy Axminster by Michael Fitzhubert’s obsession with the girls’ disap-
carpet, and hemmed in with sculptured lowerbeds and pearance. Fresh from England, and a witness to the girls
manicured lawns, it radiates resistance to youthful making their way through the bush, he is subsequently
exuberance and passion. Lindsay describes the school as haunted by strange dreams, apparitions, and a jumble
‘an architectural anachronism in the Australian bush – a of overwhelming emotions he cannot comprehend or
hopeless misit in time and place … like exotic fungi articulate.
following the inding of gold’. Perhaps in a declaration of defeat in her quest to com-
Miranda is the most enthusiastic of the escapees on municate the incommunicable, Lindsay focuses on the
Valentine’s Day. Her otherness, her other-worldliness, responses of the girls as they edge closer to vanishing –
are symbolised by her ainity with nature. Unlike the very describing, not interpreting. hey are silent, unconscious
English and very European characters in the novel, to anything around them as they continue their ascent.
whose collective motivation here are moments of epiph-
is to re-establish the environ- any; Irma dances – no, she
ments and cultures of the loats – shedding her stock-
old worlds in the new one, ings and shoes, and Marion
Miranda is free of tradition. discards her pencil and note-
The child of a Northern book, symbols of her intellect
Queensland grazier and ‘well and logic. Lindsay refers to
used to the Bush’, she took their enchantment, increas-
as much pleasure in ‘a bunch ing lassitude, and longing
of wildlowers’ pinned to her to sleep, which culminates
coat, ‘as a breathtaking dia- in their strange collapse. Mi-
mond brooch’. As such, she is randa wakes in a transcenden-
ripe for the taking by a brood- tal state of heightened aware-
ing, mysterious geological ness and insight: ‘Every-
formation. It is through Mi- thing, if only you could see
randa that the enigmatic power it clearly enough, is beautiful
of the Rock is principally and complete.’ Edith is the
evoked. Even before the day only one who ights against
begins, Miranda conides to the force of the Rock. Resist-
her roommate Sara Way- ing at every turn, whining and
bourne that she won’t be here proclaiming illness, she is the
much longer, as if she knows hysterical witness to the dis-
she won’t return. appearance of the senior girls
On the day of the picnic, Joan Lindsay c.1920 (via Wikimedia Commons) ‘behind the monolith’. It is
Hanging Rock ‘had been creep- this terror-induced resistance
ing down towards the Picnic Grounds’, as if to call Mi- to the expedition she so desperately pleaded to join, and
randa and her companions to its secrets. he studious and her abhorrence at the increasing power of the Rock,
mathematically gifted Marion Quade requests a closer that ultimately result in Edith’s return to the group of
look ‘to make a few measurements’, and Miranda and the picnickers. Is the ‘the college dunce’ found an unsuitable
beautiful heiress Irma Leopold ask to join her. hey are ofering to the undeclared needs of Hanging Rock?
given approval by their guardians for the day, Miss Mc- Lindsay plays with ideas of European vulnerability in
Craw and the French mistress, Mademoiselle de Poitiers. the Australian bush. his underlying tension is achieved
he three senior girls allow Edith Horton, a younger with ease in the novel because of our familiarity with the
boarder and ‘the college dunce’, to tag along. While Marion motif of the lost white woman or child. his is a colonial
initiated the exploration, Miranda leads it. More than once response to the bush, haunting the literature and art of
she is described as being ahead of her three companions, the nineteenth century, and not without reason. Men also
as if the Rock relies on her to deliver the girls to it. Indeed, got lost, but their stories seemed to lack the pathos to be
it is Miranda who opens the gate into the picnic area at immortalised by artists such as Frederick McCubbin
the beginning of the day, heralding the entry into the (Lindsay’s teacher at the National Gallery of Victoria

E S S AY 51
 School), whose Lost (1886) shows a bereft girl standing and not only the young and beautiful were kept busy
in the bush. McCubbin returned to the theme again in opening their cards this morning. Miranda as usual had
1907 in another Lost, in which a boy is depicted crying a drawer of her wardrobe illed with lace-trimmed pledges
amid a lonely landscape later identiied by his daughter of afection …’
as the bush near Hanging Rock. he languid, luid sensuality of the schoolgirls echoes
But the diferences between McCubbin’s paint- the theme of innocent sexual awakenings characteristic
ings and Lindsay’s novel are as powerful as the simi- of the pastoral genre. he orphan girl, Sara, loves and
larities. His igures wait for rescue, her girls are driven is in love with Miranda, her passion being the subject
onward. For all their sentimentality and artistry, the of the students’ casual gossip. Such romantic, perhaps
paintings lack the mysticism and otherworldliness erotic expressions underlie the world of the school, ex-
of the novel. No sentient rocks or natural forces pull tending to subtle moments of intense reciprocal admira-
the artist’s lost children into the unknown. Unlike tion of female beauty, and tenderness between women.
Miranda and Marion, the two girls who never return Indeed, Lindsay’s exploration of the sexuality of turn-
from Hanging Rock, the audience can at least see Mc- of-the-century women is masterful. Applegate College
Cubbin’s igures – they are tangible, almost touchable, is a sequestered feminine enclave where the girls’ inner
thus rescuable – whereas Lindsay’s have van- lives are comparable to the dreamy, romanticised world
ished, never to be seen of the Greek poet Sappho’s
again. his is emphasised imaginary school for girls,
by the absence of tracks on Is Hanging Rock nothing more than once believed to be nestled
the Rock; as if something a mysterious volcanic mass? away on the island of Les-
or someone obliterated bos. Lindsay, much like Sap-
the girls’ footprints, or as pho, may be somewhat coy
if there were none left in the irst place. Perhaps, as in on details, but ultimately that is the point of such roman-
Irma’s epiphany, they all loated, which is implied in tic friendships; they embody sensuality, mild eroticism,
Edith’s observation that the three girls were ‘hardly burgeoning sexual awareness, but usually not sex. his
walking – sliding over the stones on their bare feet as is not about lesbianism in the modern sense, nor was the
if they were on a drawing-room carpet’. Interestingly, original Sappho for that matter, but rather an intense
when Irma is found alive eight days later, her bare feet female awareness and love of feminine beauty, which
are impeccably clean, without any injuries, despite cuts Lindsay herself understood and experienced. In this
and bruising to her face and hands. way, she deftly avoids anachronistic renditions of same-
sex desires in the late Victorian age, which is quite an

L
ike the gothic grandeur of Appleyard Col- achievement for a novel published in 1967.
lege squatting awkwardly in cleared bushland, he allusions to Sappho are not far-fetched in view
Lindsay’s deference to the pastoral genre is more of Lindsay’s intertextual reference to the English poet
at home in the literature of Europe and Britain. And, Mrs Felicia Hemans. Author of ‘Casabianca’, better
like the college landscape in which the girls and their known as ‘he Boy Stood on the Burning Deck’, He-
teachers are cloistered, the inclusion of the pastoral is mans was also known for her poems on female death,
a device to explore gender and sexuality. particularly suicide, cast in a Classical tenor. ‘he Last
In Picnic at Hanging Rock, the pastoral manifests in Song of Sappho’ is typical of such works, and chronicles
all its Classical glory, reminiscent of the Greek Golden the overdone, apocryphal story of the broken-hearted
Age, complete with virgins in the wilderness, mythical poet’s suicidal leap of the Leucadian Clif. Lindsay men-
allusions, a pervading sense of the mystical, and a dis- tions Hemans in a strange scene of incorrect referencing,
placement of time and space. Even the ‘misty summit suggestive of unhinged behaviour, when the head-
of Mount Macedon rising up’ renders it an Australian mistress, Mrs Appleyard, and Sara lock horns. Sara is
Mount Olympus. And as Greece’s highest mountain was prevented from attending the picnic due to her failure to
once home to ancient gods, Hanging Rock, towering at recite Longfellow’s ‘he Wreck of the Hesperus’ the day
its peak at 718 meters above sea level, houses supernatu- before. Her punishment entails sitting in the schoolroom
ral forces hidden from the uninitiated. on Valentine’s Day ‘committing the hated masterpiece
Per the literary rules of pastoral, women are young, to memory’. While Sara is aware of the task at hand,
beautiful, and on the brink of sexual awakening. Lindsay Mrs Appleyard is clearly confused: ‘You little ignoramus!
establishes the sensuality of the nascent sexuality of her girls Evidently you don’t know that Mrs Felicia Hemans is
through Miranda, whose desirability and inherent charm considered one of the inest of our English poets!’ Mrs
are symbolised by the meaning of her name; from the Lat- Appleyard’s conlation of Longfellow’s ‘he Wreck of
in, ‘she who must be marvelled at’. Her pre-eminence as the Hesperus’ with Hemans’s ‘he Boy Stood on the
the embodiment of Venus is introduced early in the nov- Burning Deck’ is a complex intertextual game on Lind-
el with the reference to Valentine’s Day and its eponym- say’s part. he headmistress’s error may denote nothing
ous patron: ‘Saint Valentine is impartial in his favours, more than a tenuous grasp on literature, which ironically

52 DECEMBER 2017 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

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 of clifs, 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: ‘hus 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 at-
tended to the boarders’ wardrobes, was bustling about
in a fever of delighted anticipation.’
his 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.he girl’s voluptuous
little breasts, her dimples, full red lips, naughty black eyes
and glossy black ringlets, were a continual source of aes-
thetic 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 lagons, 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 lagons’, ever the subject of the erotic
gaze. It is also Mademoiselle’s keen eye for artistic com-
parisons that casts Miranda as ‘a Botticelli angel from the
Uizi’, one of the novel’s most famous similes. Of course,
this comparison is of-kilter. Tired, dozing, perhaps over-
whelmed by the girl or simply forgetful of her cultural
touchstones, Mademoiselle conlates the surfeit of Eu-
ropean angels with Botticelli’s Venus. Much later in the
novel, Lindsay clariies 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 lying away. he vision casts
Miranda as Botticelli’s Venus, who is depicted emerging
from a clamshell. he swan, Venus’s sacred bird, further
connects the girl to the goddess. In Peter Weir’s 1975
ilm, the scene shows Mademoiselle resting a book on
her lap, open at a page showing he Birth of Venus,
simultaneously illustrating and correcting the school-
mistress’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 iancé
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 of adult delights’ as
the carriage takes its passengers through the village to
the picnic site. his reference to ‘adult delights’ suggests
freedom, and also a less romantic, less idealised sensual-
ity; alluding to expressions of illicit desire aforded by
remote settings. he observation, brief and casual, adds
a knowing, unsettling element to the narrative; a presage
of the prurient theories surrounding the disappearances.
he 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,
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E S S AY 53
 and murder. Gossip travels quickly, indiferent to the
rigid class-based categories that maintain a stufy social
order in the region. When Irma is found alive, Lindsay
chronicles the inherent anxieties of Australian readers an-
ticipating revelations of rape. here are whispers of Irma’s
missing corset, politely kept from the police, but ‘the body’
of the living girl is conirmed to be ‘unblemished and
virginal’. However, this does not stop speculation about
the fate of Miranda, Marion, and Miss McCraw. When
Edith inally confesses to seeing the mathematics mis-
tress on the Rock, she reluctantly conides that Greta
McCraw was without her skirt, wearing only pantaloons.
he loss of clothing, symbolic of a suspicious sexual en-
counter – 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’. he claim, which he quickly dismisses, comes
from a misogyny, articulated silently in idle musings as
he speaks with the headmistress: ‘hese 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 muled and indirect ways. By adopt-
ing the mannered obliqueness of the age, Lindsay is free
to explore a range of relationships, including those between
men. he 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 Fitzhu-
bert, nephew of Colonel and Mrs Fitzhubert, and Albert
Crundall is their coachman. heir 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 un-
known 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 inex-
plicable 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
igure of Cupid, Saint Valentine’s less threatening com-
panion, Eros was the embodiment of the overwhelming
54 DECEMBER 2017 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW
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. here
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 igure
gracefully clearing the creek and striding of ’. 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 homo-
eroticism, which also has a place in the pastoral tradition.
he 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 ind Miranda (and the others). When Albert sees
Michael, unconscious and beaten by his experience on
the Rock, and remembers the little white lags 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.
P
icnic at Hanging Rock opens with the girls of Ap-
pleyard College ‘luttering about in their holiday
muslins like a lock of excited butterlies’. he
simile references the beauty of feminine adolescence but
also its brevity, and the brevity of life itself. he image
further implies that the girls are fragile and in need of
protection. hroughout the course of the novel, Lindsay
conversely reinforces and destabilises this stereotype of
femininity.
For the most part, Lindsay’s women function inde-
pendently 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 lawed 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.’
he mathematics mistress’s intellectual acumen,
which challenges traditional claims that such qualities be- the élitism of utopian visions of female illumination and
long to men alone, liberates her from the social constraints emancipation. If the reading were adopted, then the novel
of gender. Her eccentric appearance and indiference to explicitly and signiicantly depicts the selection of those
style – ‘coarse greying hair perched like an untidy bird’s deined as ‘special’: Miranda is miraculous, and both Mar-
nest on top of her head’ and an ‘outlandish wardrobe’ ion and Miss McCraw possess extraordinary intellects.
– may suggest she is a bluestocking. She is shown di- It would follow that there is no place for the likes of
recting, contradicting, and dismissing the local coach- Edith or Minnie, one of the school’s domestic staf, or
man, Mr Hussey as she assumes the dominant role even the beautiful and wealthy Irma, who is ultimately
during the picnic. An erstwhile igure of both awe and rejected by whatever mysterious force it is that takes (and
quiet mockery among her keeps) the other three. If the
students, Miss McCraw, strange events on Valen-
who listened to ‘the Music Lindsay plays with ideas of European tine’s Day 1900 mark a new
of the Spheres in her own vulnerability in the Australian bush beginning for Australian
head’, was a ‘brilliant math- women in Picnic at Hanging
ematician – far too brilliant Rock, the world presaged
for her poorly paid job at the College’. Here, Lindsay is not for the ordinary. As Irma becomes increasingly
shows the complexities of gender in 1900; Greta Mc- irritated by Edith, she muses: ‘why was it … that God
Craw has a degree of agency because of her intellect and made some people so plain and disagreeable and others
education, but her full potential is unrealised. his is not beautiful and kind like Miranda’.
just about the limitations of class – all is ‘an accident Lindsay’s muslin-clad schoolgirls are in stark con-
of birth’ – juxtaposed with the optimism inherent in trast to the lives of women in 1967 Australia, a time
female access to education, but also the social restraints of radical change and reform that arguably laid the
faced by Australian women in 1900. And while Lindsay foundations of the Whitlam government ive years later.
realises that education can be a means of escape from A major referendum resulted in the recognition of Aus-
marriage and motherhood, the reality is that the pupils tralia’s First Nation Peoples as citizens, although it took
of Appleyard College are being prepared, ultimately, to several more years before any signiicant changes began
assume their allotted role in life. to take efect. he year also heralded the federal govern-
But this reality is not something Lindsay blithely ac- ment’s announcement that it would not ban the con-
cepts; her protestations can be detected in the symbolic traceptive pill. Women actively protested the Vietnam
use of clothing (and its shedding) in the novel. Lindsay War; lobbied governments for equal rights in marriage,
protests the restrictive attire of her characters, describ- the workplace, education, politics, sport, and the arts.
ing the girls as ‘[i]nsulated from natural contacts with Although Lindsay wrote Picnic at Hanging Rock at
earth, air and sunlight, by corsets pressing on the solar a time when many victories had been won for women,
plexus, by voluminous petticoats, cotton stockings and and in a decade of advances in liberation, she appears to
kid boots’. Likewise, Irma complains: ‘Whoever invented have missed most of the action. It may not be an exagger-
female fashions for nineteen hundred should be made to ation to suggest that Lindsay was indiferent to women’s
walk through bracken fern in three layers of petticoats.’ rights, not out of any antagonism for the movement but
Appropriately, when Irma experiences the uncanny pow- because she did not perceive herself as needing feminism.
er of the Rock, which is liberating as well as frightening, She was the child of a privileged Melbourne family.
she does so without gloves, shoes, stockings, and corset. Her mother, Anne Sophie Hamilton, a gifted pianist,
It may be argued that Lindsay’s fascination with grew up in Dublin Castle where her father, Sir Robert
mysticism, which she explicitly aligns with the feminine, Hamilton served as under-secretary for Ireland, and later
contributes to the muting of feminism in the novel. became governor of Tasmania. Lindsay’s father, heyre
Mysticism is partly expressed through the theme of à Beckett Weigall, Australian-born, was a King’s Counsel.
liminality. he event occurs on Valentine’s Day, a time Lindsay was cherished, well-educated, encouraged to
when, according to Lindsay’s friend, Phillip Adams, pursue her artistic talents, and to travel overseas.
she believed ‘the commonplace [is] ... overwhelmed by Yet, as with many aspects of her life, Lindsay’s fem-
the extraordinary’. It is also a millennial year, a time inism – or lack thereof – may not be quite so clear-cut.
characterised by the uncanny and the foreboding as well he major clue to this mystery, like so much else, lies in
as the anticipated and optimistic. And while this focus the novel. hroughout Picnic at Hanging Rock, Lindsay is
on a world betwixt and between may suggest that 1900 damning of the academic deicits of Appleyard College
symbolically marks a new epoch for Australian women, and the lack of compassion of its headmistress. Despite
with Miranda, Marion, and Miss McCraw ultimately Mrs Appleyard’s commercially driven promotion of the
entering an enlightened space, such a reading is prob- scholastic merits of her College for Young Ladies, she is
lematic. his is not only because it may be over-interpre- indiferent to the reforms of the female curriculum of the
tation, or that female agency via mysticism is more dis- Victorian era. She barely provides anything resembling
empowering than liberating, but because it also implies instruction in the more traditional skills of feminine

E S S AY 55
 accomplishment. Indeed, besides the brilliant Marion
Quade it would be highly unlikely that any graduate of
the school would have met the matriculation require-
ments 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 educa-
tion at Clyde, Appleyard College is a sham. his contrast,
and the intense anxiety that Lindsay evokes in her de-
scriptions of the ictional school, may be the unexpected
feminist twist in the novel. he stiling, unimaginative,
unacademic, rigid, and sometimes cruel school environ-
ment, with its obsession with marriage – for the girls,
for Mademoiselle de Poitiers – symbolises a powerful
lack of freedom that the self-identiied libertine would
have found an anathema. From a free, somewhat bo-
hemian family, and well-educated, her depiction of the
school may be a powerful reminder in 1967 of those un-
acceptable 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
Hanging Rock, 2017 (photograph by Kate Johnson)
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 indi-
rectly relects on the beneits aforded 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 oice, without family. In the
early part of the autobiography, Lindsay blithely depicts
herself as unit for the traditional role of wife; she can-
not cook and has no interest in housekeeping. Instead,
she works at her art and writing with Daryl, the two of
56 DECEMBER 2017 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW
them focusing on creativity, entertaining and being at
the heart of Melbourne’s cultural élite. Far from disap-
pointing 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, mu-
sic, literature, family, friends, and her husband. It seems
to be a blessed existence. However, as with much of Lind-
say’s public persona, this is a stringently edited version
of a life constructed for public reading. his 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. hus, 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 leeting
interviews – during which she regularly and
tantalisingly would state that ‘something did
happen’ – are essentially all we have.
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. he scene is never varied by so much
as the falling of a leaf or the light 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. heir joys
and agonies are forever new.
W
e have one additional insight into
the mystery of Picnic at Hanging
Rock, the much discussed and some-
times rejected inal chapter.
he Secret of Hanging Rock, chapter eighteen
of the original novel, was published posthu-
mously 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). hus, parts of chapter three
read complicatedly and chapter eighteen repeats pas-
sages from it.
he 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 beauti-
ful but ultimately unextraordinary Irma. She cannot
understand or participate in the complete experience
of that Valentine’s Day, and is inally left behind. As re-
counted in the strange images and metaphors of chapter
three, chapter eighteen conirms that the Rock pulls
Miranda and Marion into it, pulling them ‘like a tide’,
pulling them ‘inside out’. he mystery of Miss McCraw
is also solved in the most fantastical of ways with her
manifesting as ‘a clown-like igure dressed in a torn calico
camisole and long calico drawers’. Manic and distressed,
the creature who was once the unlappable 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, un-
less 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 igures, Irma is
(merely) lost, waiting for rescue.
he 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 irst place. he only real mystery lies in Lind-
say’s belief that her iction was fact: ‘I can only say that
for me fact and iction 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 Coun-
cil 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 point-
ing 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 ictional 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 thorough-
ly modern Miranda, moving deiantly through the land-
scape. Like the others, we are drawn in, encouraged to
move forward, onwards, upwards. here 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, inally,
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 ilm, released eight years after the pub-
lication of the novel, made use of Hanging Rock and
the Macedon Ranges, augmenting the region’s ictional
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.
he ripples continue. he novel has been adapted by
playwrights for both dramatic and musical theatre, in-
cluding Tom Wright’s version, which premièred in 2016.
Ursula Dubosarsky’s young adult novel he Golden Day
(2011) was inspired by Picnic at Hanging Rock. A mini-
series has also been scheduled for release in 2018. As the
miniseries garners media coverage, intensiied by the nov-
el’s iftieth 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 iction is fact.
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 coloni-
al-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 pres-
ence 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 type-
writer, glasses case, a sheaf of papers, and a tray of sea-
shells. his ‘unstufy’, eclectic ensemble sits on top of an
old Persian rug, marking the domestic landscape in
which Joan, sitting on the loor, 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 shad-
ows across Australia, extending across the globe, going
on forever – shaped by the Australian landscape and in
turn having shaped it. g
Marguerite Johnson is Professor of Classics at he Uni-
versity of Newcastle. She is a writer and academic special-
ising in the widespread inluences of the ancient Medi-
terranean on post-antiquity. Her focus is on the recep-
tion 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 he Conversation and the
ABC. ❖
Acknowledgments
hank you to ABR Patron Emeritus Professor Anne
Edwards AO; ABR Editor Peter Rose; Valerie Lay-
cock, Mornington Peninsula Properties Manager,
he National Trust of Australia (Victoria); Professor
Ian D. Clark, Federation University Australia; and Leni
and Kate Johnson.
he ABR Gender Fellowship was generously funded
by Emeritus Professor Anne Edwards AO.
E S S AY 57