Dave Schaafsma's Reviews > Picnic at Hanging Rock

11/9/24: Reread for Fall 2024 Ghosts class and liked it this third time even more. Joan Lindsay was not one of the great writers of all time, but this book has legs as a mystery washed in supernatural ambiguity that leaves you offering more questions than answers.

Update 11/28/23: I just reread this book with my ghosts class, and liked it even better the second time.

8/25/23, original review, somewhat amended: I saw again Peter Weir's film based on this book, and liked it very much, filled with romanticized langorous, ethereal girls in white, symbolized by the--as in the book--appearance of swans throughout. An unknowable mystery. Then things seems to slowly fall apart. . . . but no, I have not seen the 2018 TV series yet. Would like to see at least some of it for a contemporary reading of the story.

Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967) was published by Australian author and artist Joan Lindsay at the age of 70, her most celebrated achievement, its reputation enhanced by Peter Weir’s (1975) adapted film. Lindsay went to a private girls’ school, and she sets her novel on Valentine’s Day, 1900, when a group of twenty girls and two governesses from the Appleyard College for Girls have a picnic at Hanging Rock.

The novel, that Lindsay says was in part inspired by Henry James’s Turn of the Screw, involves the mysterious disappearance of four girls and one of their governesses as they climbed to get a closer look at the peak. The story, that opens on Valentine’s Day, has undercurrents of eroticism and the supernatural. Some of it is homo-erotic, some of it is hetero-erotic--there are subtle suggestions of intense connections and crushes between and among the girls, and two young men who watch the girls cross a stream to make their ascent are also part of the story.

“At every step the prospect ahead grew more enchanting with added detail of crenellated crags and lichen-patterned stone. Now a mountain laurel glossy above the dogwood's dusty silver leaves, now a dark slit between two rocks where maidenhair fern trembled like green lace.”

So, right, Hanging Rock operates (as peaks will sometimes seem) as a kind of phallic and then also--those slits and maidenhair-sapphic symbol in this undercurrent of desire, though you can see this in photographs of the Rock (well, see below for the wikipedia page, but none of these work as well as the peaks Weir chooses for his Hanging Rock images). The final image is almost too on the. . . nose? peak? as a symbolic image in conjunction with the Headmistress and her eighteen whalebone corset stays.

Of the Headmistress: “Born fifty-seven years ago in a suburban wilderness of smoke-grimed bricks, she knew no more of Nature than a scarecrow rigid on a broomstick above a field of waving corn. She who had lived so close to the little forest on the Bendigo Road had never felt the short wiry grass underfoot.”

As a book that seems to me consistent at times with the late back-to-nature sixties when it was written, we see in every paragraph the natural world--and Hanging Rock possibly the same for a “million” years--juxtaposed with the frilly yet constricting layers of clothing the girls wear almost as a defense against the naked, pulsing world the school protects them from.

“Insulated from natural contacts with earth, air and sunlight, by corsets pressing on the solar plexus, by voluminous petticoats, cotton stockings and kid boots, the drowsy well-fed girls lounging in the shade were no more a part of their environment than figures in a photograph album, arbitrarily posed against a backcloth of cork rocks and cardboard trees.”

Our being cut off from nature is a central point of the book:

“The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!”--Wordsworth

The supernatural elements are few and sparely shared--the coachman’s watch has stopped at 12 when they get to the picnic grounds, and hey, so has the watch of one of the governesses! How strange! We learn much of human time versus millions of years of natural time. Ignore it or disconnect yourself from it at your peril! The uncanny is present in this tale, as the house (maybe I should say this is a spoiler alert for a book fifty years old?) and the Appleyard (such a wholesome name, with healthy fruit!) College itself crumbles (and yes, there is a touch of the gothic in this tale, The Fall of the House of Usher is referenced here).

What gets referred to as the “College Mystery” "pattern" expands--as one expects--as parents remove their girls from the school, as employees quit, and as a steady stream of dire (but not terribly improbable) events happen. The story tacks back and forth between the two men who are involved in the search and the college (and I know what you're already thinking, amateur sleuths, but most of what happens operates in the unknown, sorry).

Lindsay wrote the book as historical fiction with a documentary feel to it, with pseudo-documents from the case, excerpts from newspapers, police interview transcripts, but thousands of people (embracing fake news) asked her until her death if the novel was based on actual events. She was coy about it, refusing to answer directly. I was reminded of tales related to alien abduction (one theory that has attached itself to the story), the Bermuda Triangle, The Loch Ness Monster and there's a reference to a ship mystery, The Mary Celeste, in the very last line. Lindsay actually wrote a last chapter that explained much of the mystery away, but her editors wisely talked her out of it. There have been many subsequent publications trying to “get at the truth” of what happened there at the Rock.

And yes, because I am using this book for a course on liminal spaces and ghosts--there is a ghost, and appearances of the dead in dreams--lucid dreaming in one case--and there are other metaphorical ghosts to consider as the tale proceeds. The missing girls themselves "haunt" the school and the living.

Odd that the author Joan Lindsay would barely survive a car crash less than two years after the publication of her book . . . the revenge of the novel? Mysterious and strange: mwah ha ha! It has the cast of horror, actually, finally.

I thought it was terrific and highly recommend it.

Ps: Two good student observations: 1) one student mentions the resemblance in this book to The Ice Castle, which we also had read, where a girl wanders off into the natural world as the Appleyard girls do, and 2) a connection between these ineffable girls and Jefferey Eugenides's The Virgin Suicides. We can/will never know these girls!

Hanging Rock, Australia, Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanging...

Trailer for Peter Weir film (1975):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWqCH...

A statue of Miranda at Hanging Rock, Victoria (right! a statue of a lost fictional character to further encourage the notion that there were actually girls lost there!):

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...