“Everything begins and ends at exactly the right time and place” or so says Joan Lindsay, the author of Picnic at Hanging Rock. She published this novel, her most well-known, in 1967 but the main events of the story take place in the year of 1900. It begins at an all-girls school called Appleyard College in the middle of the Australian bush. These girls come from a variety of English families that are generally wealthy from jobs in the colony, such as being plantation owners. On Saint Valentine’s Day, they take a trip to Hanging Rock, a geologic anomaly that exerts itself by being a place where time is of no importance and the outside world does not exist. It is here that three of the students, Miranda, Marion, and Irma, along with one of their teachers, go missing. Only one body is ever recovered. The bulk of the novel tells of the impact these disappearances have on the college and the land’s inhabitants. By the end, on top of the disappearances, the college has burned, a student is found dead in the gardens, and the headmistress, Mrs. Appleyard, has killed herself.
Lindsay had never disclosed the truth behind her novel. She claimed that the story of the missing girls was inspired by her childhood in Australia, yet many critics have chosen to believe that the story lies somewhere between fact and fiction. Lindsay’s manager, John Taylor, has told of some anecdotes in which Lindsay perceived things that other people cannot see. For instance, he has said that, in 1929, while driving with her husband, Lindsay saw six nuns running wildly and scaling a fence while her husband saw nothing. After this happened, she found out that there used to be a convent in that area, but it had burned down years prior. Because of this possible unreliability of the author, it is up to the reader to establish how much of the book is reality. For the sake of my essay, I will be assuming that the entirety of the book’s events are based on fact, though much of it is presented on a metaphorical level.
The 1875 painting titled, At the Hanging Rock, by William Ford is what gave Lindsay the name for her book and may have been an inspiration to her writing it. It is important to note that, in the painting, the picnickers are not dressed in clothes suitable for the activity or the environment. Also, with no sign of food or water, they are ill-prepared for the day. From these details, it can be concluded that Ford is depicting the English settlers still unaccustomed to their new land after the colonization of Australia.
During the year in which of the novel is set, Australia was still divided into six British colonies. Because of this colonization, there is a feeling of not belonging for the girls that come from English families but were born in Australia. They aren’t natives but they are quite English either. Naturally, they feel both threatened by the land and one with it; it is foreign and not foreign at the same time. They feel an admiration for the landscape, but there is a pervading sense of raw power that consumes them. In one of the first scenes of the girls up on Hanging Rock, Lindsay paints the characters as fragile, little humans in a vague and distant landscape. In a trance-like state, Marion recognizes the other humans, down below, as insignificant as ants. This hugeness of Australia in comparison to the inhabitants shows that much remains a mystery, unclaimed by the people who continue to go about their meaningless lives. But by referring to people below as ants, Marion also separates herself from the other humans.
Using the metaphor of ants, Marion’s philosophical view not only shows the smallness of humans, but also their purposelessness. They wander around this big world feeling superior, but, in the end, their bodies will be reclaimed by the very soil they stand on. People’s lives are fleeting, fickle, could end at any moment, but nature is eternal. This everlasting, all-consuming immensity of nature is also too much for the human mind to comprehend. At this point, even Marion does not truly understand what she is saying. It is my theory that once the girls ascended the Rock, they entered a different realm of consciousness. In this consciousness, the land spoke through Marion and was able to lend a perspective otherwise inaccessible. Even more, by having the girls immediately fall asleep upon reaching the rocky outcropping, Lindsay shows that an attempt to comprehend the grandness of the Australian landscape is all it will ever be: an attempt. Success will never be found in trying to define the earth’s force. The girls tire out quickly because of this; the exhausting enormity of the bush is seemingly endless, and thus, unfathomable for their level of human understanding; their human understanding is still part of them despite also having the wisdom of the Rock in this altered consciousness. Lindsay takes this concept even further by having a lizard lie with a sleeping Marion. This joining of animal and human shows that these Australian girls are just another creature among the rocks, totally under the influence of nature’s changing whims. However, she also shows that this boundary between human and animal life can be crossed. This is represented in the lack of language needed for communication amongst the girls. And, with the girls being from Australia, the land claims them in a way that Appleyard College never will. The college with its English teachings, ideals, and headmistress, is foreign; the girls clearly belong to the land in which they were born. This is not to mention that the schoolgirls – aside from Irma – will become permanently inextricable from Hanging Rock later in the novel.
Going back and examining a sentence of this section further proves the mysterious quality that Hanging Rock exudes. Lindsay writes: “Clumps of rubbery ferns motionless in the pale light cast no shadows upon the carpet of dry grey moss.” This light, coming from the sun, must be in the sky shining down. It is inexplicable, then, that – no matter how pale the light – the ferns do not have a shadow. It is as if the source of light is coming from everywhere, all at once. Since this is not logical, the lack of shadow further proves that nature is an almighty force that cannot be explained by science, or any other methods humans would go about using. Lindsay uses the remote and anomalous geologic location of Hanging Rock to depict humanity’s helplessness compared to the natural world. While alive, the Australian residents are under the control of their environment in much the same way their bodies will belong to the earth when they die: a permanent fixture of the bush.
The girls born in Australia feel the same sense of helplessness, but it is not due to their environment in the sense of its controlling emptiness. It is due to the ideals of Victorian society that is being pushed upon them. With Appleyard College being the perfect embodiment of English teachings, the Rock serves as something other, separate, a respite. It is the part of Australia that remains untouched and uninfluenced by outsiders. Instead, it is the Rock that does the touching and the influencing. On the day of the picnic, “As they climb up to the higher levels, they become more and more aware of their surroundings, and less involved in their own received Victorian subjectivity.” As I have said, they become so engrossed in their surroundings that they share a mental space with the Rock. They are able to connect with the land as no one else can. Unlike their British elders responsible for colonization, the girls can see that Australia should not be controlled by outside peoples. It is a force entirely subject to its own whims. Lindsay gives this insight to their thoughts when she writes, “Everything, if you could only see it clearly enough, like this, is beautiful and complete. Everything has its own perfection.” The land they grew up in is perfect in their eyes. There is nothing the English could do to better it. This is an insightful thing to say considering these girls grew up in Australia in the peak of Victorian imperialism. It would be difficult to break away from the ideals that have conditioned them for all of their lives. Their headmistress, Mrs. Appleyard, the ideal of every English woman is a direct representation of Queen Victoria herself: “With her high-piled pompadour… [she] looked precisely what the parents expected of an English Headmistress.” Yet despite their upbringing and having Mrs. Appleyard as a role model, the girls have a better relationship with the natural world than the oppressive Victorian world that has been a constant imposition on them.
Having grown up in a British colony, the students at Appleyard College, like the native inhabitants of the land both resist and accept the Englishness overtaking the land. A prime example of this in-between of acceptance and resistance is the college building itself. “The sentient house demonstrates that the home or home space can be disruptive in numerous ways, and… the reason for a sentient house’s “unruliness” is part of the complex origin of the house in question.” Although a major setting of the novel, the College also plays the role of an actor:
“Appleyard College was already, in the year nineteen hundred, an architectural anachronism in the Australian bush—a hopeless misfit in time and place. The clumsy two-storey mansion was one of those elaborate houses that sprang up all over Australia like exotic fungi following the finding of gold. Why this particular stretch of flat sparsely wooded country . . . had been selected as a suitable building site, nobody will ever know… To Mrs. Appleyard, newly arrived from England with a considerable nest-egg and letters of introduction to some of the leading Australian families, the mansion, standing well back from the Bendigo Road behind a low stone wall, was immediately impressive.”
Clearly, the house is as foreign as its English inhabitants. It is completely out of place, but for Mrs. Appleyard, this is the perfect setting for her plan to impose England on the Australian bush. It is symbolic of her desire for a life of complete order that cannot be reached on this foreign soil. Her best attempt is shown through the wonderfully maintained garden – with its non-native plants – in the midst of a wild, wooded landscape; an interior full of Victorian furnishings; the strict routine of the students’ daily schedules; and the rigorous curriculum of English literature. Despite the school’s attempt at taming the land, white settlers are not capable of making Australia a second England. This “absence” of the land that the settlers want to occupy is not an absence at all, but a “presence” that exerts itself by undoing all of the settlers supposed progress. They try to conquer a land that they don’t know, only to find out that the environment is a living thing that will not relinquish itself to the English.
This lack of susceptibility causes damage to the colonizers and literal destruction to what they have built. To repeat: by the end of the novel, a young student is found dead in the gardens, Mrs. Appleyard kills herself, and the College goes up in flames. This perceived ugliness that really hits readers at the end of the book eliminates the hard emphasis that has been established to show the stark contrasts of the harsh land around the assumed safety that is the school: nothing is “safe” because none of the land will ever belong to the colonizers despite their best attempts at control. The feeling at the forefront of British imperialism in Australia was one of the land being a “threat to be mastered… an Other to be… appropriated.” The first explorers saw it as a “bountiful gift, an exotic paradise” to be rightfully called theirs, but came to find that “it represented a force that might reduce [them] to madness, melancholia, or despair.” To refer again to the gardens, they require a constant and obsessive care in order to maintain the illusion of security put in place by the British Empire. The pansies and hydrangeas specifically mentioned in the book are not made for the climate; one mistake and they are dead.
The death of the author Joan Lindsay brought about a discovery for readers that will forever alter their perceptions of this novel. All of what I have just said could either be further supported or refuted by what was released. I will look at the latest release in order to prove the points I have already made. After the publication of Picnic at Hanging Rock in 1967, and especially after the release of the Peter Weir film adaptation in 1975, Lindsay received a lot of letters about the ending of the book and film – they asked: what were the fates of the girls? Lindsay responded in an interview that “it’s an extraordinary thing… that people are not content to leave it as a mystery” and “fact and fiction are so closely alike, some of it really happened and some of it didn’t. And to me it all happened – it was all terribly true for me, but I don’t wish to spoil the mystery.” To complicate things further, as requested by Lindsay, her manager released a missing Chapter 18 called The Secret of Hanging Rock upon her death in 1984. The mystery initially intended to be left alone by the author, was both resolved and made even more confusing with the new ending released almost 20 years after the original book. It raises more questions over what is fact, what is fiction, and how either or both of those things relate to reality. So as not to get too deep into the topic of reality and human existence, I will be looking at Chapter 18 and explaining how it can enhance our understanding of Picnic at Hanging Rock as it has already been presented.
Chapter 18 returns to the girls on the Rock and solves the mystery about what happened to them and why their bodies could never be found. The chapter focuses intensely on the landscape – it describes the sky, the air, the animals, etc. in detail – and adds a new layer to our understanding by introducing the concept that time does not change for the girls upon the Rock and Victorian ideals have no place there. Upon the removal of their corsets – a symbol of freedom of the oppressed – the girls throw them over a precipice only for them to never fall on the ground. Instead, they floated on the “windless air” and became “stuck fast in time.” It is not that gravity was messed up in this strange-working land; no, time simply ceased to work in the new realm of consciousness that they entered during their ascent of the Rock. The Rock does not have an internal clock. It has been around long before any humans and the concept of time cannot apply to it when it will continue to exist forever. This line of thinking is captured again in Lindsay’s interview before the release of Chapter 18. She says, “It seems to me always a bit crazy that people measure time by the age of their physical bodies; I don’t think that’s much to do with it.” If time is not measured by the growth and aging of people, it definitely is not measured by a geologic anomaly that will be around until the world ends – if and when that day comes. The girls – along with their teacher – Miss McCraw, whom they encountered on the Rock in this chapter – have difficulty knowing one another’s name. This different realm of consciousness that I have previously referenced revolves around the idea that their mental space – the same mental space as that of the Rock – is characterized by the absence of time. Miss McCraw, whom the girls had just seen at the picnic, becomes a stranger because, to them, the picnic did not just happen. It took place millions of years ago and will take place hundreds of years from then and is still happening all at once because time has no power. Instead, the girls only have the present moment. And once that moment is gone, it does not become the past, it just ceases to exist.
And, as outlandish as this sounds, time works that way for us, too; it is just a matter of perspective. The past cannot influence you if you do not give it a second thought. The future cannot worry you if you are only focused on the present moment. We know, as simple humans, that we don’t live very long lives, but we also know that we can immortalize ourselves through the impact we have on people, the things we write, the music we make. It’s the same thing, but real life. Our lives.
Anyways, the matter of time aside, Chapter 18 continues to unravel the mystery by having the girls merge with the Rock in an absolutely literal sense. I will read you this excerpt because it is the whole reason behind the writing of the chapter. It is the passage that changes everything and provides just as many answers as it does questions:
“It wasn’t a hole in the rocks, nor a hole in the ground. It was a hole in space. About the size of a fully rounded summer moon, coming and going. She saw it as painters and sculptors saw a hole, as a thing in itself, giving shape and significance to other shapes. As a presence, not an absence – a concrete affirmation of truth. She felt that she could go on looking at it forever in wonder and delight, from above, from below, from the other side. It was as solid as the globe, as transparent as an air-bubble. An opening, easily passed through, and yet not concave at all.”
And then, the chapter describes the physical alterations that took place in order to enter this hole. Keep in mind that though very physical, as I said, this is also only able to be facilitated by the altered state of mind that the girls have already entered. In this space where time is lacking, physical form knows no barriers either. It reads:
“The long-boned torso was flattening itself out on the ground beside the hole, deliberately forming itself to the needs of a creature created to creep and burrow under the earth. The thin arms, crossed behind the head with its bright staring eyes, became the pincers of a giant crab that inhabits mud-caked billabongs. Slowly the body dragged itself inch by inch through the hole. First the head vanished: then the shoulder-blades humped together; the frilled pantaloons, the long black sticks of the legs welded together like a tail ending in two black boots.”
Both of these excerpts are a contradiction; logically, they make no sense. And yet, it is the only explanation that fits. The girls didn’t come down from the Rock because they became an inextricable part of it. They transfigure their bodies so as not to conform to English values. Having been born in Australia, it is home to them, not the Victorian English idea of safety and order that is Appleyard College. British imperialists exert no control despite their best efforts at a well-maintained garden: “‘Civilization’ battles with the forces of nature while at the same time the delicate, wind-blown, idealized images of the innocent young girls fuse with those of the majestic bush.” There are secrets to the land that no outsider will ever gain access to, but which the girls will always know due to their innocence in terms of British imperialism as it has attempted to conquer the Australian bush.
With the newfound knowledge of the girls’ permanence in Australia, both despite and due to their disappearance, we can see that the mystery of their fates has become a scar on the land. Without having to say a word, they become a voice for the Australia that is overtaken by Britain. The scar left by their disappearance is a reminder of the injustices implemented by the English. It is a blight on the “ideal” vision of a colonized Australia. Mrs. Appleyard speaks for all British imperialists when she chooses to kill herself rather than face the truth of her failure. Her need for perfect order is interrupted by an event she never accounted for and she knows that there is nothing she can do to fix it. She knows, just as well as anyone else, that a scar is everlasting.
“Interview with Joan Lindsay, author of Picnic at Hanging Rock.” YouTube, uploaded by The Eldritch Archives, 14 Jun 2020, www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGDkFNSoFSQ.
Lindsay, Joan. Picnic at Hanging Rock. Penguin Books, 1977.
Lindsay, Joan. The Secret at Hanging Rock, Angus & Robertson, 1987.
Mayr, Suzette. “‘Misfit’ College: The Sentient House as Thing in Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock.” Antipodes, vol. 31, no. 2, 2017, pp. 393–406. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.13110/antipodes.31.2.0393.
Miller, Rosemarie. “Return to Hanging Rock: Lost Children in a Gothic Landscape”. Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism (2168-1414), 21 (2), p. 152. https://psu.illiad.oclc.org/illiad/pdf/2807385.pdf.
Oyarzun, Eduardo Valls. “‘Tell Us, Irma, Tell Us:’ (Re)fashioning Neo-Victorian Memory in Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967)”, Brno Studies in English, vol. 47, no. 1, 2021, MLA International Bibliography, https://doi.org/10.5817/BSE2021-1-14.
Schaffer, Kay. “Women and the Bush: Australian National Identity and Representations of the Feminine”, Antipodes, vol. 3, no.1, 1989, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41956015.
Taylor, John. “The Invisible Foundation Stone”, The Secret at Hanging Rock, Angus and Robertson, 1987.
“The Australian Colonies, 1787-1901.” The Digital Panopticon, www.digitalpanopticon.org/The_Australian_Colonies,_1787-1901#:~:text=The%201901%20Federation%20and%20the,Territory%2C%20federated%20into%20one%20country.
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