Picnic at Hanging Rock. Vintage Classics. Melbourne, Victoria: Penguin Group (Australia), 1967
‘Picnic at Hanging Rock’s author, Joan a Beckett Lindsay, was one of the extended Boyd clan (Victorian artistic royalty) and influenced, like Patrick White, by the various expressions of hermetic mysticism that held sway in the heyday of depth psychology. She had a lifelong fascination with the mystery of the Australian bush (lost-children stories in particular), an especial liking for what she experienced as the otherworldly atmosphere of Hanging Rock, and was much taken by William Ford’s 1875 painting of picnickers at the nineteenth-century holiday location. Those who, like the daughters of Australia’s ruling class from Appleyard College (Braemar House), pass through Woodend on a hot summer’s day en route to Hanging Rock will be rewarded by having read the novel beforehand.
