Picnic at Hanging Rock

The must-read Australian modern classic

If her terrified cries had been heard by anyone but a wallaby squatting in a clump of bracken a few feet away, the picnic at Hanging Rock might yet have been just another picnic on a summer’s day.


On a cloudless summer day in 1900, a group from Appleyard College for Young Ladies goes for a picnic. In the heat of the afternoon sun, three girls climb through the scrub—and disappear.

Ethereal and enigmatic, Picnic at Hanging Rock has been haunting the Australian imagination for half a century.

Joan Lindsay was born in Melbourne in 1896. Originally trained as a visual artist, she turned to writing after her marriage to Sir Daryl Lindsay in 1922. Her first novel, Through Darkest Pondelayo (1936), was a parody of popular travel books. Her second, Time Without Clocks, wasn’t published until nearly thirty years later; her most famous, Picnic at Hanging Rock, was released in 1967 and made into a film in 1975. She died in 1984.

‘In the seemingly limitless pantheon of gone-girl literature, Picnic at Hanging Rock might take the prize for best setting…It’s a proto-Virgin Suicides, dreamy and haunting, animated by a sense of slightly sickening erotic mystery.’ New Yorker

‘Deliciously horrific.’ Observer

‘Iconic and enigmatic.’ Readings Monthly