Time without Clocks: Text Classics

Neither the kitchen clock nor the figured squares of the calendar could measure our first golden summers at Mulberry Hill. They were the timeless clockless summers of a dream.

Joan Lindsay’s charming and evocative autobiography tells the story of her marriage to Sir Daryl Lindsay, of their life in Melbourne in the 1920s and ’30s, of their travels, and above all the gentle world of Mulberry Hill, a house without clocks.

Revealed in this delightful reminiscence is Lindsay’s fascination with the ambiguities of time, seen by some as the key to the mysteries of her masterpiece Picnic at Hanging Rock.

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.

‘The little world Lindsay knew at Mulberry Hill…finds shelter inside the grander one set forth in the mythic symbolism of Picnic at Hanging Rock.’ Sydney Review of Books