Picnic at Hanging Rock (novel)

Picnic at Hanging Rock

First-edition cover
Author	Joan Lindsay
Country	Australia
Language	English
Genre	Historical novel Mystery
Publisher	F. W. Cheshire Penguin (re-print)
Publication date	1967
Media type	Print (hardcover and paperback)
Pages	212 (first printing)
ISBN	(1987 print)

Picnic at Hanging Rock is a 1967 Australian historical novel by Joan Lindsay. Its plot focuses on a group of female students at an Australian women's college in 1900 who inexplicably vanish at Hanging Rock while on a Valentine's Day picnic. In the aftermath of the disappearance, the narrative also explores the outlying effects it has on the community.

Lindsay wrote the novel over a four-week period at her home Mulberry Hill in Baxter, on Victoria's Mornington Peninsula. It was first published in 1967 in Australia by Cheshire Publishing and was released in paperback by Penguin in 1970. The novel sparked critical and public debate due to its ambivalent presentation as a true story, as well as its vague conclusion, and is widely considered to be one of the most important Australian novels of all time. It was adapted into a critically acclaimed film of the same name in 1975 by director Peter Weir.

The novel begins with a brief foreword, which reads:

"Whether Picnic at Hanging Rock is fact or fiction, my readers must decide for themselves. As the fateful picnic took place in the year nineteen hundred, and all the characters who appear in this book are long since dead, it hardly seems important."

At Appleyard College, an upper-class women's private boarding school, a picnic is being planned for the students under the supervision of Mrs. Appleyard, the school's headmistress. The picnic entails a day trip to Hanging Rock in the Mount Macedon area, Victoria, on St. Valentine's Day in 1900. One of the students, Sara, who is in trouble with Mrs. Appleyard, is not allowed to go. Sara's close friend Miranda, who is described as an ethereal girl, goes without her. When they arrive, the students lounge about and eat a lunch. Afterward, Miranda goes to climb the monolith with classmates Edith, Irma, and Marion. The girls' mathematics teacher, Greta McCraw, follows behind them. As they ascend the rock, in a dreamlike episode, Miranda, Marion, and Irma vanish into the rock while Edith watches; she returns to the picnic in hysterics, disoriented and with no memory of what occurred. Miss McCraw is also nowhere to be accounted for. The school scours the rock in search of the girls and their teacher, but they are not found.