Sunday book pick: A case of the unknowable in the famous 1967 mystery novel ‘Picnic at Hanging Rock’

“Listen all of you! They’re dead…dead. Miranda and Marion and Miss McCraw. All dead as doornails in a nasty old cave full of bats on the Hanging Rock.”

A few days ago, while watching Lena Dunham’s independent movie, Tiny Furniture, I heard the character played by Jemima Kirke ask Dunham’s character if she’d like to watch Picnic at Hanging Rock. An exciting coincidence, for I was reading Joan Lindsay’s novel at the time.

Lindsay’s 1967 novel about three missing schoolgirls and their governess is an Australian classic. The author uses letters, newspaper reports, and police diaries to frame the story and leaves it to the reader to decide whether it is “fact or fiction”.

There were four

The novel begins on February 14, 1900, on St Valentine’s Day, admittedly the most exciting day at Appleyard College, an all-girls’ boarding school. It is hard to say where the swoon-worthy cards come from but each female member seems to have received them and the premises are overflowing with romantic mementoes. It’s a bright summer day in the Australian countryside, and the schoolgirls are preparing picnic at Hanging Rock, a few million years old volcanic rock formation and a sacred Indigenous site.

The Indigenous peoples are rarely to be found there anymore and it is the perfect setting for...

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