Joan Lindsay (1896 – 1984) was born into a prominent artistic dynasty – the Boyds – and married into another. Her husband was the artist and inaugural president the National Trust in Victoria Sir Daryl Lindsay.
Initially intent on a career in art, she studied at the National Gallery of Victoria School between 1916 and 1920 and, although she painted throughout her life, writing was her main creative pursuit.
Lindsay’s fame as an author culminated with Picnic at Hanging Rock. Written in only four weeks at her home, Mulberry Hill, Baxter, on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula. It was first published in 1967. Set on Valentine’s Day in 1900, it tells of a group of students at an Australian girl's boarding school who vanish whilst visiting Hanging Rock, and the effects the disappearances have on the school and the local community. The novel became part of the Australian literary canon and was made into an iconic Australian film in 1975.
Biography of Joan Lindsay: Australian Dictionary of Biography
List of main characters from the novel - For information on each character visit Lit Charts
Mistresses
Students
Other College Staff
See novel for list of characters
Visit Lit charts for detailed information on the Themes
At the Hanging Rock by William Ford (1875, National Gallery of Victoria) may have inspired Lindsay’s novel. CREDIT:WILLIAM FORD
National Film and Sound Archive of Australia - Picnic at Hanging Rock Collection
Fog is a sort of corollary to darkness. Fog not only obscures but distorts: it gives one just enough information to begin making decisions but no way to judge the accuracy of that information, which often ends up being wrong. Marlow’s steamer is caught in the fog, meaning that he has no idea where he’s going and no idea whether peril or open water lies ahead.
The “whited sepulchre” is probably Brussels, where the Company’s headquarters are located. A sepulchre implies death and confinement, and indeed Europe is the origin of the colonial enterprises that bring death to white men and to their colonial subjects; it is also governed by a set of reified social principles that both enable cruelty, dehumanization, and evil and prohibit change. The phrase “whited sepulchre” comes from the biblical Book of Matthew. In the passage, Matthew describes “whited sepulchres” as something beautiful on the outside but containing horrors within (the bodies of the dead); thus, the image is appropriate for Brussels, given the hypocritical Belgian rhetoric about imperialism’s civilizing mission. (Belgian colonies, particularly the Congo, were notorious for the violence perpetuated against the natives.)
Both Kurtz’s Intended and his African mistress function as blank slates upon which the values and the wealth of their respective societies can be displayed. Marlow frequently claims that women are the keepers of naïve illusions; although this sounds condemnatory, such a role is in fact crucial, as these naïve illusions are at the root of the social fictions that justify economic enterprise and colonial expansion. In return, the women are the beneficiaries of much of the resulting wealth, and they become objects upon which men can display their own success and status.
The Congo River is the key to Africa for Europeans. It allows them access to the center of the continent without having to physically cross it; in other words, it allows the white man to remain always separate or outside. Africa is thus reduced to a series of two-dimensional scenes that flash by Marlow’s steamer as he travels upriver. The river also seems to want to expel Europeans from Africa altogether: its current makes travel upriver slow and difficult, but the flow of water makes travel downriver, back toward “civilization,” rapid and seemingly inevitable. Marlow’s struggles with the river as he travels upstream toward Kurtz reflect his struggles to understand the situation in which he has found himself. The ease with which he journeys back downstream, on the other hand, mirrors his acquiescence to Kurtz and his “choice of nightmares.”
Darkness is everywhere in Heart of Darkness. But the novella tweaks the conventional idea of white as good and dark as evil. Evil and good don't really apply to Heart of Darkness, because everyone in the novella is somehow complicit in the atrocities taking place in Africa. Rather, whiteness, especially in the form of the white fog that surrounds the steamship, symbolizes blindness. The dark is symbolized by the huge and inscrutable African jungle, and is associated with the unknowable and primitive heart of all men.
Marlow gains a great deal of information by watching the world around him and by overhearing others’ conversations, as when he listens from the deck of the wrecked steamer to the manager of the Central Station and his uncle discussing Kurtz and the Russian trader. This phenomenon speaks to the impossibility of direct communication between individuals: information must come as the result of chance observation and astute interpretation. Words themselves fail to capture meaning adequately, and thus they must be taken in the context of their utterance. Another good example of this is Marlow’s conversation with the brickmaker, during which Marlow is able to figure out a good deal more than simply what the man has to say.
Comparisons between interiors and exteriors pervade Heart of Darkness. As the narrator states at the beginning of the text, Marlow is more interested in surfaces, in the surrounding aura of a thing rather than in any hidden nugget of meaning deep within the thing itself. This inverts the usual hierarchy of meaning: normally one seeks the deep message or hidden truth. The priority placed on observation demonstrates that penetrating to the interior of an idea or a person is impossible in this world. Thus, Marlow is confronted with a series of exteriors and surfaces—the river’s banks, the forest walls around the station, Kurtz’s broad forehead—that he must interpret. These exteriors are all the material he is given, and they provide him with perhaps a more profound source of knowledge than any falsely constructed interior “kernel.”
Darkness is important enough conceptually to be part of the book’s title. However, it is difficult to discern exactly what it might mean, given that absolutely everything in the book is cloaked in darkness. Africa, England, and Brussels are all described as gloomy and somehow dark, even if the sun is shining brightly. Darkness thus seems to operate metaphorically and existentially rather than specifically. Darkness is the inability to see: this may sound simple, but as a description of the human condition it has profound implications. Failing to see another human being means failing to understand that individual and failing to establish any sort of sympathetic communion with him or her.
It was a cloudless summer day in the year nineteen hundred.
Everyone at Appleyard College for Young Ladies agreed it was just right for a picnic at Hanging Rock. After lunch, a group of three of the girls climbed into the blaze of the afternoon sun, pressing on through the scrub into the shadows of Hanging Rock. Further, higher, till at last they disappeared.
They never returned.
Why the lost daughters of Picnic at Hanging Rock still haunt us
As the new TV adaption of Picnic at Hanging Rock premieres, the story still draws us in with enduring themes of female empowerment, lost children and the deep mystery of Australia’s brutal landscape
By Dr Diana Sandars, University of Melbourne
The extraordinary story behind Picnic at Hanging Rock - Sydney Morning Herald - published 3 years ago on the 50th anniversary of artist and novelist Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, Janelle McCulloch tells the story of its author, its genesis and the remarkable film that followed.
Picnic at Hanging Rock: A mystery still unsolved - The Daily Telegraph - On the 50th anniversary of the publication of the famous Australian novel, new research uncovers historical evidence suggesting the story might have been true all along.