Picnic at Hanging Rock
Encyclopedia
Picnic at Hanging Rock is a 1967 drama and mystery novel by Australian author Joan Lindsay
Joan Lindsay
Joan Lindsay, Lady Lindsay was an Australian author, best known for her "ambiguous and intriguing" novel Picnic at Hanging Rock.-Life:...

. She wrote it over a four-week period at her home Mulberry Hill in Baxter
Baxter, Victoria
Baxter is a township and rural locality in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, beyond the urban area. Its Local Government Area is the Shire of Mornington Peninsula...

, on Victoria's Mornington Peninsula
Mornington Peninsula
The Mornington Peninsula is a peninsula located south-east of Melbourne in Victoria, Australia. It is surrounded by Port Phillip to the west, Western Port to the east and Bass Strait to the south, and is connected to the mainland in the north. Geographically, the peninsula begins its protrusion...

. It was first published in 1967 in Australia by Cheshire Publishing and was released in paperback by Penguin
Penguin Books
Penguin Books is a publisher founded in 1935 by Sir Allen Lane and V.K. Krishna Menon. Penguin revolutionised publishing in the 1930s through its high quality, inexpensive paperbacks, sold through Woolworths and other high street stores for sixpence. Penguin's success demonstrated that large...

 in 1970. The plot focuses on a group of girls at an Australian women's college
Women's college
Women's colleges in higher education are undergraduate, bachelor's degree-granting institutions, often liberal arts colleges, whose student populations are composed exclusively or almost exclusively of women...

 in the year 1900 who vanish during a Valentine's Day
Valentine's Day
Saint Valentine's Day, commonly shortened to Valentine's Day, is an annual commemoration held on February 14 celebrating love and affection between intimate companions. The day is named after one or more early Christian martyrs named Saint Valentine, and was established by Pope Gelasius I in 496...

 picnic at the site of an enormous rock formation. The novel is often discussed and debated due to its ambiguous ending.

The rock formation featured in the story, Hanging Rock
Hanging Rock, Victoria
Hanging Rock , in Central Victoria, Australia, is a distinctive geological formation, 718m above sea level on the plain between the two small townships of Newham and Hesket, approximately 70 km north-west of Melbourne and a few kilometres north of Mount Macedon, a former volcano...

, is a geological formation located in Victoria, Australia. The novel was adapted into a film of the same name
Picnic at Hanging Rock (film)
Picnic at Hanging Rock is a 1975 Australian feature film directed by Peter Weir and starring Anne-Louise Lambert, Helen Morse, Rachel Roberts and Vivean Gray. The film is adapted from the novel of the same name, by author Joan Lindsay....

 in 1975 by director Peter Weir
Peter Weir
Peter Lindsay Weir, AM is an Australian film director. After playing a leading role in the Australian New Wave cinema with his films such as Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Last Wave and Gallipoli, Weir directed a diverse group of American and international films—many of them major box office...

.

Synopsis

Picnic at Hanging Rock centers around a trip by a party of girls from Appleyard College, a fictitious upper class private boarding school, who travel to Hanging Rock in the Mount Macedon
Mount Macedon, Victoria
Mount Macedon is a small town located northwest of Melbourne in the Australian state of Victoria. It is situated on the side of the mountain of the same name, known as Geboor by the indigenous Wurundjeri people, which rises to above sea level. At the 2006 census, Mount Macedon had a population...

 area, Victoria, for a picnic on Valentine's Day 1900. The excursion ends in tragedy when three of the girls, and later one of their teachers, mysteriously vanish while climbing the rock. No reason for their disappearance is ever given, and one of the missing girls who is later found has no memory of what has happened to her companions. A fourth girl who also climbed the rock with the group is of little help in solving the mystery, having returned in hysterics for reasons she cannot explain.

The disappearances provoke much local concern and international sensation with sexual molestation, abduction and murder being high on the list of possible outcomes. Several organized searches of the picnic grounds and the area surrounding the rock itself turn up nothing. Meanwhile the students, teachers and staff of the college, as well as members of the community, grapple with the riddle-like events. A young man on a private search locates one of the missing girls, but is himself found in an unexplained daze – yet another victim of the rock. Concerned parents begin withdrawing their daughters from the formerly prestigious college and several of the staff, including the headmistress, either resign or meet with tragic ends. We are told that both the College, and the Woodend Police Station where records of the investigation were kept, are destroyed by fire shortly afterwards.

The mystery

The unsolvable mystery of the disappearances was arguably the key to the success of both the book and the subsequent film. This aroused enough lasting public interest that in 1980 a book of hypothetical solutions (by Yvonne Rousseau) was published, called The Murders at Hanging Rock.

In fact, Lindsay's original draft included a final chapter in which the mystery was resolved. At her editor's suggestion, Lindsay removed it prior to publication. Chapter Eighteen, as it is known, was published posthumously in 1987 as The Secret of Hanging Rock
The Secret of Hanging Rock
The Secret of Hanging Rock is a previously unpublished chapter of Joan Lindsay's 1967 book Picnic at Hanging Rock and contains the "solution" to the mystery in that book...

by Angus & Robertson Publishing.

The novel is written in the form of a false document
False document
A false document is a literary technique employed to create verisimilitude in a work of fiction. By inventing and inserting documents that appear to be factual, an author tries to create a sense of authenticity beyond the normal and expected suspension of disbelief for a work of art...

, implying that it is based on a true story, and even begins and ends with a pseudo-historical prologue and epilogue, adding to the overall feeling of mystery. However, while the geological feature, Hanging Rock, and the several towns mentioned are actual places near Mount Macedon
Mount Macedon, Victoria
Mount Macedon is a small town located northwest of Melbourne in the Australian state of Victoria. It is situated on the side of the mountain of the same name, known as Geboor by the indigenous Wurundjeri people, which rises to above sea level. At the 2006 census, Mount Macedon had a population...

, the story is entirely fictional. Lindsay had done little to dispel the myth that the story is based on truth, in many interviews either refusing to confirm it was entirely fiction, or hinting that parts of the book were fictitious, and others were not. Valentine's Day, 14 February 1900 was a Wednesday, not a Saturday as depicted in the story. All attempts by enthusiastic readers to find historical evidence of the event, characters, or even Appleyard College, have proved fruitless.

Appleyard College was to some extent based on Clyde Girls' Grammar School at East St Kilda
St Kilda East, Victoria
St Kilda East is a suburb in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, 6 km south-east of Melbourne's central business district. It is located within the Local Government Areas of the City of Glen Eira and the City of Port Phillip. At the 2006 Census, it had a population of 12,188.St Kilda East is one...

, Melbourne, which Joan Lindsay attended as a day-girl while in her teens. Incidentally, in 1919 this school was transferred to the town of Woodend, Victoria
Woodend, Victoria
Woodend is a small town in Victoria, Australia. The town is in the Shire of Macedon Ranges Local government area. It is bypassed to the east and north by the Calder Freeway and is located about halfway between Melbourne and Bendigo...

, about 8 km southwest of Hanging Rock. The book suggests that the fictional site of Appleyard College, given its eastward view of Mount Macedon on the Bendigo-Melbourne Road, might have been on the western side of Calder Highway/Black Forest Drive (C792), about 2–4 km south of Woodend.

A far more detailed synopsis of the story is given in the main entry for the film version.

Film

The first film adaptation of the book was a short by Tony Ingram, a fourteen-year-old filmmaker, who got permission from Joan Lindsay to adapt her book as The Day of Saint Valentine. However, only about ten minutes of footage was filmed before the rights were optioned to Peter Weir
Peter Weir
Peter Lindsay Weir, AM is an Australian film director. After playing a leading role in the Australian New Wave cinema with his films such as Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Last Wave and Gallipoli, Weir directed a diverse group of American and international films—many of them major box office...

 for his more famous feature-length version, and the production was permanently shelved. The completed footage is included on some DVD releases of Weir's film.

The feature film version of Picnic at Hanging Rock premiered at the Hindley Cinema Complex in Adelaide
Adelaide
Adelaide is the capital city of South Australia and the fifth-largest city in Australia. Adelaide has an estimated population of more than 1.2 million...

 on 8 August 1975. It became an early film of the Australian New Wave
Australian New Wave
The Australian New Wave was an era of resurgence in worldwide popularity of Australian cinema...

and is arguably Australia's first international hit film.

Stage

Picnic at Hanging Rock was adapted by playwright Laura Annawyn Shamas in 1987 and published by Dramatic Publishing Company. Subsequently, it has had many productions in the US, Canada, and Australia. There have also been musical adaptations of the novel.

A stage-musical adaptation, with book, music, and lyrics by Daniel Zaitchik, is scheduled to open in New York City in the fall of 2012. The musical received a 2007 staged reading at New York's Lincoln Center, and further workshop development at the 2009 O'Neill Theater Center National Music Theater Conference.

Radio

In 2010, BBC Radio 4 broadcast a radio adaptation.The cast included: Simon Burke, Penny Downie, Anna Skellern and Andi Snelling.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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