Hazy Memories of Hanging Rock

I have been reading aloud from Picnic at Hanging Rock for three hours when my friend touches the window beside her. I do the same; given the blasting air-conditioning, it seems impossible that the glass could be so hot. But it is – we have left behind the breezes of the coast, and the cooling altitude of the mountains. This is the Australian outback, 400 kilometres south-west of Canberra, and it is 44 degrees in the shade. We pull over and step out, and the heat hits us like a wall.

Alongside the heat, it is the sheer emptiness of the country that strikes me; it’s miles since we last passed a car. I recall a line I read earlier in the book:

‘Except for those people over there with the wagonette we might be the only living creatures in the whole world,’ said Edith, airily dismissing the entire animal kingdom at one stroke.

I left Australia on a one-way ticket when I was 21. Somehow, in the intervening decade, I’ve managed to forget quite how languorous this kind of heat makes me. We drive with the windows down, but the heat is soporific. I think of the girls under the rock, ‘overcome by an overpowering lassitude’. My eyes begin to close, and I fumble my way through the next sentences. Despite my discomfort (in truth, because of it), we couldn’t have manufactured better conditions for a reading of Joan Lindsay’s 1967 Australian classic. On Valentine’s Day, 1900, headmistress Mrs Appleyard arranges for her students to enjoy a picnic at Hanging Rock. After lunching on roast chicken and angel cake, and ignoring the fact that all their delicate wristwatches have inexplicably stopped, Miranda, Marion, Irma and Edith set off to climb the Rock in their petticoats and corsets. Hours later, Edith returns alone and in hysterics, and the girls and teachers who remain realize they have lost track of time, and that the maths teacher Greta McGraw has also vanished. They return to the school hours late and in a state of panic. The community surrounding Hanging Rock is occupied with little else in the weeks following the girls’ disappearance. Groups are sent on to the Rock in fruitless searches, and rumours about the fate of the girls begin to circulate. Mike Fitzhubert, recently arrived from England, sets out on a solo mission; he manages to recover an unconscious Irma, but has to be rescued by his friend Alfred, who finds him in a daze at the base of the Rock. At Appleyard College, the usual order has been overturned – parents are removing their daughters from the school, teachers are leaving in droves, and young Sara, who adored Miranda, proves impossible for Mrs Appleyard to handle. The horror of the events on the Rock seems to infect everyone connected with it; there are more unexplained deaths, and the lost hours and days haunt those who survive. The picnic looms large in my memory. I would happily have sworn that half the book is dedicated to the events of that day. In fact, the focus is on the months that follow, as the aftershocks of the tragedy ripple through the community. The novel is of course about the disappearances, but it is also about the Australian landscape, and a community of people who feel strange in that landscape. Though my childhood was spent in picket-fence suburbia, I never felt entirely at peace in Australia. More comfortable in the library than on the beach, I built a world among books, and it was in my early years at secondary school that I first discovered Picnic at Hanging Rock. Though I found it unsettling, the opening note – Lindsay speaking directly to us, blurring the line between fact and fiction – kept me coming back to it:

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.

Much has been written about Picnic at Hanging Rock as a reimagining of true events; and in both its opening note and the closing pseudo-historical document, Lindsay provides an ‘explanation’ for a lack of official documentation. For those who don’t know the book or saw only Peter Weir’s acclaimed 1975 film adaptation, this may seem a fair assumption. Within the narrative, Lindsay writes of rumours:

As always, in matters of surpassing human interest, those who knew nothing whatever either at first or even second hand were the most emphatic in expressing their opinions; which are well known to have a way of turning into established facts overnight.

Now past my suggestible teenage years, when I was convinced that the novel must be rooted in fact, I am more comfortable with a story that leaves its narrative threads in a tangle, rather than determinedly tying them together. It wasn’t until a decade after my first reading that I discovered the ‘final chapter’, taken out at the urging of Lindsay’s publishers, who pushed for ambiguity. At least as strange as the answers readers had been proposing for decades, it is based on Lindsay’s rumoured interest in Spiritualism. It does posit a ‘solution’ of sorts, but it is the ending of the first edition – a question mark – that has stayed with me. It hardly matters, as Lindsay herself said in an interview: ‘If you can draw your own conclusions, that’s fine, but I don’t think that it matters. I wrote that book as a sort of atmosphere of a place, and it was like dropping a stone into the water.’ Joan Lindsay (née à Beckett Weigall) attended a girls’ school in the state of Victoria in the early twentieth century. Those who wish to draw parallels between Lindsay’s childhood and Picnic at Hanging Rock make much of the fact that her Melbourne school relocated to Mount Macedon, mere miles from the Rock. However, though she holidayed nearby, this move didn’t happen until years after her graduation. During her schooling, she had planned to train as an architect, but she eventually switched to visual art. She married the artist Daryl Lindsay, later director of the National Gallery of Victoria, in 1922. Though she experienced artistic success, she eventually drifted away from it and turned to writing. In 1966, by then in her late sixties, Lindsay wrote what became her best-known work, finishing it in a matter of weeks. She said that the story came to her in a dream; she told her housekeeper that she could feel the heat of the February sun when she awoke on a cold winter’s morning, and then she retreated to the attic to write the dream down. Later, in conversation with her agent, she acknowledged that ‘Picnic at Hanging Rock really was an experience to write, because I was just impossible when I was writing it. I just sort of thought about it all night and in the morning I would go straight up and sit on the floor, papers all around me, and just write like a demon!’ In 1900, when Picnic at Hanging Rock is set, Australia was made up of self-governing British colonies and indigenous Australian communities. In 1966, the year before the book’s publication, Australia’s infamous White Australia Policy was dismantled, though it wasn’t until 1973 that legislation against overtly racist policies was passed. Though ostensibly a work of historical fiction, Picnic at Hanging Rock has much to say about the complex relationship white Australians have with their country and about the very notion of what it is to be ‘Australian’. Colonial rule hangs heavily over the narrative. In this telling of a horrific (albeit fictional) event it is impossible to ignore the fact that the original custodians of the land, the Dja Dja Wurrung, Wurundjeri and Taungurong people, suffered generations of violence in the shadow of Hanging Rock. Some contracted smallpox, others were murdered by British settlers, those left were moved on to a reserve. Tens of thousands of years of local history were forcibly erased in a century, and the voices of these communities are entirely absent from this narrative, and many others. Instead, Picnic at Hanging Rock views the mystery through the lens of first- and second-generation Australians, English migrants making their home in a harsh and unfamiliar environment. There are those who are unwavering in their wish to recreate a version of England – Mrs Appleyard attempts to operate an English girls’ school in the Australian bush. Yet as we follow her pupils, dressed in white muslin and layers of petticoats, making their way through waist-high bracken on Hanging Rock, it is clear that they don’t fit into the landscape:

Insulated from natural contacts with earth, air and sunlight, by corsets pressing on the solar plexus, by voluminous petticoats, cotton stockings and kid boots, the drowsy well-fed girls lounging in the shade were no more a part of their environment than figures in a photograph album, arbitrarily posed against a backcloth of cork rocks and cardboard trees.

There are others who embrace the harsh reality of life in Australia. Mike Fitzhubert, forced to sleep on the ground beneath the Rock the night before he finds Irma, remembers a comfortable evening on the French Riviera, on a picnic rug, in the company of his fellow undergraduates. He feels far from home, and yet he falls irrevocably in love with Australia, with the harsh land, with the opposite of familiarity. In essence, the novel explores the inescapable discord faced when recreating a set of cultural norms within an uncontrollable and misunderstood environment. As a teenager, it was the girls from Appleyard College I was most fascinated by. Nowadays, I am drawn to Mike, to his desire to become part of Australia without disrupting the natural order of the land, inserting himself into the landscape, rather than changing it to fit him. Back in the car, like Mrs Appleyard’s girls, we’re travelling with a bottle of homemade lemonade beside us. It’s perfect in the heat, flavoured with ingredients we picked from my friend’s garden. Lemonade 5 lemons (zest and juice) 12 lemon verbena leaves Rosemary stalk 150g caster sugar To serve Lemon verbena leaves Ice One bottle sparkling water Pour the lemon juice, zest, herbs and sugar into a saucepan. Bring to a simmer and reduce until viscous. Cool, and strain into a bottle. Serve with lemon verbena, ice and sparkling water. Reading of how at peace Mike feels in Australia, I’m struck by a feeling of homesickness, not, ironically, for Australia, but for England; grey winter mornings, bustling streets and changing seasons. Australia is the place I come from, but England is my home.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 66 © Kate Young 2020