Picnic at Hanging Rock – real or fictional?
Picnic at Hanging Rock
Have you read the novel Picnic at Hanging Rock? An eerie and ethereal novel set in Australia and written back in 1975.
It is the most chillingly sparse and novel I have read in a long while. Only 210 pages but a story and experience that lasts a lifetime.
Picnic at Hanging Rock is by Joan Lindsay. The plot is chillingly simple and normal which adds to the overall horror of what happens.
The place, Hanging Rock, is real!!! I was nervous to check but so happy it is!
Hanging Rock is a monolith, a rocky formation in central Victoria that really exists. It is a former volcano and is also known as Dryden’s Mount, Dryden’s Rock and to some Aboriginal Australians as Ngannelong. The two nearest townships are Newham and Hesket, approximately 70 km north-west of Melbourne.
Locations in Picnic at Hanging Rock
Hanging Rock (c) Wikipedia
Locations in Picnic at Hanging Rock
Now this is where in the novel a group of school girls from a boarding school head out to the rock to have a picnic. They are told to be careful and not to wander around or up the rocks. Three of them do however as well as a teacher and they never return. They are seen by one other student heading up the rocks slowly as if in some sort of trance. Turns out back in the 19th century, there were three tribes who lived on this land – the Dja Dja Wurrung, Woi Wurrung and Taungurung tribes who were forced from it. They had lived there for thousands of years and so when they were removed, the spiritual and otherworldly links remained…..
Hanging Rock painting William Ford (c) Wikipedia
Locations in Picnic at Hanging Rock
The story and the true history of the location really brings a special feeling to this story. It seems to have special powers, strange forces could in fact be acting here and have been responsible for the girls’ disappearance. I feel chills on the back of my neck just remembering this!
What is really brilliant is how the novel is written as if it tells of true facts. It even begins and ends with a prologue and epilogue that seem to reinforce that this is in fact a retelling of a story that really happened.
Locations in Picnic at Hanging Rock
Appleyard College was to some extent based on Clyde Girls’ Grammar School at St Kilda East, Victoria, which Joan Lindsay attended as a day-girl while in her teens. The school is pictured above – very different of course to how it was back in the day!
In the book however, the college is described as having an eastward view of Mount Macedon on the Bendigo Road:
This is roughly the map of the novel. The girls leave the school in carriages and head to the rock formation for a picnic.
Locations in Picnic at Hanging Rock
The author said this in an 1974 interview:
“Well, it was written as a mystery and it remains a mystery. 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. I felt that story, if you call it a story—that the thing that happened on St. Valentine’s Day went on spreading, out and out and out, in circles.”
This is the Hanging Rock that gives the monolith its name:
Hanging Rock (c) Wikipedia
If you haven’t read the novel – do so as it lingers with me still. So atmospheric and mysterious. Wonderfully ethereal and chilling in its simplicity. There’s an radio play version on You tube by the BBC and the story comes to life in ghostly detail with music that will haunt you!
BookTrail Boarding Pass: Picnic at Hanging Rock
