Set against it in their corsets and layers of skirts, “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.” Four girls abandon this artificial tableau to walk closer to the rock, and three of them disappear.

The picnic grounds are wild and glowing, populated with lizards, beetles, grubs, and hidden snakes. The novel takes place in the year 1900, at Appleyard College for Young Ladies, in “one of those elaborate houses that sprang up all over Australia like exotic fungi following the finding of gold.” The students spend Valentine’s morning reading passionate anonymous valentines from mostly fictional admirers, before heading out by carriage for a picnic at a rock monolith.

It’s set on Valentine’s Day, Lindsay’s wedding anniversary, which was, she said, “the only date I have ever remembered except 1066 and Waterloo.” She never wore a watch because she said they stopped on her, as the picnickers’ watches stop in the book. The novel was her first, written in four weeks when she was 70, and it became a sensation. The author was born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1896. Appleyard, and I felt very old.Įverything about Picnic at Hanging Rock challenges our assumptions about time. Then I realized that Dormer, who is 35, will play the school’s terrifying English headmistress, Mrs. When I first read that, I wondered which of the girls Dormer would play. Natalie Dormer, best known as the young queen Margaery Tyrell on Game of Thrones, will star in an Australian six-part series based on Joan Lindsay’s classic 1967 novel Picnic at Hanging Rock, about schoolgirls who disappear.

Secret of hanging rock