
Picnic at Hanging Rock
by Joan Lindsay
The must-read Australian modern classic.If her terrified cries had been heard by anyone but a wallaby squatting in a clump of bracken a few feet away, the picnic at Hanging Rock might yet have been just another picnic on a summer’s day.
On a cloudless summer day in 1900, a group from Appleyard College for Young Ladies goes for a picnic. In the heat of the afternoon sun, three girls climb through the scrub—and disappear.
Ethereal and enigmatic, Picnic at Hanging Rock has been haunting the Australian imagination for half a century.‘In the seemingly limitless pantheon of gone-girl literature,
Picnic at Hanging Rock might take the prize for best setting…It’s a proto-Virgin Suicides, dreamy and haunting, animated by a sense of slightly sickening erotic mystery.’ New Yorker‘Deliciously horrific.’
Observer‘Iconic and enigmatic.’
Readings MonthlyPublication date
- September 23, 2019

