Joan Lindsay

Joan Lindsay was born into a prominent Australian family just a few years before the turn of the 20th century. She described her childhood as “uneventful,” and was raised in a mansion called St. Margaret’s just outside Melbourne. At 13 she was sent to boarding school—during her years at the Melbourne girls’ school, the institution changed names and ownership. Despite the turbulence at school, Lindsay was regarded as a good student and excelled in art. Lindsay went on to study at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School in Melbourne and married a fellow art student named Daryl Lindsay in 1922. The two remained together during the fallow and unpredictable years of the Great Depression, renting out their large Mulberry Hill house to make ends meet. As her husband’s painting career took off, Lindsay began focusing on writing novels and plays, receiving great acclaim for her satirical novel Through Darkest Pondelayo, a book which lampooned the then-popular genre of sensationalist travel literature. In 1943, Daryl became the Director of the National Gallery of Victoria, and in 1956, he was knighted. In 1967, Joan Lindsay published her most popular and enduring work, Picnic at Hanging Rock. The novel was written and marketed as a true story, though there is no historical record or evidence of a disappearance of four schoolgirls ever taking place at the famed rock. The novel was a sensation in Australia and abroad—for the rest of her life, Lindsay would constantly dodge questions from her reading public and from her work’s adaptors (including Peter Weir, who made a 1975 feature film based on the novel) about the tale’s authenticity and the novel’s ambiguous ending. After her husband’s death, Lindsay continued writing and resumed painting. She died of cancer in 1984, and, in 1987, an excised final chapter of Picnic at Hanging Rock revealing a strange sci-fi twist was published posthumously.