Picnic at Hanging Rock

At the same time that it contains an underlying atmosphere of unresolved mystery, the novel features a realistic historical setting. Lindsay wrote the novel in the 1960s, but it's set at the turn of the century. As a result, the novel can be read as a postcolonial imagining of what life was like in Australia just before the end of British rule.

Today, the novel might feel reminiscent of the popular nonfiction genre known as true crime. Although the novel's events are fictional, Lindsay seems intent on making the reader wonder whether she might be telling a true story. This is clear from the ambiguous prologue: "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." The novel also ends with a pseudohistorical intimation, as the novel's final chapter takes the form of a newspaper article that looks back on the unresolved disappearances.

In Chapter 13, one of Mrs. Appleyard's lines can be read as a sort of comment on the novel's genre. When Mr. Lumley says that he doesn't want his sister "connected in any way with crime and all that sort of thing," Mrs. Appleyard takes issue with his word choice: "Be careful how you express yourself, Mr Lumley. Not crime. Mystery if you like. A very different matter." Mrs. Appleyard is far from sympathetic or reliable, but she does capture an important distinction here. Aside from the involvement of the local police, there is nothing about the novel that reads like a crime story. Rather, it reads as an unresolved and unsettling mystery.