The central symbol within Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock is the titular Hanging Rock, which represents many things to many different characters: it is a symbol of colonialism’s evils; of nature’s retributive properties; and of the power of the mystic, unseen, and unknown.
Hanging Rock is an ancient and distinctive volcanic formation which was, for tens of thousands of years before white settlers arrived in Australia, a sacred site and hallowed meeting-place for several local Aboriginal Australian tribes. Much like Mount Rushmore in the U.S. (originally known as the Six Grandfathers by the Lakota Sioux), Hanging Rock has been desecrated and transformed by colonialism into a tourist attraction and picnic ground. When a group of schoolgirls from Appleyard College venture to the rock for a picnic one afternoon, a small group of girls who go up on the rock to explore get much more than they bargained for. Though Edith Horton runs down the rock, hysterical after having witnessed a sinister red cloud above her, three of her classmates—Miranda, Marion Quade, Irma Leopold, and their arithmetic teacher, Miss McCraw—go missing on the rock. Irma is eventually found, but the others remain lost. In this sense, the mystical rock is a manifestation of the vast dangers of the Australian outback and a reminder of how British colonialists (the Appleyard girls among them) have brutalized and attempted to sanitize nature in the name of taming danger.
The looming presence of Hanging Rock continues to haunt several of the characters throughout the novel—most notably Mrs. Appleyard, the owner and headmistress of the school who is so tortured by the disappearances that she eventually commits suicide by flinging herself off the rock. In this way, Hanging Rock comes to represent a challenge to some and a warning to others, and as the dark “pattern” of death and destruction which begins on its peaks spreads throughout the small rural community surrounding it, an unmissable emblem of the ways in which colonialism’s dark specter threatens all in its path.
Hanging Rock Quotes in Picnic at Hanging Rock
“I have instructed Mademoiselle that as the day is likely to be warm, you may remove your gloves after the drag has passed through Woodend. You will partake of luncheon at the Picnic Grounds near the Rock. Once again let me remind you that the Rock itself is extremely dangerous and you are therefore forbidden to engage in any tomboy foolishness in the matter of exploration, even on the lower slopes. […] I think that is all. Have a pleasant day and try to behave yourselves in a manner to bring credit to the College.”
Insulated from natural contacts with earth, air and sunlight, by corsets pressing on the solar plexus, by voluminous petticoats, cotton stockings and kid boots, 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.
If Albert was right and they were only schoolgirls about the same age as his sisters in England, how was it they were allowed to set out alone, at the end of a summer afternoon? He reminded himself that he was in Australia now: Australia, where anything might happen. In England everything had been done before: quite often by one’s own ancestors, over and over again. He sat down on a fallen log, heard Albert calling him through the trees, and knew that this was the country where he, Michael Fitzhubert, was going to live.
“I feel perfectly awful! When are we going home?” Miranda was looking at her so strangely, almost as if she wasn’t seeing her. When Edith repeated the question more loudly, she simply turned her back and began walking away up the rise, the other two following a little way behind. Well, hardly walking —sliding over the stones on their bare feet as if they were on a drawing-room carpet… […] “Come back, all of you! Don’t go up there – come back!” She felt herself choking and tore at her frilled lace collar. […] To her horror all three girls were fast moving out of sight behind the monolith.
The Headmistress, after a night passed in staring at the wall of her bedroom interminably whitening to the new day, was on deck at her usual hour with not a hair of the pompadour out of place. Her first concern this morning was to ensure that nothing of yesterday’s happenings should be so much as whispered beyond the College walls.
For three consecutive mornings the Australian public had been devouring, along with its bacon and eggs, the luscious details of the College Mystery as it was now known to the Press. Although no further information had been unearthed and nothing resembling a clue, […] the public must be fed. To this end, some additional spice had been added to Wednesday’s columns’ photographs of the Hon. Michael’s ancestral home, Haddingham Hall […] and of course Irma Leopold’s beauty and reputed millions on coming of age.
“All my life I’ve been doing things because other people said they were the right things to do. This time I’m going to do something because I say so —even if you and everyone else thinks I’m mad.”
He laid his head on a stone and fell instantly into the thin ragged sleep of exhaustion, waking with a sudden stab of pain over one eye. A trickle of blood was oozing on to the pillow. The pillow was as hard and sharp as a stone under his burning head. […] At first he thought it was the sound of birds in the oak tree outside his window. […] It seemed to be coming from all round him —a low wordless murmur, almost like the murmur of distant voices, with now and then a sort of trilling that might have been little spurts of laughter.
The girl so far had remembered nothing of her experiences on the Rock; nor, in Doctor McKenzie’s opinion or that of the two eminent specialists from Sydney and Melbourne, would she ever remember. A portion of the delicate mechanism of the brain appeared to be irrevocably damaged. “Like a clock, you know,” the doctor explained. “A clock that stops under a certain set of unusual conditions and refuses ever to go again beyond a particular point.”
They see the walls of the gymnasium fading into an exquisite transparency, the ceiling opening up like a flower into the brilliant sky above the Hanging Rock. The shadow of the Rock is flowing, luminous as water, across the shimmering plain and they are at the picnic, sitting on the warm dry grass under the gum trees. […] The shadow of the Rock has grown darker and longer. They sit rooted to the ground and cannot move. The dreadful shape is a living monster lumbering towards them across the plain, scattering rocks and boulders. So near now, they can see the cracks and hollows where the lost girls lie rotting in a filthy cave.
Nothing else was said until we came to the bend in the road where you can first see the Hanging Rock coming up out of the trees in the distance. I pointed it out to her and said something about the Rock having made a lot of trouble for a lot of people since the day of the Picnic. She leaned right across me and shook her fist at it and I hope I never have to see an expression like that on another face.
To the left, on higher ground, a pile of stones . . . on one of them a large black spider, spread-eagled, asleep in the sun. She had always been afraid of spiders, looked round for something with which to strike it down and saw Sara Waybourne, in a nightdress, with one eye fixed and staring from a mask of rotting flesh.
An eagle hovering high above the golden peaks heard her scream as she ran towards the precipice and jumped. The spider scuttled to safety as the clumsy body went bouncing and rolling from rock to rock towards the valley below. Until at last the head in the brown hat was impaled upon a jutting crag.
Hanging Rock Symbol Timeline in Picnic at Hanging Rock
