Picnic at Hanging Rock

by

Joan Lindsay

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Themes and Colors
Nature, Repression, and Colonialism Theme Icon
Mystery and the Unknown Theme Icon
Wealth and Class Theme Icon
Gossip and Scandal  Theme Icon
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Picnic at Hanging Rock, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Mystery and the Unknown Theme Icon

Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock is a novel about a bizarre fictional mystery. The mystery at the heart of the book—the disappearance of three schoolgirls and one of their governesses during a picnic at Hanging Rock in Victoria, Australia—is famously left unresolved, and as the tragic event’s reverberations make their way through the rural community surrounding the rock, the characters in the novel must wrestle with the fact that what has happened has no discernable cause or solution. As more and more characters find themselves grappling with the unknown—and, in some cases, descending into the world of the surreal and the bizarre as they do—Joan Lindsay employs thematic, symbolic, and metafictional techniques to argue that the human impulse to know the unknowable and solve the unsolvable is a destructive and futile one.

As the novel unfolds and its existential questions deepen, Joan Lindsay uses the dark, mysterious “pattern” that begins unfolding after the disappearances at Hanging Rock to show how her characters and their lives become consumed by the desire for closure and certainty—even when none can be had. From the outset of the novel’s core mystery—the strange disappearances at Hanging Rock—Lindsay establishes that there are no easy answers to what has happened. As she switches among several characters’ perspectives, she suggests that the mystery is strange and supernatural in origin. Several characters’ watches stop at the base of the rock, while Miranda, Marion, and Irma, the three senior girls who lead the trek up the mount, seem hypnotized by unseen forces into climbing higher and higher. The girls’ unwitting companion Edith Horton observes a dark red cloud which drives her to hysteria and sends her running down the mountain—on her way, she encounters the school’s math governess, the logical and strait-laced Miss McCraw, stripped to her skivvies and ascending the ancient formation. Several bizarre forces seem to be at work in the early chapters which depict, in great detail, the events that transpire at Hanging Rock. As Lindsay creates a mystery of epic proportions, the answer to what has happened to the senior girls and Miss McCraw makes itself impossible to imagine. With so many forces at work—temporal, psychological, and seemingly supernatural—Lindsay intentionally demonstrates that whatever has happened on Hanging Rock, it defies explanation.

As the novel unfolds, the characters both at the center and on the fringes of the action seek desperately to understand and solve the mystery of what happened at Hanging Rock. Search parties scour the area, local detectives and investigators from the city question key witnesses, and newspaper reporters seize upon any detail they can as they speculate about kidnappings and murders. Michael Fitzhubert, a young Englishman who witnessed the girls ascend the mountain, enlists his family’s coachman Albert to aid him in his own independent search of the area. The characters in the novel are desperate to understand what has happened—perhaps because a part of them senses that admitting there is no explanation would be even worse than uncovering the most heinous of crimes. As the characters become frantic for an answer to what has befallen the missing and try to uncover the truth—or come up with their own versions of what happened—their searching and speculation leads, over and over, to dead ends. Edith Horton, the sole witness to what happened on the mountain, seems to have had her memory wiped due to fear or trauma. Irma Leopold, one of the missing girls, is found—but doesn’t remember anything of her experience beyond the picnic, either. Searches of the mountain’s crags, crannies, and caves turn up nothing—save for a single piece of calico fabric discovered by amateur hunters which seems to taunt the work of investigators, trackers, and bloodhounds.

Lindsay’s novel ends with a “clipping” from an Australian newspaper dated to 1913. The clipping commemorates the anniversary of the disappearances and states that their cause is not presently—and likely never will be—known to the public. This ending is not the original way Lindsay hoped to close her novel. She did, in fact, write a final chapter which explained what happened on the fateful afternoon at Hanging Rock—a chapter which plainly states that some kind of time warp or wormhole opened on top of the rock to transform and consume Miss McCraw, Miranda, and Marion. The chapter was, however, excised by Lindsay’s editor and replaced with the chapter which now closes the novel on a note of mystery. This fact elevates the theme of the mysterious and the unknown into the realm of the metafictional. Just as Lindsay wanted her characters to resign themselves to the fact that the mystery would never be solved, so too did Lindsay’s own editor want the book’s readers to resign themselves to that idea. The decision to end the novel on an ambiguous note, arrived at jointly by Lindsay and her editor, seems calculated to hammer home the idea that some mysteries are beyond explanation—and that sometimes, the search for the truth is futile.

The theme of mystery and the unknown in Picnic at Hanging Rock has reverberations both serious and tongue-in-cheek. Lindsay holds the key to the mystery in her own mind but does not share it with her readers—just as Hanging Rock holds the answer to what befell the three missing Appleyard women, but refuses to relinquish their bodies or their stories even to those desperately searching for them.

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Mystery and the Unknown ThemeTracker

The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Mystery and the Unknown appears in each chapter of Picnic at Hanging Rock. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
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Mystery and the Unknown Quotes in Picnic at Hanging Rock

Below you will find the important quotes in Picnic at Hanging Rock related to the theme of Mystery and the Unknown.
Chapter 1 Quotes

Whether the Headmistress of Appleyard College […] had any previous experience in the educational field, was never divulged. It was unnecessary. With her high-piled greying pompadour and ample bosom, as rigidly controlled and disciplined as her private ambitions, the cameo portrait of her late husband flat on her respectable chest, the stately stranger looked precisely what the parents expected of an English Headmistress. And as looking the part is well known to be more than half the battle…

Related Characters: Mrs. Appleyard
Page Number: 3
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3 Quotes

“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.

Related Characters: Edith Horton (speaker), Irma Leopold, Miranda, Marion Quade
Related Symbols: Hanging Rock
Page Number: 32
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Mrs. Appleyard (speaker)
Related Symbols: Hanging Rock
Page Number: 43
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Characters: Michael (Mike) Fitzhubert, Irma Leopold
Related Symbols: Hanging Rock
Page Number: 52
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Michael (Mike) Fitzhubert
Related Symbols: Hanging Rock
Page Number: 81
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8 Quotes

Greatly to Mrs. Cutler’s surprise the lamb had been brought in just as she had been lying on the Rock, without a corset. A modest woman, for whom the word corset was never uttered by a lady in the presence of a gent, she had made no comment to the doctor […] Thus the valuable clue of the missing corset was never followed up nor communicated to the police. Nor to the inmates of Appleyard College where Irma Leopold, well known for her fastidious taste […] had been seen by several of her classmates, on the morning of [the picnic] wearing a pair of long, lightly boned, French satin stays.

Related Characters: Irma Leopold, Mrs. Cutler
Page Number: 95-96
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10 Quotes

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.”

Related Characters: Doctor McKenzie (speaker), Irma Leopold
Related Symbols: Hanging Rock
Page Number: 113-114
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 12 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Irma Leopold, Mademoiselle Dianne de Poitiers
Related Symbols: Hanging Rock
Page Number: 141
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 15 Quotes

The clock on the stairs had just struck for half past twelve when the door of Mrs. Appleyard’s room opened noiselessly, inch by inch, and an old woman carrying a nightlight came out on to the landing. An old woman with head bowed under a forest of curling pins, with pendulous breasts and sagging stomach beneath a flannel dressing-gown. No human being - not even Arthur - had ever seen her thus, without the battledress of steel and whalebone in which for eighteen hours a day the Headmistress was accustomed to face the world.

Related Characters: Mrs. Appleyard, Sara Waybourne
Page Number: 185
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 16 Quotes

“You know very well I’m not one for gossip. What is it you want to find out?”

He grinned. “Shrewd little woman, aren’t you? I’ve been wondering if you ever heard any of your lady friends mention Mrs. Appleyard at the College?” In Bumpher’s experience it was amazing how an ordinary housewife seemed to know by instinct things that might take a policeman weeks to find out.

Related Characters: Constable Bumpher (speaker), Mrs. Appleyard
Page Number: 193
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Characters: Mr. Ben Hussey (speaker), Mrs. Appleyard
Related Symbols: Hanging Rock
Page Number: 198
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Characters: Mrs. Appleyard, Sara Waybourne
Related Symbols: Hanging Rock
Page Number: 200-201
Explanation and Analysis: