Wealth and Class Theme Analysis

The society depicted in Picnic at Hanging Rock is one still in its nascent stages. The settlers and colonizers who populate the township of Mount Macedon in 1900 are poor farmers, wealthy English transplants, girls on the cusp of enormous inheritances, and destitute orphans. The socioeconomic striations within this fledgling society are profound. As the novel’s characters seek to cement or change their places in society, Lindsay suggests that even in a place as full of possibility as turn-of-the-century Australia, people will always use wealth to insulate themselves from others, advance their own interests, and control those around them.

Throughout the novel, Joan Lindsay shows how the society being birthed in the heart of the Victoria countryside is built to replicate the stringently-divided society of England. At Appleyard College, a boarding school run by the mysterious widow Mrs. Appleyard, the trappings of wealth and class inform the relationships between and amongst staff and students, fueling anxieties, resentments, and vendettas—often to devastating effect. The most class-conscious individual at Appleyard—and perhaps in the entire novel—is the founder and headmistress of the school, Mrs. Appleyard. Having purchased a gaudy mansion in which to house the school several years ago, Mrs. Appleyard has wasted no time filling the halls with students from wealthy homes. Mrs. Appleyard’s social position back in England is never divulged, but as a widow, it is clear that the wily headmistress is desperate to support herself in an unforgiving, patriarchal world. Mrs. Appleyard is obsessed with appearances—she keeps her hair in a meticulously-pinned bouffant and never forgoes wearing a corset. She favors wealthy students such as Irma Leopold and Miranda but despises the less fortunate, such as the orphaned Sara Waybourne. She is constantly checking her ledger, obsessing over outstanding tuition debts, and sending letters in attempts to collect funds from parents and guardians.

When tragedy strikes and three students and one governess go missing on an excursion to Hanging Rock, Mrs. Appleyard is not concerned with the missing individuals’ well-being or safe return—instead, she sets to work right away on defusing the gossip she knows the incident will inspire, desperate to save her school’s reputation (and thus her own livelihood.) As word gets out about the disappearance, Mrs. Appleyard’s state of mind and physical wellbeing visibly begin to deteriorate—but again, her tortured demeanor has little to do with her anxiety over her missing colleague and charges but instead with her fear of losing the monetary assets and societal protections that heading the school represents. Mrs. Appleyard—even from a seemingly disadvantaged position as a widow and a single woman alone in a brand-new country—seeks to emulate the patterns of wealth, class, and favoritism that define the society from which she comes. Rather than create a new environment for her girls free of prejudice or preferential treatment based on money and social standing, Mrs. Appleyard perpetuates these systems of judgement in order to buffet her own societal position (and line her own pockets).

At the Lake View estate of the wealthy Fitzhubert family, the deep and often unmovable striations of money and class also dictate the behaviors and relationships of its inhabitants. The Fitzhuberts—the Colonel and his wife—are English nobility who have picked up and moved to Australia. Their visiting nephew, Michael Fitzhubert, is a pampered Cambridge boy. Though the sensitive Michael (Mike) befriends the family’s coachman, Albert Crundall, and enlists the man’s help in searching for the lost Appleyard girls, the Fitzhuberts seem to have little interest in their community, their servants, or anyone outside of their social class. They host garden parties even in the midst of tragedy in their community, more focused on their prize roses than the four missing women who may have been abducted or killed. Even when Irma Leopold is recovered by Albert and Michael and brought to convalesce at Lake View, the Fitzhuberts remain focused solely on wealth and class: they know that Irma is a wealthy heiress who will soon come into half a million dollars, and so begin encouraging Mike to court and marry her. They eye Irma’s jewels almost enviously in spite of the vast wealth they’ve already accrued, paying no mind to who Irma is as a person as they steamroll every conversation with her in an attempt to make themselves look good. The Fitzhuberts’ focus on maintaining their societal position—and even advancing it—demonstrates the investment of the wealthy in keeping up with the status quo. The Fitzhuberts ignore the freedom Australia might represent and instead seek to perpetuate old systems of wealth and class—even when those systems make even them feel like hamsters on a wheel.

Albert, on the other hand, is happy with his position and simple life and is unconcerned with social advancement. The friendship he develops with Mike is born out of mutual appreciation—not out of any desire to play some social-climbing game. Lindsay rewards Albert’s outlook by having him, toward the end of the novel, receive a large sum of money and a job offer at a bank for his part in saving Irma Leopold. Mr. Leopold, Irma’s father and a wealthy banker, offers Albert the chance to change his life—but instead, Albert decides to put the money away and explore the Australian countryside with Mike. Albert represents a new model of existing within a deeply-striated society in which wealth and class dictate so much—he is perhaps Lindsay’s way of expressing the wishful thought that the deep divisions in society might someday, in the hands of the right people, begin to heal and change.

Ultimately, Lindsay suggests that with few exceptions, societies—even new ones with seemingly limitless potential—will forever structure themselves around the striations of wealth and class that have defined cultures and countries around the globe for centuries. Wealth and class are, in Lindsay’s view, a kind of weaponry which disadvantage or even obliterate society’s most vulnerable members.