In Short: Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock with Amanda Lehr

On St. Valentine’s Day in 1900, the students of Appleyard College for Young Ladies set out for a picnic at Hanging Rock. Nineteen girls went into the bush. Three never came back. Inspired by a dream and drafted in less than two weeks, Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock has become a landmark of Australian literature, film (thanks to Peter Weir’s 1975 adaptation), and folklore due to its notorious question of being fact or fiction.

This session offers an exploration of the novel’s liminal spaces between girlhood and mature desire, Victorian order and untamed wilderness, truth and fabrication. Why is the mystery at the heart of Hanging Rock so unsettling? What happens in its excised final chapter, published only after Lindsey’s death? And how do the novel’s lost girls fit into a larger cultural canon—from The Virgin Suicides to Twin Peaks—obsessed with female absence?