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Contents

Cover

About the Author

List of Characters

Title Page

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Copyright

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Joan Lindsay was born in Melbourne, where she went to school as a day-girl for a few years at Clyde Girls Grammar, then situated in East St Kilda. She knew and loved the Macedon district from early childhood.

In 1922 in London she married Sir Daryl Lindsay. The Lindsays travelled together in Europe and the USA, Daryl with his paints and Joan with her typewriter. Sir Daryl died in 1976. Joan lived at their country home on the Mornington Peninsula, Mulberry Hill, Victoria, Australia. She died in December 1984.

List of Characters

MRS APPLEYARD, Headmistress of Appleyard College

MISS GRETA MCCRAW, Mathematics mistress

MLLE DIANNE DE POITIERS, French and Dancing mistress

MISS DORA LUMLEY, MISS BUCK, junior mistresses

MIRANDA, IRMA LEOPOLD, MARION QUADE, senior boarders

EDITH HORTON, the College dunce

SARA WAYBOURNE, the youngest boarder

ROSAMUND, BLANCHE, and other boarders

COOK, MINNIE AND ALICE, domestic staff at the College

EDWARD WHITEHEAD, the College gardener

IRISH TOM, handyman at the College

MR BEN HUSSEY, of Hussey’s Livery Stables, Woodend

DOCTOR MCKENZIE, a family doctor from Woodend

CONSTABLE BUMPHER, of the Woodend Police Station

MRS BUMPHER

JIM, a young policeman

M. LOUIS MONTPELIER, a Bendigo watchmaker

REG LUMLEY, brother of DORA LUMLEY

JASPER COSGROVE, guardian of SARA WAYBOURNE

COLONEL AND MRS FITZHUBERT, summer residents at Lake View, Upper Macedon

THE HON. MICHAEL FITZHUBERT, their nephew from England

ALBERT CRUNDALL, coachman at Lake View

MR CUTLER, gardener at Lake View

MRS CUTLER

MAJOR SPRACK AND HIS DAUGHTER, ANGELA, English visitors at Government Cottage, Macedon

DOCTOR COOLING, from Lower Macedon

And many others who do not appear in this book.

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.

PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK

Joan Lindsay

1

Everyone agreed that the day was just right for the picnic to Hanging Rock – a shimmering summer morning warm and still, with cicadas shrilling all through breakfast from the loquat trees outside the dining-room windows and bees murmuring above the pansies bordering the drive. Heavy-headed dahlias flamed and drooped in the immaculate flowerbeds, the well-trimmed lawns steamed under the mounting sun. Already the gardener was watering the hydrangeas still shaded by the kitchen wing at the rear of the College. The boarders at Mrs Appleyard’s College for Young Ladies had been up and scanning the bright unclouded sky since six o’clock and were now fluttering about in their holiday muslins like a flock of excited butterflies. Not only was it a Saturday and the long awaited occasion of the annual picnic, but Saint Valentine’s Day, traditionally celebrated on the fourteenth of February by the interchange of elaborate cards and favours. All were madly romantic and strictly anonymous – supposedly the silent tributes of lovesick admirers; although Mr Whitehead the elderly English gardener and Tom the Irish groom were almost the only two males to be so much as smiled at during the term.

The Headmistress was probably the only person at the College who received no cards. It was well known that Mrs Appleyard disapproved of Saint Valentine and his ridiculous greetings that cluttered up the College mantelpieces right up to Easter and gave as much extra dusting to the maids as the annual prize-giving. And such mantelpieces! Two in the long drawing-room of white marble, supported by pairs of caryatids as firm of bust as Madam herself; others of carved and tortured wood embellished with a thousand winking tiddling mirrors. Appleyard College was already, in the year nineteen hundred, an architectural anachronism in the Australian bush – a hopeless misfit in time and place. The clumsy two storey mansion was one of those elaborate houses that sprang up all over Australia like exotic fungi following the finding of gold. Why this particular stretch of flat sparsely wooded country, a few miles out of the village of Macedon crouching at the foot of the mount, had been selected as a suitable building site, nobody will ever know. The insignificant creek that meandered in a series of shallow pools down the slope at the rear of the ten acre property offered little inducement as a setting for an Italianate mansion; nor the occasional glimpses, through a screen of stringy-barked eucalyptus, of the misty summit of Mount Macedon rising up to the east on the opposite side of the road. However, built it was, and of solid Castlemaine stone, to withstand the ravages of time. The original owner, whose name is long ago forgotten, had only lived in it for a year or two before the huge ugly house was standing empty and up for sale.

The spacious grounds, comprising vegetable and flower gardens, pig and poultry pens, orchard and tennis lawns, were in wonderful order, thanks to Mr Whitehead the English gardener, still in charge. There were several vehicles in the handsome stone stables, all in excellent repair. The hideous Victorian furnishings were as good as new, with marble mantelpieces direct from Italy and thick piled carpets from Axminster. The oil lamps on the cedar staircase were held aloft by classical statues, there was a grand piano in the long drawing-room and even a square tower, reached by a narrow circular staircase, from which the Union Jack could be hoisted on Queen Victoria’s birthday. To Mrs Appleyard, newly arrived from England with a considerable nest-egg and letters of introduction to some of the leading Australian families, the mansion, standing well back from the Bendigo Road behind a low stone wall, was immediately impressive. The brown pebble eyes ever on the alert for a bargain summed up the amazing place as ideal for a select and suitably expensive boarding school – better still a College – for Young Ladies. To the delight of the Bendigo house agent who was showing her over the property she had bought it then and there, lock, stock and barrel, including the gardener, with a reduction for cash down, and moved in.

Whether the Headmistress of Appleyard College (as the local white elephant was at once re-christened in gold lettering on a handsome board at the big iron gates) 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 in any form of business enterprise from Punch and Judy to floating a loan on the Stock Exchange, the College, from the very first day, was a success; and by the end of the first year, showing a gratifying profit. All this was nearly six years before this chronicle begins.