Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay

Format: Audio (BorrowBox)
Read: June 2026

This book is an Australian classic, but I don’t think it’s all that well-known outside of Australia. The title seemed vaguely familiar to be but I suspect that’s because of the more recent TV adaptation, which I didn’t watch but was dimly aware of. It’s an interesting book, and a bit of a tricky one to categorise. It is not what I expected it to be, and not really what the blurb sells it as, which I think often makes for a confusing and frustrating experience for an unprepared reader.

The ABC Audio version I listened to was more appropriately vague in its description, but the Vintage Classics edition has this on the blurb:

Read this fantastic, atmospheric Australian thriller about the mysterious disappearance of a group of young girls.

Having read it, I take it with “thriller” (it is too slow to be a thriller!), and also “about the mysterious disappearance” is misleading if you read those words at face value. This isn’t a Mystery; it is a story in which a mystery happens, sure, but it’s not the focus, and the book is not at all interested in solving it. The disappearance of the three girls and their teacher is merely the catalyst for a tide of change that happens at their school and the surrounding community in central Victoria in 1900. This is about the people who do not disappear, and the mystery of the picnic at Hanging Rock becomes merely the background.

I am sure I would enjoy this book more if I re-read. There are two reasons. Firstly, I wish I had been more prepared for what to expect from it, then I could have appreciated what it was giving me instead of being distracted by what it wasn’t. The second reason is that I think the audio format was a mistake, as it allowed me to be more distracted by my first point, and also, I found Yael Stone’s reading of it lacked polish (I assume she got the gig because she’s in the TV adaptation). There are places where she stumbles, where the intonation she chooses doesn’t fit with the descriptor, and I found it quite flat. Some of that could be down to the language style, which, while very effective to create atmosphere it often a languorous one that didn’t make for the most entertaining listening experience.

This is an incredibly atmospheric book. I could feel the heat of the Australian outback; I could see it sizzling and shimmering on the horizon; I could hear the insects chirping in the languid silence. There is a quiet, creeping eeriness and a gothic quality to Appleyard College – perhaps more unsettling in the blazing sun. And yet, on this first read-through, I found it quite dull, and at times I found myself bored.

Part of the problem is that it does such a wonderful job in the first half of setting up the mystery before it sharply turns away from it in the second! It becomes stuffed with characters I was not prepared for, who seem inconsequential, and I got bored and annoyed by them taking up space. I didn’t find any other characters particularly compelling because no one stayed on the page long enough to be interesting. I realise, having finished it (and later on the novel explicitly states it!), that this is a story all about that ripple effect, it is about the consequences of unknowns – little and large – and the decisions they lead people to take. Almost all the characters end up in a different place at the end of the book as a result of what happened at the picnic grounds that summer.

Now I know it doesn’t matter what happened to Miranda, Marion, Irma and Miss McCraw. It only matters that they did disappear that day and the effect on everyone else. I am definitely interested to re-read this with a different perspective, and I picked up the eBook for 99p recently, so I am prepared to do so at some point in the future, with my literary cap on.

While I have been a little disappointed by this book, I think I made mistakes in approaching it, and I’d definitely recommend it and will read it again in the future.

For Law of Fives, this is a book by an Australian author, it’s (just) under 200 pages, and it’s Historical and Literary! Not bad going.