When a group of teenage girls from an elite boarding school are taken on a Valentine's Day field trip to explore a local landmark, their subsequent disappearance causes understandable hysteria. As the girls remain missing, with no rational explanation forthcoming, what remains an unsolved mystery is invested with a mythology that seems to expose how polite society can be overwhelmed by outside forces not of its making. If such life-changing events sound like the stuff of sensation-seeking headlines in old time true crime magazines, this is possibly the effect Australian writer Joan Lindsay was going for when her novel, Picnic At Hanging Rock, was first published in 1967. Where a year previously Truman Capote had rendered real life events in novelistic form in his book, In Cold Blood, with Picnic At Hanging Rock, Lindsay flipped things on its head. By opening her book with an ambivalent disclaimer to authorial responsibility and ending it with a pseudo-historical newspaper report,
An archive of arts writing by Neil Cooper. Effete No Obstacle.