The unexpected start to my friendship with Lady Joan Lindsay

My story begins with a telly show I did half a century ago, when the ABC sent me to review an exhibition of Norman Lindsay’s paintings. Knowing little of art and less of Lindsay I was perfectly unqualified, but that didn’t stop me.

Sir Daryl and Lady Joan Lindsay in 1925. Picture: State Library of Victoria.

Digital restoration can give a new lease of life to old movies, and I await its application to ancient columnists. A rejuvenated Crocodile Dundee recently screened in Sydney, and a refreshed Picnic At Hanging Rock in NYC. Let us look at the latter.

My story begins with a telly show I did half a century ago, when the ABC sent me to review an exhibition of Norman Lindsay’s paintings at Melbourne Uni. Knowing little of art and less of Lindsay I was perfectly unqualified, but that didn’t stop me. I knew of Norm’s reputation as a sort of hypersexual Puck – but my response to his enormous oils was to make the heretical suggestion that the painter, far from being a hetero satyr, was, to use the term common at the time, a homo.

The following morning I got a phone call from Lady Joan Lindsay, wife of Norm’s brother Sir Daryl, then boss of the National Gallery of Victoria. Instead of the expected excoriation I heard Joan’s sweetly say, “Daryl and I always thought that.” Thus began a friendship that would last until her death at 88.

The Lindsays first visited my home before Picnic was released. “This is my magic day,” she beamed. “I met Daryl on St Valentines Day, we married on St Valentine’s Day, Picnic is set on St Valentine’s Day. And today is Valentine’s Day.” Her curmudgeon of a husband was unmoved, simply glaring at my collection of Ancient Egyptian art, which he detested.

Over the years Joan and I often discussed the mysterious Picnic, with her doing a sort of striptease of clues, until I could reveal that both novel and film were, essentially, science fiction in frilly frocks. But while hinting at this in a column, I kept Joan’s secret.

As her autobiography Time Without Clocks tells us, Joan did not accept the notion of linear time. Like Einstein, she believed in time’s
all-at-onceness – that past, present and future co-exist. So in Joan’s universe, Miranda could emerge from the Rock at any time. Whatever time is. Re-read the book – or watch Peter Weir’s digitally restored fillum.

I long looked for other inspirations for Joan’s novel, an adaptation of which is now being performed by the Sydney Thetre Company. I knew, for example, that Daryl had kept a small painting of a picnic at the Rock in his NGV office; and I often suspected that Joan had been influenced by EM Forster’s novel A Passage to India (there are some parallels). Then, towards the end of Joan’s long life, there was a final piece of the jigsaw.

I wrote a column on the strange, sad story of two ladies from an Oxford women’s college who’d visited Versailles in the first days of the 20th century – and had a supernatural experience in its gardens. They said they’d come upon the ghosts of Marie Antoinette and her entourage. They turned their experience into a bestseller, never to learn the truth: it seems friends of Oscar Wilde’s who enjoyed cross-dressing would, once a year, flounce around the place. Drag queens indeed. And the English visitors misinterpreted the encounter.

Gullible’s travels? If so, Joan was a fellow traveller. The day after publication of my column about Versailles, there was another phone call from darling Joan. Very excited. Though sad to read that the Oxford ladies’ story had a more-or-less rational explanation, she said: “Their book inspired me to write mine.”