Time without clocks: the key to Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock

It’s lovely down in the woods today, but safer to stay at home” warns the rhyme about the teddy bears’ picnic. And if only Miranda and her school friends had heeded that advice and avoided the panicky picnic that made them famous.

In my previous column I recalled the revival of the Australian film industry in the 1970s, among the best of the new wave of feature films Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, based on Joan Lindsay’s 1967 novel. Let me tell you now about how I bonded with the author, and how that led to me doing a Hercule Poirot and solving its mystery.

It’s 1975, the year Weir’s film was released. As a reporter for ABC-TV’s The Critics I’m tasked with reviewing an exhibition of Norman Lindsay’s paintings of naked ladies, a sisterhood that made Wagner’s women look like Twiggy. Though well aware of naughty Norman’s reputation – as a satyr, a hypersexual heterosexual – I responded to the canvases with a heretical suggestion: “If I didn’t know better I’d swear Lindsay was homosexual.”

Next morning came a phone call from Lady Lindsay, wife of Norman’s curmudgeonly brother Sir Daryl. I expected an earful. Instead Joan couldn’t have been more charming, purring: “Daryl and I always thought that!” An improbable friendship blossomed.

“This is my magic day,” she announced one February upon arriving at our place in Melbourne with her formidable husband. “I met Daryl on Valentine’s Day, we married on Valentine’s Day and this is Valentine’s Day.” And, yes, her fabled and entirely fictional picnic took place on St Valentine’s Day. First clue.

Second and third clues. When I visited the Lindsays’ home, Joan pointed out the absence of clocks and reminded me of the title of her autobiography: Time Without Clocks. “I can’t even wear a watch. If I do it just stops,” she said. You might recall this happening to the driver of the schoolgirls’ coach. Joan shared a belief with Jacquetta Hawkes, wife of J.B. Priestley, that time is an illusion, that past and present and future are not sequential but coexist, like points on a map. And if that sounds eccentric remember that Einstein, among other theoretical physicists, agrees.

There were other clues I’d discover without Joan’s help – like a painting of a Hanging Rock picnic, depicting the paradox of ladies with parasols in its looming shadow, that Daryl had in his office when he was director of the National Gallery of Victoria. Or her book’s eerie parallels with elements of E.M. Forster’s Passage to India.

But you get the idea. Picnic is not merely fiction but science fiction. No, Miranda and her mates weren’t abducted by aliens. They are not lost in the physical world but lost in time. And as far as Joan was concerned they could return tomorrow, descending from the rock perhaps bewildered but otherwise unharmed.

I went through that list of clues with Joan and – apart from dismissing the cross-reference to the mysticism of E.M. Forster and the apparent links between her Miranda and his Adela Quested at their respective rocks – she smiled sweetly and agreed. But like Poirot I’m the perfect gentleman and kept her secrets secret. In a column written at the time I hinted at the explanation, but not at any private knowledge.

If you’re not doing anything yesterday, today or tomorrow (and remember they’re not sequential) perhaps we could synchronise watches and meet at Woodend? Not for a picnic but to welcome the girls back. To borrow from Gough, I’ve a feeling it’s time.