Episode 10.4: ‘Picnic at Hanging Rock’ by Joan Lindsay
While I feel like I’ve known about the existence of ‘Picnic at Hanging Rock’ by Joan Lindsay for so very long, it even has a film adaptation, but the mysterious synopsis and the question is asks about fact vs fiction really speak to our dark academia adjacent desires.
A cloudless summer day in the year nineteen hundred...
Everyone at Appleyard College for Young Ladies agreed it was just right for a picnic at Hanging Rock. After lunch, a group of three girls climbed into the blaze of the afternoon sun, pressing on through the scrub into the shadows of Hanging Rock. Further, higher, till at last they disappeared.
They never returned.
Is Picnic at Hanging Rock fact or fiction? Only you can truly decide.
I do enjoy when our dark academia adjacent titles allow us to tick of classics that have lingered on my TBR for years (and years), but how will this classic Australian thriller inform dark academia as we know it?
In this episode we discuss:
Context - The time period this book is set in. Australia 1900.
Colonialism and elitism
Narrative perspective and how it can effect the reading experience
You can listen to it here:
TEXTS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
‘Picnic at Hanging Rock’ by Joan Lindsay
OTHER MEDIA AND POP CULTURE MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
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