Picnic at Hanging Rock (novel)

Picnic At Hanging Rock (novel)

Picnic at Hanging Rock is a 1967 drama and mystery novel by Australian author Joan Lindsay. She wrote it over a four-week period at her home Mulberry Hill in Baxter, on Victoria's Mornington Peninsula. It was first published in 1967 in Australia by Cheshire Publishing and was released in paperback by Penguin in 1970. The plot focuses on a group of girls at an Australian women's college in the year 1900 who vanish during a Valentine's Day picnic at the site of an enormous rock formation. The novel is often discussed and debated due to its ambiguous ending.

The rock formation featured in the story, Hanging Rock, is a geological formation located in Victoria, Australia. The novel was adapted into a film of the same name in 1975 by director Peter Weir.