Winston Churchill once said of Russia, ‘It’s a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.’ He could have been describing the life of Joan Lindsay, in her latter years one of Australia’s most celebrated authors, and yet few people knew her well.
Brenda Niall, one of this nation’s most celebrated authors, particularly as a biographer, has turned her attention to the hidden life of Joan Lindsay, the woman who wrote Picnic at Hanging Rock.
That remarkable novel, written when Lindsay was in her late 60s, made her name. But before and after the novel, then the highly successful movie of the same name, she was in the shadow of her husband, ebullient Sir Daryl Lindsay, a high achiever as a gallery director, painter, entrepreneur and expert networker.
Niall claims that Joan entertained for Sir Daryl, supported his career, and was known as much for her flower arrangements as for her ideas.
Clear-eyed about Joan’s early life, Niall describes her as being born into solid privilege and casual neglect in Melbourne. She was well endowed with money and social position but her parents had wanted a son and were disappointed by the birth of a third daughter in 1896.
Niall had interviewed Lady Lindsay, then 87, when researching a biography of Martin Boyd, Lady Lindsay’s cousin. She had seemed vague and understated about herself as an artist, despite early art studies and a wide art knowledge.
Niall paints a word portrait of Joan Lindsay as a highly self-contained, very private person, happiest in the couple’s rural home, but a willing and knowledgeable volunteer at the National Gallery in Melbourne after her husband became its director.
To the end of her life, Joan Lindsay maintained that Picnic at Hanging Rock was a mystery story, and she had no idea what had happened to its subject schoolgirls.
Reviewed by Jennifer Somerville
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Brenda Niall is one of Australia’s foremost biographers. She is the author of several award-winning biographies, including her acclaimed accounts of the Boyd family and her portrait of the Durack sisters, True North. Her biography Joan Lindsay, of the author of Picnic at Hanging Rock, was released in 2025. In 2016 she won the Australian Literature Society’s Gold Medal and the National Biography Award for Mannix.
In 2004 she was awarded the Order of Australia for ‘services to Australian literature, as an academic, biographer and literary critic’.
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