If Joan Lindsay is known to contemporary readers, it is as the author of the classic Australian novel Picnic at Hanging Rock, which was published in 1967 and made into a feature film directed by Peter Weir in 1975. What is surprising about Brenda Niall’s engrossing biography of Lindsay is how little of it is devoted to Picnic at Hanging Rock, which was published when its author was 71 years old.
Lindsay abandoned her first vocation, as a painter, when she was in her 20s. Her list of published works is short, comprising an early pseudonymous novel, occasional journalism, two memoirs and one late-career showstopper of a novel. This biography is not, accordingly, an account of the artist at work but rather a complex and often poignant narrative of a thwarted creative life. It is the portrait of a middle-class marriage in which the husband’s career is granted priority without question.
There’s a version of Lindsay’s life story that is defined by the men in her life. She was the daughter of a judge and the granddaughter of a state governor. She was married to painter Daryl Lindsay, the director of the National Gallery of Victoria between 1942 and 1956, and later knighted for his services to the arts. Novelist Martin Boyd was her cousin, Frederick McCubbin was her drawing teacher and her friend Robert Menzies launched Picnic at Hanging Rock.
Lindsay lived most of her life in the shadow of these great men, although Boyd and McCubbin both encouraged her creative work. In Niall’s mordant phrasing, “Joan entertained for Sir Daryl, supported his career, and was known as much for her flower arrangements as for her ideas”.
The subtitle of this biography is “The hidden life of the woman who wrote Picnic at Hanging Rock”, a prompt to readers who might not recognise Lindsay’s name otherwise, as well as a caution that much about her subject remains hidden. Indeed, Niall intimates that the Lindsay archive upon which she relied in her research was strategically edited by Lindsay. Niall writes: “She burned many letters, including those that she had written to Daryl, and keeping only those she wanted to take her image and Daryl’s into the future.”
And so the biographer only has scraps of information about Lindsay’s private life to build her case that the writer greatly wanted a child and was not able to have one. Niall reads the lost child trope at the heart of Picnic at Hanging Rock as not only an elaboration of a familiar theme in Australian arts and letters, but as an expression of a deeply personal yearning on behalf of the author. She asks, “Did Joan see her fictional creation, Miranda, as a lost daughter, a child of her own, loved and waited for?” A literary critic might read the novel more closely for answers to this question, but Niall, one of Australia’s most distinguished literary historians, is scrupulous in her acknowledgment of the limits of the record on Lindsay’s childlessness and her husband’s suspected infidelities.
Although Niall suggests that the images and themes of Picnic at Hanging Rock had been brewing for Lindsay’s entire life, she presents a very glum thesis about what it was that finally jolted Lindsay out of her torpor as a wife and hostess: a public statement by her husband that she was possessed of “only a minor talent”. This assessment appeared in Daryl Lindsay’s 1965 memoir The Leafy Tree, a reflection on a long career in the arts. And thus, writes Niall, “out of the tangled emotions of anger and humiliation that she had spent her marriage containing or denying, Joan began to write something that astonished her with a power she hadn’t known she possessed”.
One hardly wants to thank Daryl Lindsay for insulting his wife. It seems remarkable, and rather unlikely, that Picnic at Hanging Rock was written at all. In revealing middle-class marriage as a hostile environment for creative practice for mid-century Australian women, Niall’s biography by implication stresses how exceptional the women who did manage to find and defend a place to write and to create were. Reading this biography is at times a melancholy undertaking, in that it evokes all the novels unwritten and the lives unrecorded, in favour of spruced mantelpieces and charming dinner parties.
The great pleasure of this new biography, however, is to share with Niall and Lindsay the author’s delight in her late success and her new identity as a writer. The scenes during which Picnic at Hanging Rock was filmed at Lindsay’s home, the closing chapters of the biography, are joyful and exuberant. Lindsay was engaged with every aspect of the production, curious, willing and hospitable. She made friends who stayed close to her in the last years of her life and cherished her as an artist in her own right, rather than as the capable wife of a great man.
Joan Lindsay by Brenda Niall is published by Text ($36.99)
