Joan Lindsay, Lady Lindsay (16 November 1896 – 23 December 1984) was an Australian author, best known for her "ambiguous and intriguing" novel Picnic at Hanging Rock.[1]
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Joan à Beckett Weigall was born in St Kilda East, Victoria, Australia, the third daughter of Theyre à Beckett Weigall, a prominent judge, and Ann Sophie Weigall née Hamilton, and was related to the Boyd family, perhaps Australia's most famous and prolific artistic dynasty. From 1916 to 1919 she studied painting at the National Gallery School, Melbourne. In 1920 she had a studio in Melbourne which she shared with Maie Ryan (later Lady Casey). Joan exhibited her watercolours and oils at two Melbourne exhibitions and also exhibited with the Victorian Artists Society.[2]
In 1922 Joan Weigall married Daryl Lindsay, in London on St. Valentine's Day. The day was always a very special occasion for her, and she set her most famous work, Picnic at Hanging Rock, on St. Valentine's Day. Sir Daryl was the youngest of the famous Lindsay family of artists and writers, the most famous of whom was Norman. He was a painter who had moderate success, particularly with his works on white flowers - a difficult subject to paint. When the couple returned to live in Australia, they renovated a farmhouse in Baxter, Mulberry Hill, and lived happily there until the Great Depression forced them to take up humble lodgings in Bacchus Marsh and rent out their home until the worst was over. With that difficult experience behind them, Daryl abandoned painting to become the Director of the Art Gallery of Victoria. The post required they move to Melbourne until his retirement, but they retained their country home. He was knighted in 1956, and she became Lady Lindsay.
Her work Time Without Clocks describes her wedding and idyllic early married life. The work takes its title from the strange ability Joan had of stopping clocks and machinery that was in her near vicinity, and also from the idea that this period in her life was unstructured and free.
Lindsay also wrote a number of plays which were never published, though one, Wolf, was performed. She contributed articles, reviews and stories to various magazines and newspapers on art, literature and prominent people. With her husband Daryl, she wrote the History of the Australian Red Cross. She and Daryl, along with Lord and Lady Casey were founding members of the National Trust of Victoria, and encouraged others to bequeath to the Trust. Lady Lindsay was very interested in the development of a national identity, and her work - in Peter Weir's hands - was hailed as beginning the Renaissance in Australian film. A childless couple, the Lindsay's donated their home, Mulberry Hill, to the National Trust on her death. It is open to the public on weekends and some weekdays.
Lady Lindsay died in Melbourne in 1984 of natural causes.
Picnic at Hanging Rock is her best known work. It was made into a feature film by producers Patricia Lovell, Hal and Jim McElroy, and director Peter Weir in 1975. The story is fiction, though Lindsay dropped hints that it was based on an actual event. An ending that explained the girls' fates, in draft form, was excised by her publisher prior to publication. The final chapter was published only in the 1980s, in accordance with her wishes.[1]
Lindsay based Appleyard College, the setting for the novel, on the school she attended, Clyde Girls Grammar School at East St Kilda, Melbourne, which incidentally in 1919 was transferred to Woodend, Victoria, in the immediate vicinity of Hanging Rock itself.[1]
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