Picnic at Hanging Rock

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders can trace their ancestry in Australia, through oral histories as well as through geological records, as far back as 60,000 years before the present time. Australia’s colonial history is much shorter. Captain James Cook led a British exploratory journey aboard the Endeavour from 1768 to 1771, during which he journeyed along the east coast of Australia.

Australia was subsequently labeled Terra Nullius by Britain—a Latin phrase meaning “nobody’s land.” This entirely discounted the many nations of Indigenous Australians who lived there. Britain, suffering from overcrowding, particularly in its prisons, established a penal colony at Botany Bay—modern-day Sydney—where convicts were sent to serve their sentences. There was also a movement of free British settlers to Australia, who were primarily attracted by the huge swathes of unclaimed land for agricultural or mining purposes (the British did not recognize land ownership of Indigenous groups).

Picnic at Hanging Rock is set in the Australian colony of Victoria. The first Victorian settlement, in present-day Sorrento, was briefly settled and then abandoned in 1803. A more permanent settlement of the area around present-day Melbourne was established in 1835, called Port Phillip. Settlers expanded outward in subsequent decades. The area around Mount Macedon, where Picnic at Hanging Rock takes place, was settled by a number of farmers in the 1890s, and Melbourne’s wealthy elite began to establish vacation properties in the area in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This is reflected in the novel through the Fitzhubert family’s estate at Lake View.

Victoria was more class conscious than many other Australian colonies. Class divisions were systemically enforced in trains (where there was first-, second-, and third-class seating), theaters, clubs, pubs, and churches. Historian Paul de Serville describes Victoria’s upper class, who remained staunchly loyal to British aesthetics and class structures, as a “would-be aristocracy valiantly defending ‘decent manners and educated tastes’” (de Serville, Paul. Melbourne: “Port Phillip Gentlemen.” Oxford University Press. 1980). Even now, Melbourne has a reputation of being “more refined” and class conscious than Australia’s other major cities (“History of Melbourne.” Only Melbourne, 2023). The fictional Appleyard College, which purports to be a school for well-bred young ladies, reflects the aristocratic reputation of the area. Furthermore, Mike attends fancy parties with well-to-do local families (although, accustomed to the British aristocracy, Mike finds the social strata in Australia comparatively egalitarian).

As in other parts of Australia, settlement in the Mount Macedon region had a catastrophic impact on traditional landowners; the Wurundjeri people, who are a part of the Kulin nation, suffered from dispossession and genocide as colonial Australians established farms, mines, and towns in the area (“Ancestors and Past.” Wurundjeri, 2023).

On January 1, 1901, the six self-governing British colonies—Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia, and Tasmania—were federated as the nation of Australia. The Northern Territory joined this newly federated country in 1911. Picnic at Hanging Rock is set one year before the federation of the nation of Australia, in the year 1900.