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Joan à Beckett Weigall, Lady Lindsay (16 November 189623 December 1984) was an Australian novelist, playwright, essayist, and visual artist. Trained in her youth as a painter, she published her first literary work in 1936 at age forty under a pseudonym, a satirical novel titled Through Darkest Pondelayo. Her second novel, Time Without Clocks, was published nearly thirty years later, and was a semi-autobiographical account of the early years of her marriage to artist Sir Daryl Lindsay.
In 1967, Lindsay published her most celebrated work, Picnic at Hanging Rock, a historical Gothic fiction novel detailing the vanishing of three schoolgirls and their teacher at the site of a monolith during one summer. The novel sparked critical and public interest for its ambivalent presentation as a Non-fiction as well as its vague conclusion, and is widely considered to be one of the most important Australian novels. It was adapted into a 1975 film of the same name.
She was also the author of several unpublished plays, and contributed essays, short stories, and poetry to numerous journals and publications throughout her career. After the death of Lindsay's husband in 1976, she spent her time involved in the local art community in Melbourne, and was involved in several exhibitions. Her last published work, Syd Sixpence (1982), was her first and only work of children's literature. Lindsay died of stomach cancer in 1984, after which her home was donated to the Australian National Trust; the Lindsay estate now operates as a museum with her and her husband Daryl's artwork and personal effects.
In 1909 at the age of thirteen, Lindsay was sent to a local boarding school, then called Carhue, to complete her education. During Lindsay's time there the school went through a change in ownership and was renamed the Clyde Girls' Grammar School; she was a model student. The school was relocated to near Mount Macedon, five years after Joan's final year. After graduating from Clyde, Lindsay considered becoming an architect, but decided to study art instead, enrolling at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School in Melbourne in 1916. There, while studying painting, she was educated by Bernard Hall and Frederick McCubbin.
In 1920 she began sharing a Melbourne studio with Maie Ryan (later Lady Casey). Joan exhibited her watercolours and oils at two Melbourne exhibitions in 1920, one of which was titled "The Neo-Pantechnicists" and exhibited with the Victorian Artists Society. She and Casey also collaborated on an unfinished book together, titled Portrait of Anna.
When the couple returned to live in Australia, they renovated a farmhouse in Baxter — Mulberry Hill — and lived there until the Great Depression forced them to take up more humble lodgings in Bacchus Marsh, renting out their home until the economic situation improved. During this time, Lindsay shifted her focus from painting to writing, and wrote two plays, both of which explored the uncanny and the macabre — Cataract, and Wolf!, the latter of which was a collaboration with Margot Goyder and Ann Joske ("Margot Neville"), Australia's best-known detective story writers at the time. Though neither of the plays was published, Wolf! was performed on stage in Swanage, England in May 1930.
After returning from travel in England and Europe, Lindsay published her first novel, ', in 1936, under the pseudonym Serena Livingstone-Stanley '. Published by Chatto & Windus in the United Kingdom, the novel is structured as a parody of popular travel books of the time but filled with intentional grammatical errors, also functioning as a satire on English tourists abroad. According to Lindsay's cousin Martin Boyd, the novel was "one of the best collections of malapropisms in the English language." Lindsay helped Boyd write the outline for his novel, Nuns in Jeopardy'' (1940).
Lindsay also contributed articles, reviews and stories to various magazines and newspapers on art, literature and prominent people. In 1928, she interviewed actress Margaret Bannerman for Victoria's The Weekly Courier, and, in 1941, co-authored the History of the Australian Red Cross with husband Daryl. In 1942, Lindsay published an essay of literary criticism on novelist George Moore in The Age, titled "A Modern of the Nineties. George Moore: literary craftsman."
During this period, Daryl Lindsay abandoned painting to become Director of the National Gallery of Victoria, a position he held between 1942 and 1955. The position necessitated their relocation to Melbourne until his retirement. They retained their country home during their Victoria sojourn. When Daryl was knighted in 1956, Joan became known as Lady Lindsay.
Her semi-autobiographical novel Time Without Clocks describes her wedding and idyllic early married life. The work takes its title from a strange ability which Joan described herself as having, of stopping clocks and machinery when she came close. The title also plays on the idea that this period in her life was unstructured and free. This was followed with Facts Soft and Hard, a humorous, semi-autobiographical account of the Lindsays' travels in the United States while Daryl was on a Fulbright Award, which took the couple to New York City on a study tour of American art collections held by the Carnegie Corporation.
The novel is historical fiction, though Lindsay dropped hints that it was based on an actual event, and is framed as such in the novel's introduction. 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 1987 as a standalone book titled The Secret of Hanging Rock, and also included critical commentary and interpretive theories on the novel. Lindsay based Appleyard College, the setting for the novel, on the school that she had attended, Clyde Girls Grammar School (Clyde School), at East St Kilda, Melbourne—which in 1919 was transferred to Woodend, Victoria, in the immediate vicinity of Hanging Rock.
In a 1974 interview, Lindsay addressed readers' and critics' questioning about the novel's ambiguous conclusion, saying:
Well, it was written as a mystery and it remains a mystery. If you can draw your own conclusions, that's fine, but I don't think that it matters. I wrote that book as a sort of atmosphere of a place, and it was like dropping a stone into the water. I felt that story, if you call it a story—that the thing that happened on St. Valentine's Day went on spreading, out and out and out, in circles.
The novel's ambiguous conclusion led to significant interest from both public and critical readers, and the novel has drawn comparisons from literary critics to the work of E.M. Forster and Nathaniel Hawthorne. It was made into a 1975 feature film by producers Patricia Lovell, Hal and Jim McElroy, and director Peter Weir, which was hailed as initiating the revival of Australian cinema. A re-printing of the novel in 1975 by Penguin Books in Australia sold over 350,000 copies, making it Penguin Australia's best-selling novel to date (second, overall, only to Albert Facey's autobiography, A Fortunate Life).
In 1972, she reunited with Lady Maie Casey and held an art exhibition at the McLelland in Langwarrin. Artist Rick Amor and his children, who had lived in a cottage of Lindsay's property, led her to resurrect an unpublished children's book she had written, titled Syd Sixpence, which she published in 1982. Amor supplied illustrations for the book, which tells the story of Syd, an anthropomorphic sixpence coin's adventures on the ocean floor. Lindsay also worked on another novel, entitled Love at the Billabong, which was left unfinished.
Lindsay died of stomach cancer at Peninsula Private Hospital in Frankston, Melbourne on 23 December 1984, aged 88. She was cremated, and her ashes are interred at Creswick Cemetery in Creswick, Shire of Hepburn in Victoria, Australia. As the Lindsays had no children, their Mulberry Hill home in Langwarrin South, Victoria was donated at her wishes to the National Trust upon her death. The Mulberry Hill estate is open to the public for self-guided tours, and contains both Joan and Daryl Lindsay's original artwork and personal possessions.
Lindsay's visual artwork has been exhibited posthumously as part of the National Women's Art Exhibition in Australia.
In 2025, foremost Australian biographer, Brenda Niall published Lindsay's biography, Joan Lindsay. The hidden life of the woman who wrote Picnic at Hanging Rock.
Novels and memoirs
Bibliography
Bibliography adapted from the State Library Victoria archive.
Books
Short stories
Journal contributions
Unpublished works
Plays
See also
Sources
(2026). 9780702235986, University of Queensland Press. ISBN 9780702235986
External links
Categories: 1896 Births, 1984 Deaths, 20th-century Australian Novelists, Australian Women Painters, Australian Poets, Australian Satirical Novelists, Deaths From Cancer In Victoria, Deaths From Stomach Cancer In Australia, Writers From Melbourne, 20th-century Australian Women Novelists, 20th-century Australian Essayists, People From St Kilda, Victoria, Joan, National Gallery Of Victoria Art School Alumni, Wives Of Knights
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