Early life Joan à Beckett Weigall was born in
St Kilda East, Victoria, Australia, a suburb of
Melbourne, the third daughter of Theyre à Beckett Weigall, a prominent judge. His
cousin,
William Arthur Callendar à Beckett, was father to
Emma Minnie Boyd and thus Lindsay was related to the
Boyd family including writer
Martin Boyd. Her mother, Ann Sophie Weigall (née Hamilton), was the daughter of the
Scottish born
Sir Robert Hamilton, a
Governor of Tasmania; she was a musician born and raised in
Dublin. Lindsay had two sisters, Mim and Nancy, and a brother, Theyre Jr. and exhibited with the
Victorian Artists Society. 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, at her home Mulberry Hill in
Baxter, on Victoria's
Mornington Peninsula, and constructed it around the real-life
Hanging Rock, a monolith that had fascinated her since her childhood. She compared the story to the work of
Henry James, citing the "book about the children in a haunted house with a governess" (
The Turn of the Screw). 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. 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. ==Bibliography==