About Joan Lindsay: Joan Lindsay, Lady Lindsay was an Australian author, best known for her "ambiguous and intriguing" novel Picnic at Hanging Rock.
Everything, if you could only see it clearly enough, like this, is beautiful and complete. Everything has its own perfection.
Any artist is insulted by the suggestion that art is merely a matter of recording reality, and knows that it is impossible to explain how imagination can transform not only events and people, but the artist as well, into quite different "realities".
But one day she handed me some more letters from people who had been researching fruitlessly through old newspapers, hoping to find the "real" events. I remarked that it was sad they wasted so much time. "Yes," said Joan - and then, absently, "but so...
Irma, a few feet behind the other two, saw them suddenly halt, swaying a little, with heads bent and hands pressed to their breasts as if to steady themselves against a gale.
Radiantly lovely at seventeen, the little heiress was without personal vanity or pride of possession. She loved people and things to be beautiful, and pinned a bunch of wildflowers into her coat with as much pleasure as a breathtaking diamond brooch....
The immediate impact of its soaring peaks induced a silence so impregnated with its powerful presence that even Edith was struck dumb.
Miranda,' she called again. 'Miranda!' In the breathless silence her voice seemed to belong to somebody else, a long way off, a harsh little croak fading out amongst the rocky walls. 'Come back, all of you! Don't go up there - come back!' She felt he...
The plain below was just visible; infinitely vague and distant. Peering down between the boulders Irma could see the glint of water and tiny figures coming and going through drifts of rosy smoke, or mist. 'Whatever can those people be doing do there ...
Irma was aware, for a little while, of a rather curious sound coming up from the plain. Like the beating of far-off drums.
Although we are necessarily concerned, in a chronicle of events, with physical action by the light of day, history suggests that the human spirit wanders farthest in the silent hours between midnight and dawn. Those dark fruitful hours, seldom record...
