Brenda Niall is one of Australia’s foremost biographers. She is the author of several award-winning biographies, including her acclaimed accounts of the Boyd family and her portrait of the Durack sisters, True North. In 2016 she won the Australian Literature Society’s Gold Medal and the National Biography Award for Mannix. In 2004 she was awarded the Order of Australia for ‘services to Australian literature, as an academic, biographer and literary critic’. She writes full-time, and is a frequent reviewer for the Age, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Australian Book Review.

We had the privilege of interviewing Niall on her unearthing of Picnic At Hanging Rock’s mysterious author, Joan Lindsay, in her latest biography.

What inspired you to write a biography on Joan Lindsay, and how was that influenced in any way by your personal meeting with her in 1984? 

Biographers know that man is not an island – or woman either. You find lots of other people’s stories along the way as you explore your subject’s life. I found Joan Lindsay while I was writing the life of her cousin, novelist Martin Boyd. She made an impression – I remembered and thought about her, but it wasn’t for thirty years that I thought of putting her at the centre of a biography. I thought of her creative old age  – perhaps because I had grown old myself. Anyway, I hadn’t forgotten her.

Joan Lindsay’s life was a mystery to many of us and your book delves into some of her personal struggles. What did you find most surprising about her during your research? 

Here were a lot of struggles beneath the smooth surface. Most surprising? Perhaps her determination after a lifetime of role-playing of model wife, hostess, social being to do something of her own,  express her own separate self. 

Lindsay’s talent was initially overshadowed by the male voices around her, one of them being her husband’s. How do you think that shaped her voice and place within the literary industry? 

I think her husband’s voice was almost overwhelming. But Picnic leaves his world behind. Daryl has nothing to say about the ancient Rock: it is another world and out of time. 

Picnic at Hanging Rock is considered an Aussie classic. What about it do you think contributes to its appeal that has lasted through generations? 

It hasn’t always been seen as an Australian classic. It’s quite different from the Henry Lawson outback tale. Perhaps its vision of the bush has drawn readers over the years. It is on a quite different scale: austere and undomesticated, terrifying.

You also shed light on Lindsay’s connection to the Australian natural landscape as well as her more unconventional beliefs of time. What can we make of her preference for time without clocks in relation to Picnic at Hanging Rock?

Her nonchalance about clock time predates Picnic by many years. The memoir Time Without Clocks plays fast and loose with the dates. I found its account of her life wasn’t factual – at least her facts had shifted about to satisfy her dramatic sense. 

Joan Lindsay’s godfather, anthropologist Sir Baldwin Spencer, was an acute observer of the life of the First Nations people that he saw, but he had little or no sense of their long history. Joan inherited that limited view but imaginatively she saw something – the land itself that transcended human history. To whom did that land belong? was her radical question. 

You delve deeper into the themes and stylistic techniques of Picnic at Hanging Rock but in a way that encourages readers to interpret the possibilities of how the characters and plot of the novel came to be. Often you preface your insights with phrases like “it may be”. This reflects your approach to the craft, seeing biographies as solving a puzzle to some extent. Why do you find this approach to writing biographies particularly important? 

I mistrust certainty. If as a biographer, your central character doesn’t surprise you now and then, you’re in trouble.

Lindsay herself was very private and in some ways protective of her marriage. How did you decide what to reveal and which pieces of information to keep while writing this biography?

I revealed what I knew and brought my guesses out cautiously using the evidence, but not closing down on possibilities. In biography, as in life, you can be wrong.

Much of Lindsay’s life was a mystery, which is a word that is constantly mentioned throughout the book. Are there any parts of Joan’s personality, desires, or any facet of her inner world that you still struggle to interpret more than others?

Joan was so silent about her wish for children that even close friends were unsure about it. It emerges only from the memories of the children she ‘adopted.’

In this book you explore how Mulberry Hill was a huge part of Lindsay’s self portrait, which reminded you of your own mother’s feeling for your family home in Kew. What do you think were some of the most significant connections between Lindsay and Mulberry Hill?

Mulberry Hill, I think, gave Joan creative space to express herself.  It was the happiest part of her marriage though it had some dark places. Her garden was an escape.

Something that I found was amplified through your book was just how exemplary women were in making the most out of their circumstances (with Joan and her marriage as well as the environment that she was in) and finding a way to exercise their creativity amidst all the odds that were against them. How do you think Lindsay’s story adds to the conversation about the ‘invisible’ or ‘hidden’ women whose writing lives may be underrecognized or lesser known?

Yes, the extent to which women improved their lives is extraordinary. We will never know how many were thwarted by social or personal commitments.

It is clear from your meticulous research on Joan Lindsay that there is a wealth of knowledge about Australia’s literary culture waiting to be uncovered and untapped. Are there any other literary figures whose lives you would like to delve deeper into? 

Lindsay’s output was very small, though significant. She had some advantages- she knew publishers for example. There would be many women who were left outside the door, but of course it is impossible to measure the personal cost of their exclusion.

What do you hope readers learn about Joan Lindsay from your biography? 

I don’t think a biography should set out to teach a moral lesson. It should explore whatever there is but there could be a lesson in Joan’s late career. We will never know how much she might have done but her Picnic at Hanging Rock makes an exciting ending for her career. What she did in old age reminds me of a Robert Frost line from The Oven Bird. 

The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing. 

It can be wonderful.

Joan Lindsay: The Hidden Life of the Woman who Wrote Picnic at Hanging Rock is available online and in-store at Roaring Stories.

Have a look at our previous interview with Brenda Niall here.