25 Facts About Joan Lindsay

Joan a Beckett Weigall, Lady Lindsay was an Australian novelist, playwright, essayist, and visual artist.

Joan Lindsay's 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 novel detailing the vanishing of three schoolgirls and their teacher at the site of a monolith during one summer.

Joan Lindsay was the author of several unpublished plays, and contributed essays, short stories, and poetry to numerous journals and publications throughout her career.

Joan Lindsay's last published work, Syd Sixpence, was her first and only work of children's literature.

Joan Lindsay died of stomach cancer in 1984, after which her home was donated to the Australian National Trust; the Joan Lindsay estate now operates as a museum with her and her husband Daryl's artwork and personal effects.

Joan Lindsay a Beckett Weigall was born in St Kilda East, Victoria, Australia, a suburb of Melbourne, the third daughter of Theyre a Beckett Weigall, a prominent judge.

Joan Lindsay's mother, Ann Sophie Weigall, was the daughter of the Scottish born Sir Robert Hamilton, a Governor of Tasmania; she was a musician born and raised in Dublin.

Joan Lindsay had two sisters, Mim and Nancy, and a brother, Theyre Jr.

Joan Lindsay spent her early years in a mansion called "St Margaret's", at 151 Alma Road, East St Kilda.

In 1909 at the age of thirteen, Joan Lindsay was sent to a local boarding school, then called Carhue, to complete her education.

Joan Lindsay 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.

Joan Lindsay contributed articles, reviews and stories to various magazines and newspapers on art, literature and prominent people.

When Daryl was knighted in 1956, Joan became known as Lady Lindsay.

The work takes its title from a strange ability which Joan Lindsay described herself as having, of stopping clocks and machinery when she came close.

Picnic at Hanging Rock, published in 1967, is Joan Lindsay's best known work.

Joan Lindsay wrote the novel over a four-week period 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.

Joan Lindsay compared the story to the work of Henry James, citing the "book about the children in a haunted house with a governess".

The novel is historical fiction, though Joan Lindsay dropped hints that it was based on an actual event, and is framed as such in the novel's introduction.

In 1969, Joan Lindsay suffered severe injuries in a car accident and she required months of convalescence.

Joan Lindsay painted several works in her later years, and she was lauded by the art critic, Alan McCulloch.

Artist Rick Amor and his children, who had lived in a cottage of Joan Lindsay's property, led her to resurrect an unpublished children's book she had written, titled Syd Sixpence, which she published in 1982.

Joan Lindsay worked on another novel, entitled Love at the Billabong, which was left unfinished.

Joan Lindsay died of stomach cancer at Peninsula Private Hospital in Frankston, Melbourne on 23 December 1984, aged 88.

Joan Lindsay was cremated, and her ashes are interred at Creswick Cemetery in Creswick, Shire of Hepburn in Victoria, Australia.