Picnic at Hanging Rock. The comestibles and drinks.

22 June 2026

It’s undoubtedly the most famous of all picnics in Australia albeit a fictional one. It’s in Joan Lindsay’s 1967 novel Picnic at Hanging Rock. On Valentine’s Day 1900 some schoolgirls and two of their teachers from Appleyard College go on a picnic to a local landmark Hanging Rock. During it four of the girls go wandering around the rock away from the picnic. They never return because …  I won’t be a spoiler, read the book or watch the film.

My interest is in what they took to eat and drink during the picnic.

Read more.

Share

Small Mulch

Paul van Reyk
My first essay on food was in Year 10 - people seemed to like it. It took me 56 years to come back to it, so I have a lot of catching up to do. My focus is on Anglo-Saxon settler culinary ways in Australia, roughly from the first days of colonisation to the 1960s - 1970s. I particularly write about stuff that has not been written about before but is very much a part of the Anglo-Saxon Australian table. I hope you enjoy reading as much as I do writing.