Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock, Melbourne, FW Cheshire, 1967, Rare Books collection. Reproduced by kind permission of designer Alison Forbes.

Joan Lindsay's haunting 1967 novel (adapted for the screen in 1975 and 2018) has become a defining evocation of white Australia's fear of this ancient landscape. Set in 1900, it relates the unsolved disappearance of three schoolgirls and a teacher on Hanging Rock, in Victoria's Macedon region. The popularity of Lindsay's fictional story of white loss and fear combined with the lack of recognition of the site's real Indigenous history reflects contemporary Australia's uneasy navigation of its shared heritage.