Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders can trace their ancestry in Australia, through oral histories as well as through geological records, as far back as 60,000 years before the present time. Australia’s colonial history is much shorter. Captain James Cook led a British exploratory journey aboard the Endeavour from 1768 to 1771, during which he journeyed along the east coast of Australia.

Australia was subsequently labeled Terra Nullius by Britain—a Latin phrase meaning “nobody’s land.” This entirely discounted the many nations of Indigenous Australians who lived there. Britain, suffering from overcrowding, particularly in its prisons, established a penal colony at Botany Bay—modern-day Sydney—where convicts were sent to serve their sentences. There was also a movement of free British settlers to Australia, who were primarily attracted by the huge swathes of unclaimed land for agricultural or mining purposes (the British did not recognize land ownership of Indigenous groups).

Picnic at Hanging Rock is set in the Australian colony of Victoria. The first Victorian settlement, in present-day Sorrento, was briefly settled and then abandoned in 1803. A more permanent settlement of the area around present-day Melbourne was established in 1835, called Port Phillip. Settlers expanded outward in subsequent decades.