Many years ago when I was in High School I read the novel 'Picnic at Hanging Rock' by Joan Lindsay, that was first published in 1967. I remember that at the time, I had absolutely no idea what happened to the missing schoolgirls and Miss McCraw.
In about 1989 I became aware of the existence of a book called 'The Secret of Hanging Rock' that was published in 1987. It contained a chapter that was supposedly the final chapter of 'Picnic at Hanging Rock' that revealed the mystery of what happened to the missing people, but was removed before the novel was originally published, and hence few people knew of its existence. I remember saying to myself, "I must buy that and find out what happened," but I didn't.
In late 1997, I finally decided to track down a copy of 'The Secret of Hanging Rock', and discovered that it was out of print. After a bit of searching I bought a copy from a second-hand bookshop, and set myself a task. I promised myself that I wouldn't read "the secret", until I re-read the original novel and had a fair attempt at working out what happened to the missing people. So a week or two later, having re-read 'Picnic at Hanging Rock' once, and in particular chapter 3 about ten times I thought I had worked it out. With great joy I opened up 'The Secret of Hanging Rock', pretty sure that I knew what was coming. Oh, how wrong I was! I was shocked at the solution it described. Hmmmm...!
I wrote the essay below on what I thought the solution was and published it on the Web in 1998. The couple of paragraphs that relate to 'Time Without Clocks' were added in 2003:
Solution to 'Picnic at Hanging
Rock'?
Click here for a PDF version of the essay.
The Secret of Hanging Rock:
'The Secret of Hanging Rock' is very hard to find these days in second-hand bookshops. It hasn't been published for many years. So to put people out of their misery here is a summary of it's Chapter Eighteen :-)
So what
do I think of Chapter Eighteen? I don't think it's a very good solution because
it just raises a lot more questions and provides very few answers. In my opinion
it seems inconsistent with the rest of the novel and has a different feel to it.
A lot could be said, but not now...
Hanging Rock is a real place:
Hanging Rock is located in state of Victoria, Australia.
Enter the
following geographic coordinates into Google Earth to view:
-37.3304,144.5945
otherwise you can try either of these links:
Google Earth link
Google Maps link
Photos of Hanging Rock:
Some photos of Hanging Rock are here.
For comments or feedback e-mail me at brett.mckenzie@mck.com.au.