Picnic at Hanging Rock

[GoEagles]

What do you think happened to the girls and the teacher (played by Nell Mangel - from Neighbours) who went missing at Hanging Rock?

Some theories:

* There was a landslide and they were all burried by rocks

* They were murdered by Michael - the guy with the red hair

* They were murdered by the guy who used to be Noni Hazelhursts husband.

* The fat girl ate the others.

What do you think happened?¿?

 

[CJ]

The fat girl ate them!

Either that or they all just went down the other side of the hill and did a runner!

 

[NYMets]

I've forgotten but is it based on fact? What do they think really hapened?

 

[GoEagles]

It's fiction, but It would be good if something like that really did happen with no explanation to what happened.

 

[blues^rock]

i thought it was based on fact???
i'm pretty sure anyway... maybe thats jsut something my parents told me to scare me when i went there as a little kid
i reckon they ran away and jsut never came back... eitehr that or teh fat girl ate them

 

[NYMets]

The place is real..the story made-up?

 

[Leia]

the place is real, but the story is fiction. it has been thought to have been based on fact since it was published, just because of the way it was written.

as for what happened to them - there is a final chapter published seperately that explains what happened. it was a totally bizarre thing where they each turned into an animal (one was a lizard i thnk ) and then they just crawled away or whatever. it happened because of a strange 'force' of some kind emitted from the rock. totally freaky!!!

(and i'm not making this up, as perculiar as it sounds - i borrowed the book from the library, and it comes with a commentary on why it wasn't published with the main text - i.e. because it is majorly weird!)

 

[Waltzing Woof Biscuit]

Aaahhh PAHR...gotta love those panpipes.

Picnic the movie is based on a novel by Joan Lindsay, published in 1967. This is from memory, but as a preface to the book she writes something like 'whether this story is fact or fiction, the event took place so long ago, and the main protagonists would have long disappeared, so it hardly seems to matter.'

This coy introduction to her book probably belies the fact that it was published one chapter short - the final chapter, which provided an explanation for the girls' disappearance. Perhaps the omission of the chapter was her publisher's strategy to move more units - I don't know - but I'm guessing that Lindsay's intro was written after the decision to withhold the chapter was made.

The missing chapter did eventually make it into publication some twenty years later (I think after Lindsay's death) - and I'm drawing upon a faint memory of an article by Phillip Adams, who wrote about the event. Apparently, the disappearance of the girls had something to do with the co-existence of time in some sort of parallel universe situation (think Red Dwarf folks). Lindsay bought into the 'is time linear?' question. The girls stumbled upon a temporal vortex which sucked them into another age (all except for Miranda, who seemed to have a eerie sense of destiny about the whole ordeal).

Putting the last fantastic chapter aside, no-one to my knowledge has ever been able to substantiate the disappearance of the girls at Hanging Rock as fact. All who have fossicked around archival material have failed to find any media coverage of the event. I think that Lindsay was having a lend of us - i.e., purely doing what any self-respecting novelist aims to do.

 

[Leia]

Thanks WWB, made some sense of my ramblings.
been a few years since i read it, so my memory is a bit hazy.

 

[Waltzing Woof Biscuit]

No probs Leia We must have posted at the same time. But I think I prefer the lizard version actually. Sounds like fun!

 

[Leia]

LOL, fun? i dunno.
freaky? definitely!

 

[NYMets]

It happened only back in 1900 right? There should be newspaper clipping and people around who's relatives remember it if it had been real.

I love your XFiles take on things Woofer (love your name) and I remember the little final chapter book now..... but Leia's tale seems to mesh with the theory that it's a sacred site.

I love the pic by the way ...an innocent hill till you keep looking at it LOL

 

[Waltzing Woof Biscuit]

Cheers NYM! Perhaps what I'm remembering is very much Adams's spin on things. But theories abound methinks. The 'sacred site' angle is certainly one of the more popular.

Personally, if the girls did turn into lizards, I reckon that it would make the 'fat girl ate them' theory a hell of a lot more feasible - but not necessarily more digestible.

 

[NYMets]

lol They say it tastes like chicken.

Adams would prob know from experiece about aliens

 

[Dr AlfAndrews]

The lizard explanation sounds like a load of old cobblers to me ... I reckon they just ran away ... Strewth, if I went to a school as stodgy as that one I think I'd rack off too.

Great music ... shame about the movie.

P.S. the girls that went missing were "nice lookers", especially the one that had "legs all the way up to her bum". It's a pity none of them could act their way out of a wet paper bag.