Picnic at Hanging Rock

If Albert was right and they were only schoolgirls about the same age as his sisters in England, how was it they were allowed to set out alone, at the end of a summer afternoon? He reminded himself that he was in Australia now: Australia, where anything might happen. In England everything had been done before: quite often by one’s own ancestors, over and over again. He sat down on a fallen log, heard Albert calling him through the trees, and knew that this was the country where he, Michael Fitzhubert, was going to live.

“I feel perfectly awful! When are we going home?” Miranda was looking at her so strangely, almost as if she wasn’t seeing her. When Edith repeated the question more loudly, she simply turned her back and began walking away up the rise, the other two following a little way behind. Well, hardly walking —sliding over the stones on their bare feet as if they were on a drawing-room carpet… […] “Come back, all of you! Don’t go up there – come back!” She felt herself choking and tore at her frilled lace collar. […] To her horror all three girls were fast moving out of sight behind the monolith.

For three consecutive mornings the Australian public had been devouring, along with its bacon and eggs, the luscious details of the College Mystery as it was now known to the Press. Although no further information had been unearthed and nothing resembling a clue, […] the public must be fed. To this end, some additional spice had been added to Wednesday’s columns’ photographs of the Hon. Michael’s ances­tral home, Haddingham Hall […] and of course Irma Leopold’s beauty and reputed millions on coming of age.

Greatly to Mrs. Cutler’s surprise the lamb had been brought in just as she had been lying on the Rock, without a corset. A modest woman, for whom the word corset was never uttered by a lady in the presence of a gent, she had made no comment to the doctor […] Thus the valuable clue of the missing corset was never followed up nor communicated to the police. Nor to the inmates of Appleyard College where Irma Leopold, well known for her fastidious taste […] had been seen by several of her classmates, on the morning of [the picnic] wearing a pair of long, lightly boned, French satin stays.

The girl so far had remembered nothing of her experiences on the Rock; nor, in Doctor McKenzie’s opinion or that of the two eminent special­ists from Sydney and Melbourne, would she ever remember. A portion of the delicate mechanism of the brain appeared to be irrevocably damaged. “Like a clock, you know,” the doctor explained. “A clock that stops under a certain set of unusual conditions and refuses ever to go again beyond a particular point.”

“If I may say so, now that you are no longer under my care, your teachers were continually complaining to me of your lack of application. Even a girl with your expectations should be able to spell.” The words were hardly out of her mouth before she realized that she had made a strategic blunder. It was above all things necessary not to further antagonize the wealthy Leopolds. Money is power. Money is strength and safety. Even silence has to be paid for.

They see the walls of the gymnasium fading into an exquisite transparency, the ceiling opening up like a flower into the brilliant sky above the Hanging Rock. The shadow of the Rock is flowing, luminous as water, across the shimmering plain and they are at the picnic, sitting on the warm dry grass under the gum trees. […] The shadow of the Rock has grown darker and longer. They sit rooted to the ground and cannot move. The dreadful shape is a living monster lumbering towards them across the plain, scattering rocks and boulders. So near now, they can see the cracks and hollows where the lost girls lie rotting in a filthy cave.