A few items to do with my interactions with the location and film Picnic at Hanging Rock. No other place – nor movie – has quite the hold on me.
The Typewriter
Joan Lindsay wrote the fictional book in 1967. It apparently came to her quickly and in a series of dreams and she would get up and write it all down. This was done at their lovely house Mulberry Hill at Langwarrin South in Victoria. It’s not far from Mt Eliza on the Peninsula. We went there in 2017 and here’s a photo I took:
The very typewriter she used to write the book is still there, in-situ:
Three Mysterious Visits by Me
1. Upset tough kids on the bus
It was a relatively short gap between the book (1967) and film (1975). But in that gap my first mysterious visit to Hanging Rock took place. I hadn’t read the book, but there were rumours of three girls having gone missing on the Rock.
Around 1974 or early 75 (before the film) we went on a school bus trip there. I was 13 or 14. All was going well, but then – as we were walking back to the bus – I could hear the commotion.
Some of the ‘school toughs’ had been exploring the Rock – like all of us – and claimed to have seen three skulls in one of the many deep crevices. They were actually crying.
2. Lost in silence in a crowd
The family went up there again, a few years later. Maybe 1978, so after the film. I am the eldest child and got the OK to take a younger brother up to explore this mysterious place. It was warm and there were lots of people around.
We were up the top and somehow, which I still can’t explain, everything went quiet. There appeared to be no sound. We could talk to each other, but there were no ambient sounds. There were also no other people nearby.
It was probably only 15 minutes, but we wandered around, quite lost. It was notorious for not having many signs, but I somehow found a track back down and all ended up being ok. My theory is that in the narrow crevices, the rocks somehow absorb – or reflect away – the external sounds.
3. Mist flowing up and not just Miranda lost
In 2nd year University (1980) my College – Roberts Hall – had a bus trip there in the cooler months. I had my film camera. We were up the top on a chilly day, when something I’ve never seen before (or since) happened.
Mist or fog rolled in from the plains, got pushed up the steep side of the Rock and flowed up-and-over the edge towards us on the top. I had black and white film in the camera and snapped off multiple shots.
A few days later I took the film in to the University’s photo processing place, who sent it off site.
And somehow, someone lost it. Never to be seen again.
It’s Fiction, but…MARI and P.A. and…
In the mid 1970s a group of my teachers were interested in “was it true?”. They went off to the State Library of Victoria to research. And found nothing to verify. No news reports, nothing about the school, the girls, the police. Zero.
The first clue is that she gives an exact date at the very start of the book: Saturday Feb 14th 1900. But that date wasn’t a Saturday. Was she having fun or placing red-herrings via being so precise, yet ‘wrong’?
Anyway, whole books have been written on ‘is is true?’. This is one summary.
However my teachers did spot something interesting which stuck in my mind.
Philip Adams, who knew Joan, has been interested in the mystery for years. In 2010, I emailed him asking about what the teachers had found:
“I wonder if it’s anything to do with the observation that the 3 missing girls all had the same first 4 initials in their first names: MARI ? [Marion, Irma, Miranda] Back in the 70’s a teacher pointed that out to us. Plus a 4th combination [is] RIMA. Meaning hole or fissure. Possible literary joke?”
He quickly got back to me:
“nope David , naught to do with it….will tell the whole story one day…the secret lies in
A. a visit by two literary ladies to Versailles in 1901
B, .St,Valentine’s Day
C. an old painting in the NGV
D. Joan L’s problems with clocks……
and E, the probability that her brother-in-law, Norman Lindsay, was gay..”
He was true to his word and discussed this on an ABC RN Podcast in 2011. The ABC archives from back them seem to have links that go nowhere – i.e. get the 404 Not Found – so can’t find the audio. Will email them to see if they have it.