The True Story Behind ‘Picnic At Hanging Rock’

This is equal parts fascinating and spooky.

By Mahalia Chang
This month, the first episode of the remake of Picnic at Hanging Rock will air. The re-creation of the 1975 film by Peter Weir is one of the most highly-anticipated Australian television events of the year and boasts a seriously impressive cast: Natalie Dormer, Lily Sullivan, Samara Weaving and Madeleine Madden.
Picnic At Hanging Rock has long been shrouded in mystery. Set around a group of private schoolgirls who go missing in 1900, the original film and the novel it's based off have captivated audiences around the world for decades. The whimsically shot film has influenced fashion houses like Chloé, Dior and McQueen, while the imagery has inspired everything from costume design to magazine editorials.
But is the plot—an eerie re-telling of a tragic event—based on a true story? Some say yes, some say no.
In the lead-up to the premiere this May, we investigate the truth behind the story, and some of the disturbing—and downright scary—things that have happened along the way.

The plot

Half-mystical sci-fi, half-psycho thriller, the plot of Picnic at Hanging Rock has intrigued audiences since the book's first release in 1967.
In a private boarding school in Victoria in 1900, the girls from the school plan a picnic for St Valentine's Day. After lounging about and eating lunch, four of the girls—Miranda, Edith, Irma and Marion—go to explore and climb the Hanging Rock with their teacher, Ms McCraw. In an unexplained dream-like event, everyone except Edith vanishes 'into the rock'.
Edith, returning to the group, is in hysterics and can't detail or explain what happened.
The boarding school, and surrounding town, descends into chaos. The public and the police force organise several searches; Irma, one of the missing girls, is found unconscious but unharmed at the rock; students are withdrawn from the school; teachers and staff quit unexpectedly; a schoolgirl commits suicide in a mysterious manner; the headmistress jumps off Hanging Rock, killing herself.
The book and film end with the school and police station destroyed by a fire, after which some rabbit hunters find a bit of 'frilled calico' at the rock, believed to have belonged to Ms McCraw. None of the missing women are ever found.
A biography of the author, some years later, revealed that the first draft of the book originally included a final chapter that explained the disappearances. In the excised chapter (published in '87 as The Secret of Hanging Rock), the missing girls are at the rock, Edith runs back to the group, and a mysterious women in her underwear shouts at them, "Through!" The woman is sometimes references as being Ms McCraw, although none of the girls recognise her. She faints, and is later revived by one of the girls loosening her corset to let her breathe. The rest of the girls throw their own corsets off the cliff, but point out that they stop in mid-air and cast no shadows.
The girls then follow a lizard into a crack in the rock, described as "a hole in space." Ms McCraw, Marion, and Miranda go through, but the Hanging Rock stops Irma (the girl who is found unconscious) from going through. It is acknowledge that the crack in the rock is a timewarp, and that the missing girls are in another dimension.

Right place, wrong time

Although we can't say for sure whether or not the novel is based on a true story, there are a few hints. 'Hanging Rock' is, of course, a real place, as is the surrounding towns mentioned in the book.
The times are wrong, however. St Valentine's Day in 1900 fell on a Wednesday, not a Saturday as described in the book. Similarly, Easter Sunday was on April 15th that year, not March 29th.
The boarding school written about in the book is loosely based off Clyde Girls' Grammar School in Melbourne, which the author attended.

Unsolved crimes

Just because there aren't any records of the exact disappearances or murders referenced in the book, doesn't mean there were never rumours they occurred. In fact, the book and movie drove such interest that Yvonne Rousseau wrote a book, The Murders at Hanging Rock, about possible solutions and answers.
The author of the original book, Joan Lindsay, was the subject of a biography, investigating how she came to write the book and whether it had any basis in fact. The author of that biography, Janelle McCulloch, notes that some students who attended the school the book is based on believe that the crimes did occur, and that the stories might have based on a case of two girls who went missing around 1800s.

Time stops

Aside from some historical evidence, there was some paranormal history, too. At the premiere of the 1975 film, the clock at the cinema stopped exactly on 12 o'clock.
A producer told the Telegraph the same happened on set: "All our watches seemed to be playing up. Mine stopped at 6pm on the rock… to ask the time became quite a joke."

An author’s intuition

Joan Lindsay told her publishers at the time of writing that she had dreamt the plot of the book. Lindsay, who had been to Hanging Rock in her childhood, said the dream felt so real she woke up.
But another type of sense might have gone into the plot. One of Lindsay's close friends, Colin Caldwell, said she could "see" things others couldn't, likening her to Indigenous Australians, who could read the land.
Caldwell and Lindsay visited Hanging Rock together, where Lindsay reportedly went off to get a 'feel of the rock.'
"Oh yes, she was very much a mystic," Caldwell told the Sydney Morning Herald. "She could sense things in the landscape that others couldn't."
Picnic at Hanging Rock premieres on Foxtel May 6 at 8.30pm.