The Secret of Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay

Author:Joan Lindsay [Lindsay, Joan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781925416558
Publisher: ETT Imprint
Published: 2016-09-07T00:00:00+00:00

A COMMENTARY ON CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

YVONNE ROUSSEAU

Joan Lindsay agreed with her editor that Picnic at Hanging Rock would be published without its original Chapter Eighteen. To make up for the loss of information, changes had to be made to the original Chapter Three, where the girls on the Rock went out of view. As an incidental result of these changes, another slope and a belt of dogwoods were added to the scene; thus making things difficult for visitors to Hanging Rock who wanted to map the path described in the book. A notebook and pencil belonging to Marion were also added, only to be thrown into some ferns near the monolith and never found again, even by the police bloodhound. In both versions, Irma and Marion and Miranda are accompanied part way up the Rock by Edith Horton, a younger girl, who is known as the school dunce, and who thinks that the Rock is nasty. If we reconstruct the original Chapter Three on the assumption that as few changes as possible would have been made, then in both versions the girls decide to rest in the shade on an almost circular platform. In both versions their experience becomes strange at this point. The three older girls take off their shoes and stockings, and Irma dances barefoot on the stones. She is still barefooted when she is found on the Rock eight days later, but her feet are “perfectly clean” and “in no way scratched or bruised”1 Thus, the Rock has become in some way insulated from these humans; its dust is not disturbed by their movement, its stones will not be overturned or bloodstained by anything they do. But only the living flesh seems to be set apart in this way; in both versions, the dead vegetable fibres of the girls’ muslin and calico get torn by the dogwoods, although we may assume that their faces and hands, like their feet, are not scratched.

After the dancing, Miranda and Marion set off, barefooted, up the next little rise. Edith draws Irma’s attention to their lunacy. Irma only laughs, slings her shoes and stockings about her waist, and sets off after them. In the original version, it will have been here that Edith makes her last attempt to recall them. She asks Miranda, “When are we going home?” But Miranda only looks at her strangely, as if not seeing her; then turns her back, and leads the other two on up the rise.

Edith sees them “sliding over the stones on their bare feet as if they were on a drawing-room carpet”2 Half-petrified, she croaks Miranda’s name several times as they move into some dogwoods and out of sight; until she sees “the last of a white sleeve parting the bushes ahead”. An “awful silence” descends, and Edith begins to scream. She runs, still screaming, back down towards the plain; and the author assures us that her screams are heard only by a nearby wallaby.

In the published version, the little rise with the dogwoods becomes two rises and two sets of dogwoods.

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