It was a cloudless summer day in the year nineteen hundred. Everyone at Appleyard College for Young Ladies agreed it was just right for a picnic at Hanging Rock. After lunch, a group of three girls climbed into the blaze of the afternoon sun, pressing on through the scrub into the shadows of Hanging Rock. Further, higher, until at last they disappeared. They never returned ...
As Joan Lindsay, author of "Picnic at Hanging Rock", writes at the front of the book, "Whether 'Picnic at Hanging Rock' is fact or fiction, my readers must decide for themselves. As the fateful picnic took place in the year nineteen hundred, and all the characters who appear in this book are long since dead, it hardly seems important."
Peter Weir, director of such movies as "The Last Wave", "Gallipoli", "The Year of Living Dangerously", "The Mosquito Coast", and "Dead Poets Society", turned the book into a brilliant movie in 1975 which was voted the best Australian film of all time by the Australian Film Institute.
Whether you have read the book or seen the movie, the book review "Picnic at Hanging Rock fifty years on" by Marguerite Johnson, Professor of Classics at The University of Newcastle, should give you a better understanding of this mystery which to this day remains a mystery.
