'It was a cloudless summer day in the year 1900. 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 the secluded volcanic outcropping. Farther, higher, until at last they disappeared. They never returned. ...'
Source: Publisher's blurb (Penguin Random House, 2014).
On St Valentine's Day 1900, three schoolgirls and a teacher from an exclusive English-style boarding school go missing at the mysterious Hanging Rock in central Victoria. One of the girls is found alive a week later, but the others are never seen again. As morale within the school begins to disintegrate, the headmistress's increasingly incoherent anger is turned towards one student, leading to tragic consequences. Although the police suspect Michael Fitzhubert, a young English aristocrat, and his manservant Albert, who were in the area at the time the girls disappeared, the mystery is never solved. As Paul Byrnes (Australian Screen) notes, the suggested scenarios range from the 'banal and explicable (a crime of passion) to deeply mystical (a crime of nature).'
[Source: Australian Screen]'Australia, 1900. An ancient land becomes the site of an impossible mystery. A group of schoolgirls and their teachers venture out into the sundrenched landscape, only for four of their number to disappear forever.
'The subsequent investigation creates more questions than answers. One of the girls is found with no memory of what happened to her or her classmates, another succumbs to hysteria for no apparent reason. Those close to the missing girls begin to meet with unfortunate ends and it becomes clear that this is no ordinary disappearance.' (Production summary)
'The present article offers a Deleuzian reading of Picnic at Hanging Rock (Joan Lindsay, 1967) that does not start by analysing binary oppositions, but rather construes the space and, more specifically, its synthesis in and through time as processes of “different/ciation” and “becoming”. The article probes into Deleuze’s idea of the first synthesis of time in the novel. Time can be read as a synthesis, a contraction of differences in repetition. This resonates with the “elemental rhythms” of nature the novel overtly identifies as constitutive of the natural space. These rhythms are in turn projected onto different fictional levels, so much so that the novel reads like an organic spread of the patterns of nature into the very structure of the narrative. Victorian identities and cultures attempt to resist the spread of this pattern, albeit to no avail. Finally, the spread of the said pattern reveals the possibility of a new virtual set of relational tools for the self to encounter the other via processes of different/ciation and becoming.' (Publication abstract)