Joan Lindsay · 1967 · survival

Joan Lindsay's 1967 novel. On St Valentine's Day 1900 a girls' college drives out to a volcanic outcrop north of Melbourne for a picnic, and three pupils and a teacher walk up into the rock and are never satisfactorily accounted for. Lindsay refused all her life to say whether any of it had happened.

1. 1
   Appleyard College

   A boarding school for the daughters of the colonial well-off, run on English lines under Mount Macedon by a headmistress with a past she does not discuss - and on 14 February 1900 the girls are allowed out for the day.

2. 2
   Woodend

   The drag takes them up through the township on a hot Saturday, past the hotel and the station, in an outing that the whole novel afterwards treats as the last ordinary hour anybody there had.

3. 3
   Hanging Rock

   A real volcanic outcrop of six-million-year-old rock. Four girls climb into it in the afternoon; one comes back screaming, and Miss McCraw walks up after them in her underclothes and is not found either.

4. 4
   The Rock's upper slopes

   A week later Irma Leopold is found on a ledge, unmarked but with no shoes, no corset and no memory - and every search of the ground turns up nothing, which the book presents as a fact rather than a mystery to be solved.

5. 5
   Melbourne

   The disappearance takes the college apart: parents withdrawing daughters, a suicide, a fire, and Mrs Appleyard's own end at the rock - and Lindsay declining, for fifty years, to say whether it was true.