A little puce head slipped out, followed by a rush of blood and water. Jerra saw it splash onto the gynaecologist’s white boots. Across Rachel’s chest the little body lay tethered for a moment while smocks and masks pressed hard up against Rachel’s wound. He saw a needle sink in. Someone cut the cord. Blood, grey smears of vernix. The child’s eyes were open. Jerra felt them upon him. From the little gaping mouth, pink froth issued. They snatched him up.

More than anything else, The Secret of Hanging Rock is an exercise in marketing strategies and packaging. The real question, what happened to the girls, is in the midst of this finally of little importance, although it could have been very important. Indeed, the final, previously unpublished chapter of Picnic at Hanging Rock is only one of four pieces of writing in the publishers’ package, each of which tries to be as important as the next.

As well, there is an introduction written presumably by the publishers themselves, a second psalm­quoting introduction by John Taylor. the Promotions Manager at Cheshire who handled Joan Lindsay’s original manuscript, and a commentary on the chapter by Yvonne Rousseau, author of The Murders at Hanging Rock which the publishers describe in their introduction as a ‘remarkable scholarly spoof’. The package also includes (as with most fiction these days) a tasteful painting on the front cover, a detail from Frederick McCubbin’s Lost (painted, incidentally, fourteen years before the setting of Picnic, in 1886, and showing only one girl, alone. She’s not on a rock either, but on flat ground in a forest. In fact, there’s little connection between the cover painting and Lindsay’s story, where the girls, while missing, are not ‘lost’ at all.)

Not being of an introspective temperament, nor an accomplished portraitist, I find it easier to talk about my milieu than myself. I spent my childhood in northern New South Wales. My mother’s people had come to farm in the district around the tum of the century, and most of her family had married, lived and died there. Though my father was a newcomer from the coast, he too had relatives in the town. For some years my younger brother and I were the babies of the kin group.

One of my most powerful memories from that time is of Sunday drives: myself, my brother, my grandmother and great-grandmother in the passenger seats and my mother behind the wheel the three women exchanging a fusillade of gossip at near-shouting volume (the older women being hard of hearing, and the car’s engine contributing to the uproar). Years of this had bred in them an encyclopedic knowledge of the district and its people, their foibles, feuds, and tragedies. I would let the details of their talk wash over me. However, the subtext stuck: a reflexive racism, a puritanical, combatively sectarian Methodism, and a wariness of outsiders were all part of my unconscious universe.

I have never met Vivian Smith but respect him awfully. The remarkable thing about his editing of this new anthology of Australian poetry is that his own work is not in it. This is unprecedented among recent anthologies, and may of course be a printing error. Even that excellent poet of Buddhist leanings, Robert Gray, was unable to achieve such perfect nirvana some years back in his Younger Australian Poets. I think Vivian Smith could at least have included here his very fine poems ‘The Names’, which appeared in the most recent Mattara Award anthology.