This presentation of Lindsay’s unpublished eighteenth chapter was certainly well timed, for all Lindsay’s own interests in timelessness (or ‘time without clocks’, to borrow the title from another of her publications). The chapter was supposed to be in the bookstores on Saturday, 14 February, St Valentine’s Day – exactly eighty-seven years after the girls disappeared on Hanging Rock in the original novel, and twenty years after that novel was published. But from the consumers’ point of view, things didn’t quite go to plan: some of the major bookstores didn’t stock it until well into the following week. More important, the ‘secret’ revealed in the chapter was written up in the daily papers as soon as journalists got their copies – rendering the imaginative appeal of the chapter null and void by spilling the beans to would-be readers before they could buy a copy for themselves. In The Age, the chapter was paraphrased in detail, crucial passages were quoted from the text, and the ‘secret’ was out. At $6.95 for the chapter and the other bits of writing in the package, readers may have felt that it wasn’t worth the price to pursue it any further; but, then again, the first print run sold out by the end of February…

What did happen to the girls, anyway? Simply, they disappeared into a ‘hole in space’:

It wasn’t a hole in the rocks, nor a hole in the ground. It was a hole in space. About the size of a fully rounded summer moon, coming and going. She saw it as painters and sculptors saw a hole, as a thing in itself, giving shape and significance to other shapes. As a presence, not an absence – a concrete affirmation of truth ... It was as solid as the globe, as transparent as an air-bubble. An opening, easily passed through, and yet not concave at all.

Lindsay clearly opted for a fantastic ending to a story that could well have gone the other way: the solution could have been resolved into fact, rather than fiction. The publisher’s remark in their introduction that Lindsay wanted the original story to accommodate both options, the factual and the fantastic: as her note at the beginning of the novel had said, ‘Whether Picnic at Hanging Rock is Fact or Fiction, my readers must decide for themselves.’ Of course, some readers chose to pursue the former option, searching through newspapers and records to find out what might have happened to the girls, as if the story were real history. Indeed, this desire to factualise the novel has probably been mostly responsible for its longevity in the public imagination: compare the longevity of other ‘Fact or Fiction’ disappearances, like the Beaumont children or the Lindy Chamberlain case. Picnic at Hanging Rock was like an unfinished detective story: all we needed was an Hercule Poirot to come along and find the ‘facts’ that explained the mystery away for us.

But that line of enquiry has been closed off by the publication of this final chapter. Now, the possible facts behind the disappearance are no longer an issue: the ending is totally fantastic. The novel now belongs solely to the arena of fiction, not ‘Fact or Fiction’: the publication of this final chapter has put paid to one of our desires about the novel, that it might at the end of the day be true. Endings always amount to one kind of closure or another, but this particular closure could have important consequences. The story of the girls at Hanging Rock, with the possibility of ‘fact’ no longer written into it, could withdraw from the public imagination altogether.

Of course, the problem of what did happen to the girls is still a problem, but it’s a problem to do with fiction now, not fact – and fiction can have an openness all its own. Yvonne Rousseau’s commentary moves away from the detective work of her earlier Murders at Hanging Rock (she is compared to Sherlock Holmes in John Taylor’s introduction), and turns to a kind of literary criticism. She analyses Joan Lindsay’s representation of time and timelessness in the chapter, drawing up an elaborate scheme and suggesting that the girls’ entry into the hole in space amounts to a metaphysical entry into a ‘perpetual now’. She also suggests a link between the girls’ fate and the Aboriginal notion of ‘the Dreamtime’, using some of Lindsay’s symbols to support her case. My own view here, for what it’s worth, is that Lindsay’s symbols in the novel and in this chapter are too confused to allow any one reading; and again, for what it’s worth, I’d like briefly to offer two.

The first is that the climb up Hanging Rock towards the hole in space amounts to a representation of the ascent into heaven, also a ‘perpetual now’. The emphasis on the hole’s ‘perfection’ supports this, ‘as a thing in itself, giving shape and significance to other shapes’. In this reading, the mathematics teacher Miss McCraw becomes a kind of guide, leading the virgin girls into heaven albeit through the back door. Of course, Irma is excluded from heaven, but then again she has ‘full red lips, naughty black eyes, and glossy black ringlets’: in contrast to Miranda and Marion, her appearance contradicts her virginal condition and besides, she’s also ‘the wealthiest student at the College’ and wealthy people don’t go to heaven either. After Marion and Miranda have gone into the hole with their teacher, Irma is left alone outside, weakly beating the boulder that falls over the hole and covers it up for good. This ending reminds me of the ending to the Pied Piper of Hamelin story, with all the children gone and the lame boy left behind, and with this in mind the role of the mathematics teacher becomes a bit more complex. She’s not only a guide but also a seducer, and this leads me to a second reading.

It’s not difficult to see that the trip to Hanging Rock, for the schoolgirls, is also a sexually liberating event. Moving at last outside the confining gates of the College, the girls proceed to unlace their corsets and loosen their clothes, drawn towards the rock. Indeed, as the girls climb the rock in this final chapter, they actually throw off their clothes and clutch their breasts in a rite of passion. The rock can easily be seen as phallic, thrusting up into the sky; just as easily, the hole in space can be seen as a vagina. After all, it is surrounded by ‘bruised, heart-shaped leaves’ (and, incidentally, anyone with a copy of this chapter should look at the motif sketches of intertwined leaves and stems that precede each piece of writing. A quick check in Everywoman suggests to me that this artist must have been inspired!). More important, the girls actually move beyond the phallic rock (‘Come on, girls – we don’t want to stand staring at this great thing forever’) towards the hole in space, as if the symbol of male love has now been rejected for the more ‘perfect’ symbol of female love. Certainly Miranda and Marion have not at this point made any sexual commitment one way or the other; led on by the enigmatic and near­naked spinster Miss McCraw, it is not unreasonable to see their entry into the hole as a celebration of female love above and beyond love with men. The fate of the excluded girl is different: Irma, carried back down to the real world below to marry Michael Fitzhubert, is drawn into a conventional heterosexual relationship (and yet the final image in this chapter is of Irma clawing at the boulder, desperate to follow Miss McCraw, Miranda, and Marion ... )

So why do Marion, Miranda, and Miss McCraw disappear in this chapter (according to my second reading)? Perhaps because love between women, celebrated in a symbolic fantasy here, is hardly acceptable to the real world below. Only by ‘disappearing’ can that kind of love continue: the girls have to make an exit from a world that demands love with (and marriage to) men. And yet one of the points of this chapter is that the girls remain, like the hole itself, as ‘a presence ... a concrete affirmation of truth’. In the same way, love between women is also a sort of absent presence, not ‘seen’ by the real world and yet there all the time (just like the girls: Yvonne Rousseau argues this point about time and presence carefully in her commentary). Not surprisingly, the chapter that celebrated such love, however symbolically, itself had to disappear from the novel (even though it, too, had always existed). It’s not exactly clear why this chapter was not published with the original story, but certainly it would not do to show the heroine, Irma, trying finally and desperately to escape her heterosexual fate.

Whether we needed it or not, this once-absent chapter is now a presence: some would say it has been over-presented by the publishers. But I think, finally, that the chapter operates very much like the strange hole in space it introduces us to: after all, it brings the girls back, only to make them disappear again. And we too, like Irma, are left outside.