Beyond the Rock

First, this is a very neat book physically. The cover is very well designed, the book pages are thicker than average and there's a lot of photos in it. The book also is filled with information on Joan Lindsay and her husband. There's a little on the movie and the Picnic at Hanging Rock movie but the majority is biographical in nature.

It's also a little on the expensive side.

The main points of the book include:

The local tribesmen consider the lower part of Hanging Rock to be okay but the upper part to be evil, powerful and sacred. This is, of course, the part that the girls and the teacher disappeared from.

Some people that have explored the rock have said that they had the feeling that someone was watching them. Again, the local tribesmen have said that there are evil spirits on the rock.

Some of the tribesmen have said that the rock has 'unfinished business.'

Some of the names of people in the book/movie were based on real people's names.

The book discusses the importance of gardens to the Lindseys.

They had a lot of financial problems during their lives. They were artists and she was a writer so their income was not high and they tended to spend a lot on alcohol and related things.

In the movie watches seem to stop and this continues to this day. The cause of this is unknown. It obviously stopped watches in the movie and those watches had no electronic parts and it seems to continue to do that today even with watches that have electronic parts to them.

Clyde School is compared to the books Appleyard Cottage.

Both of the Lindsays had exhibitions of their artistic work.

Their marriage went through various rough parts but their remained married until the end.

The photos in the book are rather interesting. There is a bibliography but it's a 'select ed' one and lacks some of the books I've found (although there really aren't that many books about the movie or the original book.)

I think it would be interesting if a group of paranormal researchers with up-to-date equipment would do an examination of the Hanging Rock area. Also, part of that should be exposing a lot of watches to the area and see if the majority stop or if only a few stop or maybe not even any of them stop.

That the local tribesmen consider the rock to have 'evil spirits' is also significant. They have been there far longer than the Europeans and I don't think they would say an area is evil unless something had really happened there, at least once but most likely more than once.

Anyhow, it's a good book and worth getting.