NOTE: I AM NOT THE AUTHOR OF THE ARTICLE. FOLLOWING IS A SUMMARY OF THE ARTICLE. YOU CAN FIND THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE USING GOOGLE.

Peter Wier's Picnic at Hanging Rock, an in-depth analysis

This is a fairly long article and ties the movie in to various other literature including The Wreck of the Hesperus, Casablanca, the Pythagorean Theorem, Nietzche's Monolith, Daphne, Apollo-Python, the Marie Celeste, Leda and the Swan, The Marquikse of O and The Watcher on the Hill.

In my opinion a lot of the article is quite interesting but I think parts of it are sort of stretching to find a relationship to some other writing where no actual relationship probably exists. In you read a serious book or watch a serious movie and you think long enough you can probably find some kind of 'relationship' to something vaguely similar simply because all writing and filming is based at least in a tiny part on something else done earlier.

Yet that does not automatically mean the person making the book/movie actually made a conscious decision to draw from an earlier source. So I will note some parts of the article that I thought were interesting but I'll still over the parts I though were too much of a rich.

So, the main points of the parts of the article I thought were significant:

The author examines the 18th chapter of the book which was published after her death and put out separately.

The book/movie look at the impact of Australia on the British children that were there.

(I've read the 18th chapter and, again in my opinion, I think it makes almost no sense at all with people being turned into small animals which enter a hole in the rock. I think a much better ending, using some material from the chapter such as the red cloud, would have been for them to have gone through some kind of space/time portal. This could have set up something where they return some time in the distant future or perhaps show up some time in the distant past.)

The chapter shows that not everything was totally known or understood to the Victorians.

Mrs. Appleyard represents English colonial imposition on Australia.

The article examines the frenzied attack on Irma and notes that she is Jewish.

Irma represents the mysterious, unable to explain what happened.

Some of the girls might have considered Irma to be a betrayer, her returning alive but Miranda disappearing apparently forever.

The author examines the 18th chapter of the three going into a hole in the rock with the death of Christ and his body being put into a tomb.

In the novel (and in the movie) time seems to be stopped (watches stopping).

The disappearance of the three is mystical.

When Sara dies she visits her brother in a vision or a dream.

The author examines the importance of the valentines the girls give to each other.

The author examines the Australian aboriginal concepts of dreamtime and the importance of the land.

The author examines the concept of the walkabout. (This concept appeared in an episode of Babylon 5.)

Here is something which I found very, very interesting. '...every meaningful activity, event or life process that occurs in a particular place leaves behind a vibrational residue in the Earth.'

My analysis: I think this is a very real process. How many times has a person walked into an old church and felt an aura of peace? How many times has a person felt negative energy at a site of something terrible having happened? I think the Earth does absorb little bits of energy, both positive and negative, and this energy stays (for how longI don't know) and can be felt by anyone who is open to those type of feelings/vibrations. I think the aboriginal concept above makes very good sense.

No one knows why Edith screamed and ran down the mountain.

Irma had been on the rock for 8 days. There is no way she could have survived that time without any food or water. In my opinion this would indicate that the girls and the teacher went through a portal of some sort and, somehow, Irma managed to find her way back. It took 8 days on the other side of the portal but time passed differently and on this side only a day or so had passed.

Edith remembers a red cloud after she passed the teacher. Again, I think this would indicate the presence of some kind of portal. If you want to get very negative, though, it could have been a cloud of blood thrown into the air when the girls were disintegrated by some kind of energy discharge. (Which goes to show you it's possible to come up with loads and loads of alternative explanations for what happened on the rock.)

Mrs. Appleyard knew that Sara was dead. She could have been outside the college and seen her body or she could have been the one to lose her temper and push Sara out the window to her death.