I know the movie doesn't answer that and leaves it open on purpose, but I want to hear theories about what happened to the girls that made them disappear. To me tt gave the impression the rocks somehow hypnotized them, right now I can't come up with anything better.
shareMost people in Australia actually believe that this story really happened and its this huge urban legend. One of the ones I've heard from people who have seen it and do take the legend very seriously is that they may have fallen down the rock and into one of the crevis' beneath it. Take that theory how you will.
"If you don't like your ideas, stop having them!"
In the original novel there were plans to put what happened to them after the final chapter. Those plans were scrapped but now can be read as "The Secret Of Hanging Rock". The Wikipedia article says that this is what it's about:
The chapter opens with Edith fleeing back to the picnic area while Miranda, Irma, and Marion push on. Irma looks down and compares the people on the plain below to ants. When the girls walk past the monolith, they feel as if they are being pulled from the inside out and get dizzy. After they leave it behind, they lie down and fall asleep.
A woman suddenly appears climbing the rock in her underwear shouting, "Through!" and then faints. This woman is not referenced by name and is apparently a stranger to the girls, yet the narration suggests she is Miss McCraw. Miranda loosens the woman's corset to help revive her. Afterwards, the girls remove their own corsets and throw them off the cliff. The recovered woman points out that the corsets appear to hover in mid-air as if stuck in time, and that they cast no shadows. She and the girls continue together.
After the women experience dizziness, the group encounter a strange phenomenon described as a hole in space that influences their state of mind. They see a snake crawling down a crack in the rock. The woman suggests they follow the snake and takes the lead. She transforms into a small lizard-like creature and disappears into the crack. Marion follows her, then Miranda, but when Irma's turn comes, a balanced boulder [the hanging rock] slowly tilts and blocks the way. The chapter ends with Irma "tearing and beating at the gritty face on the boulder with her bare hands".
There is no factual proof whatsoever of this posthumous, apocryphal story of a 'last chapter' containing the 'solution' to the 'original novel'. The author has stated time and again that she did NOT write any 'solution' and that she purposefully left the story open-ended. She fiercefully advocated the open-endedness of her novel.
It was only after her death that her editor claimed such a 'last chapter' had been written. He offered no material evidence to back up this claim. No manuscript, no annotated typoscript, no correspondence, no last will, no notary documents transferring the rights, nothing whatsoever.
Besides, many critical readers find this 'last chapter' deviating in style and content, which is another reason to doubt its authenticity.
I will consider this 'Secret of Hanging Rock' a sham until evidence of the contrary is presented. The history of literature is full of literary shams or hoaxes.
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I read a melb newspaper article a while back regarding the true story of the 1900 disappearance of the school girls.
From what I vaguely remember, its a possibility that a mob of aborigines abducted the girls and took them away through the bushland.
No, the nearest thing the film's producer was able to find in the newspapers from the actual era was a case of some girls disappearing and being found dead in the area (but not on Hanging Rock itself). A story of some girls disappearing on Hanging Rock itself and never being found and so on was made up by the novelist, who never claimed it was a true story.
shareAs I said on this on this board before - Joan Lindsey provides clues as to what happened throughout the book. You just have to look for them.
shareJoan Lindsay has stated more than once that this book is not a 'whodunnit' with clues leading up to one perpetrator. She purposefully left the book 'open-ended' meaning that more than one 'solution' is possible and none of them 'the only one'.
shareThe novelist never said whether or not it was true, thus adding to the mystery. This was a PR stunt to help sell the story. But it is entirely fiction. But it adds to the aura and eeriness of the story.
shareThey became hookers in Sydney.
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Non-sequiturs are delicious.
They fled Mrs. Appleyard's sexual abuse. They had to kill Miss McCraw, who was coming after them. Their families made the pretense of their deaths rather than start a scandal.
What we see and what we seem are but a dream. A dream within a dream.share
My actual favorite theory, however, is that they met the Doctor and hopped in the TARDIS.
What we see and what we seem are but a dream. A dream within a dream.share
Where do you losers come from and why do you find you way here?
shareI felt very uncomfortable with Ms. McCraw's side-eye that she gives the girls in the buggy ride to Hanging Rock when she's talking about the time-frame of the rock's existence, and the girls make a lighthearted joke about it. Then Ms. McCraw gives a look to the girls like she resents and hates them.
Ms. McCraw is talking about the time-frame that the rocks have been in existence during the ride to Hanging Rock. Then the watch stops. This weird watch-stop event, in my mind, connects back to Ms. McCraw and her pre-occupation with "time."
After the girls go off on their hike, Ms. McCraw saw her chance, and so she left the camp, removed her dress to facilitate hiking quickly up the rock after the girls, and she overpowers the exhausted girls with the large cake-knife that was shown, driving them over a ledge into a crevasse. Only Irma escaped and hid, and she remembers nothing.
Then Miss McCraw took off to a new place and made a new life for herself.
:-)
www.huffingtonpost.com/nathan-j-winograd/PETA-KILLS-PUPPIES-KITTENS_b_ 2979220.html
This is an original and not totally unlikely solution. But with every thinkable solution to this story, the solution is more telling of the person who invented it than it is telling about 'what actually happened'.
This is a *quality* of the novel, not a shortcoming.
I always believed that something like this happened
http://listverse.com/2014/05/05/10-creepy-tales-of-interdimensional-travel/
🐈Jacks
Well that's the whole point of the film, what happened to them?. Did they run away, were they murdered, did some supernatural force spirit them off? we simply don't know, that's what makes this a very memorable film 40 years after it was made.
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