So what happened to the girls?

Actually, there is no reason to believe that this so-called "missing chapter" was written by Joan Lindsay.

I have read this so-called 'missing chapter' to one of the best known and literary most succesful 'The Picnic at Hanging Rock' and found it terribly disappointing. Those who believe that this '18th chapter' was actually written by Joan Lindsay accept the chapter's lacking quality as the reason why Lindsay and her publisher rejected it. But I take the chapter's lacking quality as an indication that Lindsay may not have written it at all, and that the chapter may be a sham.

Thus, I challenge anyone to deliver convincing evidence that the 'missing chapter', published as 'The Secret of Hanging Rock', was actually written by Joan Lindsay.

I do not believe that, and find it troubling that so many people take it as a fact only because the publisher made us believe that it is. A publisher with clear commercial interests in the popularity of the book and the film.

I find it suspect that the chapter bluntly reveals what Lindsay intentionally kept hidden in the previous 17 chapters, and that 'The Secret' was only published after Lindsay's death - so she was not around anymore to refute its authenticity.

To my knowledge, there is no substantial proof for the assumption, just hearsay. There is no manuscript, no diary entry, no civil law notary who acknowledges that Lindsay personally transferred the copyrights from Mrs. Lindsay to Mr. John Taylor (of the editor's house Cheshires), no 'last will' in which Lindsay states that she wanted the 'missing chapter' to be published three years after her death.

On the contrary. Lindsay herself was a firm and vocal advocate of an open ending to 'Picnic at Hanging Rock'. In an interview on the Criterion DVD edition, Mrs. Lindsay can be heard and seen stating that she finds it 'an extraordinary thing to me that people are not content to leave it as a mystery', that she 'wrote the story as a mystery', that it 'will remain a mystery' and that a solution would only 'spoil the mystery'. She also says that the book is 'atmospheric' and not in the least a 'whodunnit' with a concrete solution. She explicitly refers to Henry James 'Turn of the screw', a book that is also renowned for being open-ended.

To me it seems that this book indeed delivers yet another 'secret' to the Hanging Rock business, and the secret is that Lindsay never wrote this so-called 'missing chapter'. Anyone who believes it is, should worry about the absence of convincing proof for their assumption.

It is high time some Australian PhD student conducted some thorough research into the philological genesis of "The Secret of Hanging Rock". My best guess is that he/she will reveal a deep, dark secret.

It is a far more plausible and simple solution than any of these.