Confronted by such monumental configurations of nature the human eye is woefully inadequate. Who can say how many or how few of its unfolding marvels are actually seen, selected and recorded by the four pairs of eyes now fixed in staring wonder at the Hanging Rock? Does Marion Quade note the horizontal ledges crisscrossing the verticals of the main pattern whose geological formation must be memorized for next Monday’s essay? Is Edith aware of the hundreds of frail starlike flowers crushed under her tramping boots, while Irma catches the scarlet flash of a parrot’s wing and thinks it a flame amongst the leaves? And Miranda, whose feet appear to be choosing their own way through the ferns as she tilts her head towards the glittering peaks, does she already feel herself more than a spectator agape at a holiday pantomime?
This early passage in the novel highlights how small the girls are in comparison to the nature they are seeing. Lindsay uses vivid imagery to underscore this point: focusing on the extraordinary flowers, rocks, and birds around them. The narrator points out that they cannot fully understand the things that they are seeing, catching only glimpses of these objects while missing their surprising intricacies. The final line about Miranda becoming a spectator as she peers through the ferns underscores the fact that they are about to be impacted by some sort of supernatural force that no one properly sees or comprehends.
The awful silence closed in and Edith began, quite loudly now, to scream. If her terrified cries had been heard by anyone but a wallaby squatting in a clump of bracken a few feet away, the picnic at Hanging Rock might yet have been just another picnic on a summer’s day. Nobody did hear them.
This early moment is central to the book's plot. Edith looks up and sees the other girls wandering towards the monolith. She tries to call out to them but they seem to not hear her. She begins to scream in horror at the frightening scene. Her helplessness draws attention to the supernatural element of this occurrence. She seems to be momentarily caught in a timeless vortex. The wallaby gazing at her seems to stand in for nature's larger indifference to the event, as it remains unaffected by her cries. Lindsay vividly conveys Edith's terror and helplessness in this instance.
The animal, however, did raise some false hopes during Thursday afternoon, by standing for nearly ten minutes growling and bristling on an almost circular platform of flat rock considerably further towards the summit, whereon the magnifying glass disclosed absolutely no signs of any disturbance more recent than the ravages of Nature over some hundreds or thousands of years.
This minor moment in the story highlights a central part of the main mystery. The girls are seen earlier gathered around the same "circular platform of flat rock" that the dog carefully inspects. This solidifies the reader's impression that whatever happened at Hanging Rock is directly related to the mystical properties of this circle and the monolith. At the same time, the mention of "the ravages of nature over some hundreds or thousands of years" suggests that the answer to this mystery perhaps predates human history. Lindsay manages to puzzle the reader while at the same time hinting at what may have caused the girls to disappear.
But who would be laughing down here under the sea . . .? He was forcing his way through viscous dark-green water, looking for the musical box whose sweet tinkling voice was sometimes behind, sometimes just ahead. If only he could move faster, trailing useless legs through the green, he might catch up with it. Suddenly it ceased. The water grew thicker and darker; he saw bubbles rising from his mouth, began to choke, thought, "This is what it feels like to drown," and woke coughing up the blood that was trickling down his cheek from the cut on his forehead.
This passage occurs while Mike is conducting his search for the rocks and comes upon Irma. He then falls into a fugue state, as he is overwhelmed by some unexplained force. The surreal imagery in this passage showcases Mike's altered mental state before he jostled back to reality by the blood "trickling" into his mouth. Mike's attempt to recover a music box as he moves slowly through "viscous dark-green water" suggests that he is somehow trapped in this mental state by the same unseen forces that affected the girls and Miss McCraw.
Strong-minded persons in authority can ordinarily grapple with practical problems of facts. Facts, no matter how outrageous, can be dealt with by other facts. The problems of mood and atmosphere known to the Press as ‘Situations’ are infinitely more sinister. A ‘situation’ cannot be pigeonholed for reference and the appropriate answer pulled out of a filing cabinet.
In this passage, the narrator examines how news publications profit off of "situations" and not facts. They make the distinction that facts are beholden to other facts and must be backed up by evidence and explanations. In contrast, "situations," like the disappearances, can be assigned any number of outrageous explanations, without a need for confirmed facts. Here, Lindsay seems to suggest that these newspapers often distort the truth with sensational headlines to turn a profit. She particularly highlights this with regard to how the papers depict the case in the most dramatic possible manner, before any proper evidence has been gathered.
Sent a few days ago, from some God-forsaken address in Bengal, the peremptory wording was utterly unlike the usual extravagant Leopold technique. UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES IS MY DAUGHTER TO RETURN TO APPLEYARD COLLEGE. LETTER FOLLOWS. To lose in such a manner her richest and most admired pupil made her feel physically faint, almost sick. The implications of this new catastrophe were dangerous and unending. Only a few weeks ago the Headmistress had been telling the Bishop’s wife: "Irma Leopold is such a charming girl. Worth half a million when she turns twenty-one, so I understand . . . her mother was a Rothschild, you know."
This is another important moment in the text, as Appleyard loses Irma as a student, marking the beginning of the end for its financial solvency as an organization. Tellingly, this is also one of the few moments in which Mrs. Appleyard shows great emotion, as she is overcome with a feeling of faintness that borders on physical illness. This moment draws attention to how Mrs. Appleyard is almost solely focused on the school making money and continuing to survive. She has no feelings about Irma's disappearance and is actually more stressed about her leaving the school than her possibly being dead. This passage highlights Mrs. Appleyard's cold view of her student population.
They hear Miranda proposing the health of Saint Valentine; magpies and the tinkle of falling water. Another Irma in white muslin, shaking out her curls and laughing at Miranda washing out cups at the creek . . . Miranda, hatless with shining yellow hair. A picnic was no fun without Miranda . . . Always Miranda, coming and going in the dazzling light. Like a rainbow . . . Oh, Miranda, Marion, where have you gone . . .? The shadow of the Rock has grown darker and longer. They sit rooted to the ground and cannot move. The dreadful shape is a living monster lumbering towards them across the plain, scattering rocks and boulders. So near now, they can see the cracks and hollows where the lost girls lie rotting in a filthy cave. A junior, remembering how the Bible says the bodies of dead people are filled with crawling worms, is violently sick on the sawdust floor. Someone knocks over a wooden stool and Edith screams out loud. Mademoiselle, recognizing the hyena call of hysteria, walks calmly to the edge of the dais with madly thumping heart.
This passage, written in a loose, stream-of-consciousness style, telegraphs the assorted panics that the students have in the aftermath of the disappearances. The girls claim to see Miranda, Irma, and Marion in different guises and nightmarish scenes. The narrator notes that their mythical stature only grows after they vanish, as they occupy the minds of the other boarders in their absence. These visions become increasingly intense and disturbing and the girls seem to fall into a collective panic as they do things like vomit and scream. The inclusion of sentence fragments serves to convey the instability of the students' mental health. This quote is important in that it captures the atmosphere of dread and fear at the school.
They were just in time for a late evening meal and after swallowing some cold mutton and strong tea the brother and sister retired exhausted to bed. About three o’clock in the morning an oil lamp, left alight too close to a blowing curtain on the wooden stairs, fell to the floor. The flames began licking up the shabby wallpaper and blistered paintwork. Curls of smoke poured unseen into the street from the staircase window. Within minutes the whole of the back wing was a roaring vault of fire.
This passage depicts the deaths of Dora and Reg Lumley. It shows that they were killed in a hotel fire which resulted from an oil lamp situated too close to a curtain. This seemingly concrete explanation only adds to the book's central mystery, as they sought to escape from Appleyard but were killed before they could return home. Their tragic deaths add to the air of fear at Appleyard as the school continues to lose staff and students in the wake of the disappearances. Lindsay offers no reason behind the Lumleys' deaths, so it exists unconfirmed as either a random tragic or a part of the ongoing tragedies at Appleyard.
Just as he himself by a few casual words this morning had effectively shaped the destinies of Tom and Minnie, so had Irma’s father, in a moment of generous impulse, altered the entire course of Albert’s life. It is probably just as well for our nervous equilibrium that such cataclysms of personal fortune are usually disguised as ordinary everyday occurrences, like the choice of boiled or poached eggs for breakfast. The young coachman settling down in the rocking chair after tea that Monday evening had no sense of having already embarked on a long and fateful journey of no return.
In this moment, the narrator observes that Irma's father permanently changed Albert's life with a small decision: giving him money for locating Irma. In doing so, he allows Albert to depart from the school and go to Queensland, removing himself from the dramas at Appleyard. The narrator adds that seemingly minor choices like this one often have a wide-ranging impact. They say that the consideration of these possibilities would be troubling for anyone, as it would lead them to wonder if their road to ruin could be set off by the choice to have a certain kind of egg for breakfast.
And now, at last, after a lifetime of linoleum and asphalt and Axminster carpets, the heavy flat-footed woman trod the springing earth. Born fifty-seven years ago in a suburban wilderness of smoke-grimed bricks, she knew no more of Nature than a scarecrow rigid on a broomstick above a field of waving corn. She who had lived so close to the little forest on the Bendigo Road had never felt the short wiry grass underfoot. Never walked between the straight shaggy stems of the stringy-bark trees. Never paused to savour the jubilant gusts of Spring that carried the scent of wattle and eucalypt right into the front hall of the College. Nor sniffed with foreboding the blast of the North wind, laden in summer with the fine ash of mountain fires. When the ground started to rise towards the Rock, she knew that she must turn to the right into the waist-high bracken and begin to climb. The ground was rough under the large soft feet in kid button-up boots.
This moment highlights how unaware Mrs. Appleyard is of the natural world that surrounds her. It notes that despite growing up in the area, she has spent her whole life within the controlled confines of the school. It emphasizes the fact that she missed out on the natural splendor surrounding her on all sides. This takes on a particularly tragic significance, as she goes up to the rocks and commits suicide after experiencing disturbing visions of her dead students. In the end, her lack of appreciation or respect for this natural space dooms her, as she has failed to perceive the thing that caused her students to vanish and her college to fall apart.
