Fixated on the footsteps of Miranda

Something happened here ... or so believe many visitors to Victoria's Hanging Rock, such as Shayla Cosgrove, 11.Credit: Ken Irwin

Hanging Rock's allure is partly its natural beauty, partly its mythic history. John Elder goes exploring.

JUST above Hanging Rock is a natural balcony of boulders and butterflies and the mercy of evening shadow.

You can hear people coming up, not scrambling as they once did in white crinoline dresses over steps shaped by rain and wind but trudging up the man-made staircase that sucks away a little of the mystery of the place, in exchange for cheaper indemnity insurance, one presumes.

Also, missing here is the bare-leg creaking of 19th-century sexual awakening and Gothic poetry from the lips of young women who climb slowly and dreamily.

Nor is there the music of pan pipes, and the sweet threat contained therein. Too many iPods, belly-buttons and backsides bulging in lycra.

Regardless, the memory if not the mood of Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock lingers.

''Brandon! Don't go over there,'' a mother calls to her son who has ventured too close to where the rocks fall away. ''Brandon!'' Just like in the film: ''Miranda!''

And from the balcony you hear young and old folk making jokes about those missing schoolgirls, that maybe they're in the shadows watching. Do they believe it's a true story?

''Something happened, but who knows what?'' is the most popular answer.

Shayla Cosgrove, 11, says the story was told recently in her classroom as an Australian mystery. ''She said it was a true story.''

Do you think this is a spooky place? ''Not really.''

Shayla's mother Debbie disagrees: ''It's got a mystery to it. I feel there's something in the air … knowing there was a true film produced here … and it's part of Australian history.''

Joan Lindsay, who wrote the novel on which the film is based, would be dancing in her grave. Lindsay went to hysterical lengths to suggest that her Valentine's Day picnic of 1900 was a piece of history rather than fiction. Her ploy was to enigmatically refuse all discussion on the matter.

Anne Lambert, who played Miranda, later told a story about Lindsay accosting her in the bushland near the film set, and emotionally carrying on as if Lambert was indeed a long-lost friend named Miranda.

There are no newspaper reports of missing girls from the time. And where Lindsay's Valentine's Day was a Saturday, in 1900 it fell on a Wednesday.

If truth is beauty, as declared by the prematurely dead poet John Keats, getting to the truth of Hanging Rock means sitting still on one of the boulders and staring up at the volcanic pillars where white butterflies float dreamily, dancing about the rock face, fluttering back and forth as if to find a secret place to enter there.