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Chapter 16
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Picnic at Hanging Rock, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Nature, Repression, and Colonialism
Mystery and the Unknown
Wealth and Class
Gossip and Scandal
Summary
Analysis
A clipping from a Melbourne newspaper dated February 14th, 1913, is reproduced. The article commemorates the 13th anniversary of the disappearances at Hanging Rock. After the “mysterious death” of the college’s headmistress several months after the incident, the college was destroyed in a bushfire the following summer. In 1903, rabbit hunters uncovered the only clue ever found—a scrap of fabric thought to be part of Miss McCraw’s petticoat. The article also states that Edith Horton—a girl who accompanied the missing students up the rock but returned to the picnic grounds—recently died. The article states that the only missing student to return, Irma Leopold, has married well and is now a countess. In the years since her return, she has never recalled any more details of her time up on the rock. The “College Mystery,” the newspaper says, is likely to remain unsolved forever.
The final chapter of the book—which reads as a kind of epilogue or postscript—offers little or no resolution as to the monumental, devastating events that have defined the novel’s final chapters. Lindsay uses this brief chapter to demonstrate the long, unending half-life of gossip and scandal, and also to suggest that the answer to such a great mystery is not what’s important, but rather the casualties and failures of human decency which erupt in the wake of something so divisive and incomprehensible.
Themes
