Chapter 18: Picnic at Hanging Rock

 The publishers of Picnic at Hanging Rock may have escaped judgement (in an Oprah-esque way) by saying that they didn't know it was not a true story. That they had done their due diligence and had been convinced by the local legend of the disappearance of the three girls and one woman. We might have thought that they were lazy or (and this is probably more accurate, with my experience of the last fifteen years in the publishing industry) facing an impossible deadline that encourages you to cut corners while also producing a peerless product.

But then there is Chapter 18. The last chapter of Picnic at Hanging Rock that was not published in the original edition (1967). There's a reason for that. It's B-A-N-A-N-A-S. Bat poop crazy. Philip K Dick in the shed nuts.

I will expand on this in a later post. In the meantime, an updated edition with the missing chapter was published in 1987. It seems to be out of print, so the only copies you will find will be second-hand. I don't have that patience, so I (and I do not do this often) found *cringing* a PDF.

Watch this space.