Movie: Picnic at Hanging Rock In this scene from Peter Weir's Australian film, Picnic at Hanging Rock, a young woman, Irma, is preparing to leave her all girls' school. In the first half of the film, the director films a school picnic horribly wrong: three girls, including Irma, wander to the top of a large rock outcropping sacred to the Aborigines -- and don't come back. Irma, miraculously, was discovered a week later, delirious and nearly dead; the other two girls quite literally vanished into thin air and were never heard of again. Irma--and only Irma--knows what mysterious event truly happened on the rock that day. As in the Oedipus at Colonus, the rock signifies a sacred space in which participants undergo a ritual: a ritual involving the basic components of life and death. The initiants are not allowed to reveal the components of the mystery, even to those seeking it: Theseus rebuffs the daughters of Oedipus, for instance,as they struggle to learn what happened on the rock of Colonus. Likewise, the girls of the Australian boarding school demand to know from Irma what happen on Hanging Rock. Obviously, something happened on the rock, and even the costume scheme shows that Irma has undergone an initiation; while the girls rehearsing in the 'Temple of Callisthenic' wearing simple and virginal white costumes, Irma, as she is about to leave the academy, wears a sumptuous blood-red gown, a symbol of her maturity into a world of (menstruating) adulthood. The life and death ritual of Hanging Rock has been a metaphor, then, for her transition from girl to woman: the death of childhood and the birth of a new, adult, life.