<P> The novel begins with a brief foreword, which reads: </P> <P> Whether Picnic at Hanging Rock is fact or fiction, my readers must decide for themselves . As the fateful picnic took place in the year nineteen hundred, and all the characters who appear in this book are long since dead, it hardly seems important . </P> <P> At Appleyard College, an upper - class women's private boarding school, a picnic is being planned for the students under the supervision of Mrs. Appleyard, the school's headmistress . The picnic entails a day trip to Hanging Rock in the Mount Macedon area, Victoria, on St. Valentine's Day in 1900 . One of the students, Sara, who is in trouble with Mrs. Appleyard, is not allowed to go . Sara's close friend Miranda goes without her . When they arrive, the students lounge about and eat a lunch . Afterward, Miranda goes to climb the monolith with classmates Edith, Irma, and Marion . The girls' mathematics teacher, Greta McCraw, follows behind them . As they ascend the rock, in a dreamlike episode, Miranda, Marion, and Irma vanish into the rock while Edith watches; she returns to the picnic in hysterics, disoriented and with no memory of what occurred . Miss McCraw is also nowhere to be accounted for . The school scours the rock in search of the girls and their teacher, but they are not found . </P> <P> The disappearances provoke much local concern and international sensation with rape, abduction, and murder being assumed as probable explanations . Several organized searches of the picnic grounds and the area surrounding the rock itself turn up nothing . Meanwhile, the students, teachers and staff of the college, as well as members of the community, grapple with the riddle - like events . Mike Fitzhubert embarks on a private search of the rock and discovers Irma, unconscious and on the verge of death . When he fails to return from his search, he is found at the rock with Irma in an unexplained daze, by his friend and uncle's coachman, Albert Crundall . </P>

Where is the hanging rock in picnic at hanging rock