Picnic at Hanging Rock: Alternative ending with original script overlay

Since 1975, audiences have pondered the ending of Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, trying to make sense of its unresolved mystery – which is only deepened by Weir's original ending. 

The artist Martin Sharp, who served as artistic adviser on the shoot, saved footage from this scene and donated it to the National Film and Sound Archive. Here, we’ve overlaid these outtakes with the scene as written in Cliff Green’s original script. In the finished film, Weir ends with a close-up of Mrs Appleyard’s face, and we learn in voice-over of her death at Hanging Rock. 

In the alternate ending, we see the character’s final trajectory: after the death of Sara – a student she had cruelly oppressed – Mrs Appleyard gravitates to the Rock. Struggling in her heavy mourning clothes, she climbs the same path taken by the vanished girls. Cliff Green’s script describes her progress: ‘an exhausted, half-mad old woman, as far away from the study and the drawing-room as it is possible to be.’ At the summit she encounters Sara, dressed in mystical white against the crags of the Rock, savouring her power over the broken headmistress. The script also extends the voice-over, detailing the fate of Appleyard College and the discovery of a last clue.

Read Peter Weir’s thoughts on the original ending

With special thanks to Peter and Ingrid Weir.