Extract from a Statement by Edward Whitehead, gardener at Appleyard College, as given to Constable Bumpher on the morning of Good Friday, April the twenty-seventh.
All this was a terrible shock to me and a terrible thing to have to tell Madam after what she’d had to go through lately. I think she must have been walking up and down the room when I knocked. Anyway she didn’t answer so I went in. She nearly jumped out of her skin when she saw me. She was looking something awful – even for her. I mean to say, we all said in the kitchen she had been looking ill. She didn’t ask me to sit down but my legs were shaking that badly I could hardly stand up and I took a chair. I can’t remember exactly what I said about finding the body. At first she just stood there staring as if she hadn’t heard a word I’d been saying. Then she told me to say it all again, very slowly, which I did. When I’d finished she asked, ‘Who was it?’ I said, ‘Sara Waybourne.’ She asked if I was quite sure the girl was dead? I said, ‘Yes, quite sure.’ I didn’t tell her why. She let out a sort of smothered scream, more like a wild animal than a human being. I won’t forget the sound of that scream if I live to be a hundred.*
She got out a bottle and poured out a stiff brandy for herself and one for me which I refused. I asked if I would fetch the cook who was the only other person in the house at the time. She said, ‘No, you fool. Can you drive a horse?’ I told her I wasn’t much of a hand at it but I could put the pony in the trap. She said, ‘Then you can take me into the police station. For God’s sake hurry and if you see anyone don’t open your mouth.’ About ten minutes later she was out in the drive waiting for the trap at the front door. She was wearing a long navy blue coat and a brown hat with a feather sticking up that I’ve seen her wearing when she goes to Melbourne. She was carrying a black leather handbag and black gloves because I wondered why a person would think of gloves at such a time. We drove to Woodend as fast as the pony would go and neither of us said a word the whole way. When we were within a hundred yards of the Police Station, opposite Hussey’s Livery Stables, she told me to pull up. She got out and went ever to the seat where Hussey’s passengers wait for the cabs. I thought she was going to fall over. I asked if she wanted me to go with her to the Station or wait outside. She said she would sit there for a few minutes and then go to the Station alone. She said there would be plenty of questions for me to answer later and I was to drive straight home. I didn’t like leaving her there in the street looking so ill and all. However, she seemed to know exactly what she wanted, like she always does, and I thought it best to obey orders. Especially as I was feeling terribly sick in the stomach after what I had seen that afternoon. Before I left her Mrs Appleyard said she would get a cab back to the College from Hussey’s after she had seen the police. She was still sitting on the seat straight as a poker when I turned the pony round to go home. And that was the last time I saw her.
Signed . . . Edward Whitehead,
Woodend, Friday, March 27th, 1900.
Statement by Ben Hussey of Hussey’s Livery Stables as given to Constable Bumpher on the same date as above.
We were very busy on the Thursday before Good Friday because of the Easter holidays. I was sitting in my office at the Stables checking on the orders for cabs when Mrs Appleyard came in and said she wanted one straight away. I had hardly set eyes on her since the day of the picnic to Hanging Rock and was shocked at the change in her appearance. I asked how far she wanted to go – she said she thought about ten miles; she had just had bad news from friends out on the Hanging Rock Road, she would know the house when she saw it. As all my drivers were out on jobs meeting trains and so on I told her I’d take her myself if she didn’t mind waiting while I harnessed up a pretty lively mare I’ve just broken in, and won’t let anyone handle but me. I could see Mrs Appleyard was very upset, especially for somebody like her who don’t show her feelings. I asked her if she’d like to sit down and have a cup of tea at my place while she was waiting but she came and stood beside me all the time I was putting the mare in the buggy and we got away at ten minutes to three. I know the time as I had to write it down for my drivers on the office pad. After we had gone a couple of miles in silence I remarked it was a nice sunny day. She said she hadn’t noticed. Nothing else was said until we came to the bend in the road where you can first see the Hanging Rock coming up out of the trees in the distance. I pointed it out to her and said something about the Rock having made a lot of trouble for a lot of people since the day of the Picnic. She leaned right across me and shook her fist at it and I hope I never have to see an expression like that on another face. It gave me quite a turn and I wasn’t sorry when we came in sight of a small farm with a gate on to the road but no track and she told me to stop. I said are you quite sure this is the place? ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘this is it and you don’t need to wait. My friends will bring me back later.’ There was a tumbledown sort of a cottage across the paddocks and a man and a woman holding a baby were standing outside. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘the mare’s not used to standing yet and if you’re sure you can manage I’ll be off and I hope things won’t be as bad as you think.’ We got off to a flying start and I didn’t look back.
Signed . . . Ben Hussey,
Livery Stables, Woodend, March 27th, 1900.
The shepherd and his wife who later testified in Court that they had seen a woman in a long coat getting out of a one-horse buggy at their gate, stood watching her walking off along the road in the direction of the Picnic Grounds. Very few strangers passed that way on foot. The woman appeared to be walking fast and was soon out of sight.
Although she had seen the Hanging Rock for the first time this afternoon, when Ben Hussey had pointed it out from the buggy, Mrs Appleyard was only too familiar with its general aspect and the various key points of the Picnic Grounds, as depicted in the plans, drawings and photographs in the Melbourne press. Here, after a more or less level stretch on the seemingly endless road, was the sagging wooden gate through which Ben Hussey had driven his five-horse drag. There was the creek, holding the last of the afternoon light in its placid pools. To the left, a little way ahead, the much photographed spot where the picnic party from Lake View had camped beside their wagonette. To the right, the vertical walls of the Rock were already in deep shade, the undergrowth at the base exuding the dank forest breath of decay. Her gloved hands fumbled with the catch of the gate. Arthur used to say: ‘My dear, you have an excellent head but you are no good with your hands.’ She left the gate open and started to walk along the track towards the creek.
And now, at last, after a lifetime of linoleum and asphalt and Axminster carpets, the heavy flat-footed woman trod the springing earth. Born fifty-seven years ago in a suburban wilderness of smoke-grimed bricks, she knew no more of Nature than a scarecrow rigid on a broomstick above a field of waving corn. She who had lived so close to the little forest on the Bendigo Road had never felt the short wiry grass underfoot. Never walked between the straight shaggy stems of the stringy-bark trees. Never paused to savour the jubilant gusts of Spring that carried the scent of wattle and eucalypt right into the front hall of the College. Nor sniffed with foreboding the blast of the North wind, laden in summer with the fine ash of mountain fires. When the ground started to rise towards the Rock, she knew that she must turn to the right into the waist-high bracken and begin to climb. The ground was rough under the large soft feet in kid button-up boots. She sat down for a few minutes on a fallen log and took off her gloves. She could feel the perspiration trickling down her neck under the stiff lace at her throat. Now she was on her feet again looking up at the sky faintly streaked with pink behind a row of jagged peaks. For the first time it dawned on her what it meant to climb the Rock on a hot afternoon, as the lost girls had climbed it, long, long ago, in full-skirted summer frocks and thin shoes. Stumbling and sweating upwards through the bracken and dogwood, she thought of them now, without compassion. Dead. Both dead. And now Sara lying under the tower. When presently the monolith came into view she recognized it at once from the photographs. With her heart pounding under the heavy coat it was as much as she could do to clamber towards it over the last few yards of stones that slid from under her feet with every step. To the right a narrow ledge overhung a precipice at which she dared not look. To the left, on higher ground, a pile of stones . . . on one of them a large black spider, spreadeagled, asleep in the sun. She had always been afraid of spiders, looked round for something with which to strike it down and saw Sara Waybourne, in a nightdress, with one eye fixed and staring from a mask of rotting flesh.