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While Joan Lindsay herself was always notoriously vague and ambiguous whenever she was pressed upon the matter, I find it highly likely that she, in fact, did experience something deeply disturbing in her youth, and that this particular event came to form the basis of her famous 1967 novel "Picnic at Hanging Rock",
Joan Lindsay (1896-1984), née Weigal, was born into an artistic upper-middle class family and attended Clyde Girls School at East Saint Kilda, near Melbourne. This private girls school existed here between 1910 and 1919, before moving to the small country town of Woodend, Victoria, just a few miles away from the (in)famous Hanging Rock itself.
It is certainly not inconceivable that Joan Lindsay while a pupil at Clyde Girls School in Melbourne might have taken part in a school outing to Hanging Rock, which is only ca 70 km from Melbourne, a distance that even in the early 1910´s was within reach of a one-day summer excursion. Something very unsettling might well have occurred, which then came to form the basis for the plot in Lady Lindsay´s novel.
That she sets the events in her novel in February 1900 might merely be a kind of "red herring" in order to confuse and also part of the artistic licence of all authors.
We must also remember that the 14th February was the date of Lady Lindsay´s 1922 marriage to the artist and art-historian Sir Daryl Lindsay and thus a symbolically important date in her life.
Let us imagine that one or several girls from a school party might, in fact, have disappeared without trace while exploring Hanging Rock at some point between ca 1910 and ca 1915. i.e. some 10-15 years later than indicated in Joan Lindsay´s novel. Such an event might have been successfully hushed up by the authorities for a number of reasons. There may or may not be some references to such a possible incident mentioned in the Woodend local newspaper(s) at the time. However, judging from the rather vague information available on the Internet no really concerted effort seems to have been made to trace any such newspaper reports during the time period of ca 1910-ca 1915. My impression is, rather, that any searches that have been made of newspaper records have almost entirely concentraded on the period between ca 1895-ca 1905.
We must also take into account that according to some sources on the Internet the local Woodend police station and all its records were apparently destroyed by a fire at some point early last century. I have not as yet been able to verify the exact date or year of the fire, but it is quite possible that any police records as such would have been destroyed then.
My conclusion is that it would be impossible to rule out that Joan Lindsay herself could well have experienced something on the line of the events described in her novel, but at a much later date than indicated in the book and in slightly different circumstances.
It would therefore be both foolish and unfounded to suggest that the events described in Lady Lindsay´s novel are purely fictional, just as it would be equally impossible to state the opposite. For the time being we simply cannot know for sure.
There is, however, some anecdotal evidence to suggest that Joan Lindsay had indeed known a real "Miranda" in her youth. The actress Anne Lambert who played Miranda in Peter Weir´s magnificent movie has publicly recalled a strange and unsettling meeting with Lady Lindsay while filming on Hanging Rock itself in 1974. At that meeting Joan Lindsay apparently addressed Anne Lambert as "Miss Miranda" and behaved as if she indeed were seeing a long-lost and much loved friend of her youth rather than an actress playing an entirely fictional role. It doesn´t take a qualified psychologist to work out the possible implications.
Peter Weir himself is also quoted in an interview to have stated that he and Lady Lindsay at one point were having a private conversation about the efforts a lot of people were making to trace any real-life disappearances at Hanging Rock. Weir seems to have indicated the futility of any such exercises, to which Joan Lindsay is said to have responded:
Well, you know something did actually happen there....

Wouldn´t it be an exciting challenge for the historians of Australia, amateur as well as professional, to make a concerted effort to unearth whatever the various historical archives might (or might not) have to tell us.
Whatever the outcome of such an exercise the mesmeringly fascinating novel of Joan Lindsay and the equally enthralling film of Peter Weir will always remain absolutely unique and almost other-worldly treasures in an increasingly materialistic and humdrum world.