The Water Hole as a Symbol in Kate Morton's Homecoming
The Water Hole as a Place
The water hole is a literal feature of the Turner property in the Adelaide Hills: a widening of the creek that runs through the land, shaded by an old willow tree on its bank. The property, known locally and historically as the Wentworth place, was rechristened Halcyon by the Turners. On Christmas Eve 1959, Isabel Turner and her three eldest children carried a picnic down from the house and set up beneath the willow, with baby Thea asleep in a white crib hanging from the strongest bough. It was a spot the family knew well.
The water hole was also familiar to locals. Percy Summers, the deliveryman who ran the grocery shop with his wife Meg, regularly stopped there to let his horse Blaze swim when returning from deliveries down south. It was on one such stop that he made his grim discovery: the Turner family lying still beneath the willow, apparently asleep, but with no one breathing. The baby's crib was empty; Thea was missing.
A Place of Ordinary Life
Before the tragedy, the water hole represents the unremarkable rhythms of rural Australian life. It is a place of recreation and respite—a swimming spot for a tired horse, a picnic site for a family, a landmark known to those who worked the land. The willow tree offers shade; the creek offers water; the land offers a sense of permanence and belonging. For Isabel Turner, an Englishwoman raising children in a country she never fully embraced, the water hole was part of the landscape she found both beautiful and alien. Her children had brought home stories of the bunyip, a creature that hides in the swamp and grabs children who come too near—a myth that captured her sense that danger lurked in the dark spaces of this unfamiliar continent. The water hole, in this light, is not merely a setting but a reminder that the Australian landscape holds beauty and terror in equal measure.
The Site of Catastrophe
The water hole's meaning shifts violently on Christmas Eve 1959. Percy's description of the scene—the strange stillness, the lack of breath, the ants crawling over young Evie's wrist—turns the familiar picnic spot into a site of horror. The family's deaths are later ruled a murder-suicide, with Isabel as the perpetrator, though the poison's type and source are never determined. The water hole becomes the place where the Turner family's story ends, and where the town's suspicions begin.
The site also becomes a locus of investigation. Police and photographers walk the ground, and the search for the missing baby begins. The water hole is transformed from a private family retreat into a public crime scene, its willow tree and grassy bank now associated with death rather than picnics.
Nature's Indifference
The water hole's most persistent symbolic weight lies in what it reveals about nature's indifference to human catastrophe. The storm that follows the discovery washes away footprints and muddies the ground, erasing the traces of what happened. Percy returns to the water hole on the night after the deaths and finds not a single footstep visible—the rain has done its work, and the site offers no answers. The dingoes that were active in the area, and that the coroner concluded likely removed the baby's body, are another reminder that the natural world operates according to its own logic, unconcerned with human grief.
Even the poison that killed the family comes from nature. Marcus Summers caught a pufferfish, and Meg made fish paste from it—a substance whose toxicity was undetectable in 1959. The blue-green algal blooms that washed pufferfish up on the beach are a natural phenomenon, and the deaths they enabled are, in a sense, an accident of the natural world. The water hole, where the family died, and the beach, where the pufferfish was found, are both sites where nature's indifference intersects with human tragedy. This connection ties the water hole to the novel's exploration of guilt, complicity, and the legacy of past actions.
Isabel's own reflections on Australia reinforce this theme. She observes that this continent was one where beauty and terror were inextricably linked—people died from thirst if they took a wrong turn, a spark could consume a town, children could disappear. The water hole, a place of beauty and shade, becomes the stage for a family's annihilation, and the landscape itself seems to absorb the event without comment.
A Site of Memory and Return
The water hole recurs throughout the novel as a place characters return to, often decades later. Polly—who is, unbeknownst to herself, Thea Turner, the surviving baby—visits the water hole in 1989 during a trip to Tambilla. She walks along the creek, inspects stones and leaves, strokes the willow's trunk, and imagines the scene as it must have been. She finds a small silver fairy wren charm on the ground near the water hole—a charm Percy Summers had given to Isabel years before. Polly feels at peace at the site of her family's death, a strange and telling response. The water hole, for Polly, is not a place of horror but of origin—the place where her life began, and where her family's ended.
Percy, too, returns to the water hole in memory. In his final reflections, he recalls the affair he had with Isabel, the wren charm he gave her, and the way the water hole became the site of both his greatest discovery and his deepest guilt. The water hole is where Percy's life changed—where he found the bodies, where Meg found the baby, where the family's fate was sealed.
For Jess, the water hole is part of the story she uncovers. She reads about it in Daniel Miller's book, visits the Turner property with Polly, and walks toward the creek at the novel's end. The water hole is the place where the past is anchored—the fixed point around which the novel's secrets revolve. This makes it central to the novel's exploration of memory, narrative, and the construction of truth.
The Water Hole and Secrecy
The water hole also functions as a symbol of how secrets are buried and resurface. The rain that washes away footprints is a kind of erasure—the landscape itself conspires to hide the truth. Meg's footprints at the scene, the muddy boots of Percy's sons, the photographer's preserved images—all are traces that the water hole both reveals and conceals. The site is a palimpsest: each return to it uncovers a new layer of meaning, even as the physical evidence fades.
The water hole's connection to the novel's themes of intergenerational secrecy and its consequences is direct. The deaths at the water hole are the origin of Nora's deception—her decision to raise Thea as her own daughter, her concealment of Isabel's affair, her burial of her own baby in the rose garden. The water hole is where the truth begins, and it is the place to which the novel's characters must return to understand it.
Study Questions
1. How does the water hole function as a site of both beauty and terror in the novel?
The water hole is introduced as a peaceful natural feature—a swimming spot for Percy's horse, a picnic site for the Turner family. Its beauty is established through the willow tree, the creek, and the family's ordinary enjoyment of the spot. The terror comes with the discovery of the bodies and the subsequent investigation. The novel links these two aspects through Isabel's reflections on the Australian landscape, which she sees as a place where beauty and terror were inextricably linked. The water hole embodies this duality: it is the same place, unchanged by the tragedy, yet its meaning is transformed. The landscape's indifference—the rain that erases evidence, the dingoes that remove the baby—reinforces the sense that nature does not register human suffering.
2. What role does the water hole play in the novel's treatment of memory and the construction of truth?
The water hole is a site where memory and evidence intersect. The physical traces of the tragedy—footprints, the crib, the picnic items—are subject to erasure by rain and time. Percy's return to the site on the night after the deaths reveals that the storm has washed away all signs of the investigation, leaving the ground a mudslide. The water hole thus becomes a metaphor for the unreliability of memory: the past is not preserved but continually reshaped by the forces of nature and time. The novel's characters must reconstruct the truth from fragments—Daniel Miller's book, Isabel's diary, Nora's confession—just as they must revisit the water hole to understand what happened there.
3. How does Polly's visit to the water hole in 1989 complicate the site's symbolic meaning?
Polly's visit is remarkable because she feels at peace at the site of her family's deaths. For her, the water hole is not a place of horror but of origin—the place where she was found, and where her life as Thea Turner ended and her life as Polly began. Her discovery of the silver wren charm, which Percy had given to Isabel, connects her to the family she never knew. The water hole, for Polly, is a place of reconciliation rather than grief. This complicates the site's meaning by showing that the same place can hold different truths for different people: for Percy, it is a site of guilt and memory; for Polly, a site of peace and belonging.
4. In what ways does the water hole symbolize nature's indifference to human tragedy?
The water hole's symbolic power derives largely from the natural forces that operate there. The storm that washes away evidence, the dingoes that remove the baby's body, the ants that crawl over Evie's wrist, and the pufferfish that provides the poison are all natural phenomena that occur without regard for human meaning. The novel emphasizes this through Isabel's reflections on the Australian landscape and through Percy's sense of the country's brutally stark vastness. The water hole is a place where human catastrophe unfolds against a backdrop of natural indifference—the same water that sustains life also conceals death, and the landscape absorbs the tragedy without comment.