Content Warning: This section of the guide describes and discusses the source text’s treatment of child loss, death by suicide, gaslighting, and postpartum depression.

“Meanwhile, tall and slender on the upsweep of hills that surrounded their river-run valley, the blue gums stood silent, streaky skins glinting metallic. They were old and had seen it all before.”

The gum trees appear repeatedly throughout the novel and represent the timelessness of the landscape. As they are a particularly Australian feature, they help to center the narrative in a specifically Australian landscape. In order to delve into the theme of Transforming History into Myth, Morton utilizes the landscape to recontextualize the human experience within a longer, larger history. By positioning this reference so early in the novel, Morton offers the longer perspective of the landscape as a contrast for the human drama to follow.

“A thousand childhood hours spent lying in her grandmother’s garden in Sydney, book in hand, had come back in an instant, and she’d hurried up the concrete stairs and pushed open the shiny black door. Time had dissolved; the novelty of being in England, of finding that the names and places she’d come across in novels were real, was still fresh, and Jess had been utterly awed to think that Dickens himself had once walked through these halls, eaten at this table, stored his wine in the cellar downstairs.”

After moving to England, Jess discovers the Charles Dickens Museum and becomes a frequent visitor. Through her childhood connection with Dickens, she forges a tenuous connection to her new home in order to assuage her loneliness. The themes of Finding Home and Belonging and creating Connection Through Literature are both present in this passage, for Jess connects to her new home through literature when she finds herself unable to create living human connections to her new place of residence.