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Chapter 2
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Tomorrow, When the War Began, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
War, Law, and Morality
Family, Friendship, and Love
Coming of Age, Transformation, and the Loss of Innocence
Writing and Storytelling
Summary
Analysis
The path to the bridge is overgrown and covered in twigs and leaves. The bridge itself is clearly old, but it is well built out of uniform round logs. The group immediately decides the stories about the Hermit must be true. Who else could have built such a bridge? He must have lived on wild animals, like possums and wombats, Ellie says, and perhaps he had a vegetable garden. Ellie remembers a guy in town who once found a homemade walking stick in the bush near Wombegonoo. Ellie now thinks it must have been the Hermit’s, although she never really believed the story.
Ellie’s continued disbelief in the Hermit again suggests that stories and legends aren’t always believable or even remotely true, which underscores the limitations of storytelling. There are local legends in Victoria about an actual hermit who lived in the remote bush surrounding Mount Howitt during the 1970s and 1980s, and a hiker named Scott Vickers-Willis found a homemade walking stick in the Mount Howitt bush in 1986.
Themes
The path leads them downhill, through a dense growth of green and brown bushes. Fiona comments how nice it is for Hell, and Robyn wonders if they are the only ones to ever set eyes on it, except for the Hermit, of course. The path opens to a clearing about the size of a hockey field, and they decide to build camp. The clearing isn’t far from the creek—where Ellie sits now as she writes—and Kevin begins to gather wood for a fire. Lee and Ellie are tasked with making dinner, and they decide on two-minute noodles. Fiona asks what two-minute noodles are, and the others are shocked she has never had them. Her parents only eat healthy food, Fiona says. Ellie shakes her head. Sometimes Fiona really is too perfect.
Ellie constantly interrupts her story throughout the novel, which draws attention to the fact that she is writing their story in real-time. Fiona’s observation that Hell is a pretty nice place is certainly ironic, and it suggests that, like people, there is more to Hell than meets the eye. Fiona again appears sheltered and pampered given that she has never eaten two-minute noodles, a staple food similar to ramen noodles, and it is examples like this that make her transformation later in the novel all the more significant.
Themes
