The Waterhole
Graeme Base

Penguin Books:
Viking 2001

unpaged hbk $26.00

ISBN: 0-670-88928-8

The Waterhole is a book about numbers. It also shows us animals from different countries and the noises they make when drinking water. The book also has different types of words we can use to say something is delicious. There’s a mystery as well. There seems to be fewer frogs on each page. Are the animals going to die of thirst?

Graeme Base has given another pleasure to us, just like his first pleasure Animalia. This book, The Waterhole will be most enjoyed by younger readers, but anyone can enjoy the fabulous drawings. I always thought animals could never be brought to life in books, but I’ve been proved wrong. When you look at the drawings, it feels like you’re right there with the animals as they drink.  I loved reading this book and I hope Graeme can produce more books as wonderful as The Waterhole and Animalia.

Tharsiga, aged 11, Canberra, ACT
Water is the gift that keeps our planet alive, and in The Waterhole, Graeme Base illustrates (literally) what happens as the water dries up. The bleakness of page 11 is dramatic and the simple sentence "all the animals went away" is almost superfluous.  But it is not the end of the story.

This book can be read on many levels by different audiences.  There is the simple counting book, there is the find-the-hidden-picture book, there is the environmental book and there is the allegorical book about despair and hope, so topical for these times. It can be read again and again by the same person and each time there will be something new which is revealed.

Graeme Base is a master illustrator, and for me, in the top three in Australia.  His attention to detail, his knack for transforming things so that even the keenest eye is challenged, his ability to tell a tale are all demonstrated yet again.  If the definition of a true picture book is one where the text and textures are so intertwined that neither is complete without the other, then The Waterhole is a perfect example of the genre!

Natalia, 16, NT