David Malouf (1934–2026)

Gemmy Fairley lived a miserable life in Industrial Revolution England. As a child laborer his early life was spent crawling around on factory floors between heavy machines, picking up scraps. Later he became a rat-catcher’s assistant. Then, after getting work as a cabin boy he’s thrown off the ship, eventually washing up on a shore in Queensland.

The Aborigines who found him didn’t know what the white-skinned creature was, but they helped him up and let him go with them and be part of show more their life, though he was always an outsider. Over his years with the Aborigines Gemmy Fairley loses most of his original limited English language and learns that of the tribe. He internalizes their culture, their body-language, their ways of moving and standing, their way of life.

Like other whites in Australia’s earlycolonial history who lived for years with Aborigines, Gemmy Fairley is eventually drawn to people of his own culture when he hears white children playing.

Gemmy approaches and stands on the top rail of a farm’s fence, arms outstretched, a Christ-like figure silhouetted against the SF-like blue of the Australian sky, watching. Seeing this unusual man the children alert their parents. Gemmy is taken in by by their Scottish family, but kept outside the main family house, dwelling in a lean-to.

With nobody really understanding him because of his strange language and his inability to understand the words and dialects of the new settlers, he’s between cultures, living in a nowhere land.

Given the ignorance of the local whites and the time period – mid 19 century, there’s no need to outline Gemmy Fairley’s life with the whites. His life exists through white reactions of “Christian charity”, scientific interest and fear, the fear taking over.

Gemmy is seen by most of the local whites as the "White Blackfella”. He runs.

Sadly, the hatred has stayed on in modern Australian life. It’s the usual way with colonizers and their descendants. They cannot accept the guilt, and turn it into hate. But this is not the time to editorialise. All I can say is please read this book. show less

Ransom focuses on the moment in the Iliad when King Priam retrieves his son Hector’s body from Achilles. In twenty years of teaching that part of the epic, I never survived a class without having to wipe away tears. For me, it is the single most revealing moment in literature about what it means to be human. Nothing tops it. To choose that moment for a book’s primary subject! —audacious and, it turns out, wise.

As far as plot or story goes, it’s as simple a book as could be. A show more grieving father ignores the legitimate concerns of his aged wife and remaining sons and insists on going on a mad journey into the heart of the Greek camp to beseech the killer of his many sons, and most particularly his dearest son Hector, to give back Hector’s body, even though Achilles has shown nothing but a burning desire to wreak his continuing revenge on the corpse by dragging it daily behind his chariot. Hector, after all, had killed his friend Patroclus, the man who was as necessary to Achilles’s well-being as breath or water. In a moment of transformation, Achilles agrees, and Priam returns with the body. That’s the story, unchanged from Homer. But that’s not the book, or not more than the structure upon which he suspends the essentials; the insights and epiphanies of his telling rise like the smell of fresh bread coming from the oven: earthy, embracing, bracing, and beautiful.

Malouf captures both physical place and inner worlds with extraordinary precision and grace—sometimes all in the same group of spare words. For example, in the opening pages Malouf portrays the complex being that is Achilles, part mortal, part son of the sea goddess Thetis:

“As a child he had his own names for the sea. He would repeat them over and over under his breath as a way of calling to her till the syllables shone and became her presence. In the brimming moonlight of his sleeping chamber, at midday in his father’s garden, among oakwoods when summer gales bullied and the full swing of afternoon came crashing, he felt himself caught up and tenderly enfolded as her low voice whispered on his skin.”

“When summer gales bullied”—that sort of word choice, unexpected and perfect, is a reflection that Malouf is not only an award winning novelist, but also a first rate poet.

It is to Priam that Malouf brings the most startling understandings. In building his version of Priam, he borrows from a mythological tradition outside Homer about Priam’s early life—a near miss with slavery—and he gives Priam a most unlikely companion on his crazy journey, a rough workman, a carter who sits in the marketplace each day with his mules and wagon for hire. He portrays Priam struggling to understand what being a father, a husband, a man means. Malouf’s Priam tugs off the restraining mantel of kingship to discover the simple joys of being human, partly with the help of his humble companion. This is fascinating to me since it is from Priam’s visit that Achilles finds his way back to the human race. I had never imagined a Priam who, for different reasons than Achilles, is also struggling to find his humanity. Malouf has often written about what the inner world of being a man is, and this book continues that theme. The subtlety of his findings on this subject are hard to analyze—the atmospheric, osmotic understanding has to grow into you from Malouf’s words.

I’m not sure how this book would feel to someone who has never read the Iliad. I honestly can’t say if it would be as rich an experience, though I’d love to hear from anyone who reads Ransom but hasn’t experienced the ancient epic. Given the depth of Malouf’s ideas about male feelings, I think it’d be a great read. But for all you lovers of Homer, I am certain this is a book you’ll savor. show less

One of the most astonishing pieces of Australian writing I have ever read. It's no secret that Malouf is one of our national treasures, but Remembering Babylon is something else entirely. Written from a dozen or so perspectives, each absorbing in its accuracy, Malouf turns his eye in this short novel to the complexities of colonialism, specifically among white, rural Australians in the 1860s. Less than a century after the country was colonised, a small town (village?) of white people show more struggle with the introduction amongst them of a white man who has been living with Indigenous people for 16 years. Their concern about whether he has completely lost "it", their fear of the unknown - anything beyond view of their steeple - and that uncomfortable, uneasy relationship with their own colonialism, their sense of inferiority to the mother country, and the social and cultural clashes between neighbours that have made up every society since time immemorial... all captured in fewer than 200 pages.

Malouf smartly chooses not to write from the Indigenous perspective - he has rightly said that no white person in Australia can really do that - but gives us enough touches through Gemmy's point of view that we understand the true tragedy of colonialism, as symbolised through Janet's relationship with her bees. Being able to see them communicate but not quite understand how, and wondering if you knew it once, is a thought that has often haunted me, and remains haunting.

By 1860, my ancestors were well settled in Australia, their children becoming young adults and soon to have children of their own. My relationship with this land - as a white, rural-born, gay, intellectual, urbanite - is a complex one, and so is my relationship with the attempted genocide my ancestors perpetuated. Although the killing ended long ago, the cultural suppression continued well into the 1960s - the decade of my parents' birth - and we live with a lineage of divided privilege, culture, and sentiment. Compared to our neighbours "across the pond", New Zealand, who charted a very different 19th century, it is very telling.

To return to Malouf's work, his prose is tight, almost silhouetting the situations that occur, using the characters' summations of moments and often sidestepping detail, to leave us caught in the shadow between the people involved. It's a strange, sometimes surprisingly synopsis-like approach to writing, and yet it somehow produces a staggering effect. This is a quintessential Australian novel, one that examines our tortured history without unfairly chastising. The relationship between white and black is one key theme, but so is the relationship between home and away. Even now in 2018, the so-called "cultural cringe" remains strong in Australia. We have a fractious relationship with the UK, and within ourselves about the UK - the proximity to "the world", the lengthy history and culture, the feeling that we have been distanced from so much cultural understanding through the fault of our parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and so on. We often discuss this in the context of Australia's newer migrant families, but I can attest it remains strong in an eighth-generation Australian like myself. To peer into the minds of people who themselves remember the mother country, or - even worse - have heard it from everyone around them but are themselves inexperienced, is a gift in the hands of Malouf.

Perhaps this is a work about questions, not about answers. The answers are for us to find - if, indeed, we ever can. show less

'Ransom' is a story inspired by an event from 'The Iliad', King Priam’s decision to beg the dreaded Achilles to return his son, exchanging the treasures of Troy for Hector’s body. It’s a meeting of two legends so its perhaps slightly surprisingly that the meeting itself doesn’t take up much more space. Rather 'Ransom' is really more a character study of Priam, showing us the man behind the royal mask. He knows full well that his is merely a ceremonial role but he realises that only show more by doing what has never been done before can he hope to succeed.

Perhaps the most pleasing aspect of this book is the wonderful (invented) character of Somax the carter, the only escort Priam will allow on his quest. This short journey outside the walls of Troy allows the king to experience another side of life. Priam discovers the simple joys of the wider world that he usually simply ignores. Malouf’ elegant prose builds up a picture of a man who knows the end is not too far away, musing on the nature of mortality:

“Only we humans can know, endowed as we are with mortality, but also with consciousness, what it is to be aware each day of the fading in us of freshness and youth;"

Even if the book is based on "The Iliad", I don't believe that its neccessay to have read Homer’s classic to enjoy this one. This is my first book by Malouf and I must say that I really enjoyed his simple yet elegant prose, but perhaps the only thing I felt was missing from the story was a little more of Achilles, who very much plays a supporting role here. All the same the meeting is a touching moment in the midst of a great war. The two men are able, for a brief moment, to shed their public roles and embrace their own private grief only too aware of their own death is merely a matter of time. show less