Remembering Babylon

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 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 show more 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

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 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 show more 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

Remembering Babylon is a powerful book. So much to think about. On the surface, this is a story of pioneer life in Australia. The time period is the 1840s, Gemmy Farley is cast off a boat on the far north of Australia. He is raised by aborigines until the Europeans arrive. He tries to join them. Gemmy doesn't fit anywhere. This is a story of isolation, language and communication.

I also saw Gemmy as a Christ like figure. Our first picture of him is a man balancing on the rail with his arms flung out and the book ends with that image repeated in memory and the the statement "their need to draw him into their lives--love, again love--overbalanced but not yet falling." Because of Gemmy, people started seeing things differently or became show more more aware of themselves. "Others felt it but did not know, and the less they knew the more openly hostile they grew; these were the ones you had to watch out for." Even the title of the book lets us know that there is a Biblical reference here.

There is also the theme of colonialism. When immigrants come to a new land they try to make it like the old land instead of learning to live on the land as it has been created. Gemmy is of the land. He has learned to live in this new land. "The land up there was his mother, the only one he had ever known. It belonged to him as he did to it; not by birth but by second birth, a gift..."

Then there is the bees. The bees with their power to communicate. This land is like the Biblical land? A land of milk and honey?

This book was short listed for the Booker Prize and won the inaugural IMPAC Award. Great book. show less

REMEMBERING BABYLON, by David Malouf.

My second Malouf novel. I was very impressed with his THE GREAT WORLD, and this one, while not quite as ambitious, is nearly as good, with its depiction of 19th century Australia, up in the undeveloped 'sticks' above Brisbane, when that town was little more than a glorified 'village.' Malouf again creates some memorable characters and manages to weave a lesson of predjudice and fear into this tale set on the outer fringes of a tenuous civilization. Gemmy, an illiterate and much abused white British orphan, who spent sixteen years in a tribe of aborigines after being pitched overboard from his ship, rejoins a rough-edged white society, which turns out to be less tolerant than that of the so-called show more 'savages.' You get thumbnail lives of not just Gemmy, but of the brave white family that takes him in, as well as the local preacher, school teacher and others. And the fear, hate and loathing that follows Gemmy rears its ugly head again fifty years later as Australia enters WWII and turns on some German emigrant citizens. For a book of barely two hundred pages, Malouf's story packs a powerful punch. Highly recommended, especially if you enjoy Australian fiction. show less

I found this book to be enjoyable, interesting, and meaningful-- a trifecta! Malouf's writing style is straightforward and uncomplicated (except for the Scotch-Aussie dialect which was really fun to read.) The story itself is just perfect. Every character is tenderly rendered and so human, so vulnerable. The interactions between the characters, though subtle, reveal so much about interpersonal politics that is timeless and universal. It's so true it maddening.

The story of Gemmy is one of xenophobia, language and cultural barriers, Colonial mindset of natural superiority, and the loneliness of being an outsider. Some of my favorite passages:

"...yet when, as sometime happened, he fell back on the native word, the only one that could show more express it, their eyes went hard, as if the mere existence of a language they did not know was a provocation, a way of making them helpless."

"Slipping out into the dark he would track night-scented flowers in the summer woods, or with breathing suspended and his whole body alert, observe from a hide, in the soft night air and a liquid light with its own colours, the life of creatures that were abroad, as he was, while the human world slept. That was the joy of the thing. While the eyes of others were closed...to look in on a part of creation that is secret, but only because it lives in a different time zone from that of men."

I just found something to like or at least empathize with in every character (except Sir George perhaps). The ending was even pretty satisfying and the fence imagery from the beginning was perfectly woven through to the end. This is a fantastic book that can really open ones eyes to the ridiculousness of some darker aspects of human nature. Everyone should read this book. 5 stars show less

The play of three children in mid-nineteenth century Queensland is suddenly interrupted by the appearance of a bird-like, scarecrow of a man, perched on their fence and flailing wildly, having emerging from the swamp that marks the edge of their known world. The fear provoked by Gemmy Fairley’s bewildering entry into a small, isolated community of white settlers creates a rift between those who feel responsible to protect him and those who are fearful that he is a harbinger of attack by black savages. A British subject, Gemmy had served as cabin-boy on a ship from which he was cast overboard at age thirteen on the northern shores of Australia, surviving by attaching himself to a group of aborigines. Sixteen years later, he struggles show more to communicate with the white settlers, through a pantomime of signs and a few remembered words.

Gemmy struggles in the gap between two worlds, two identities, and two cultures. His decision to reveal himself to the settlers is driven not by intent to abandon his life with the aborigines, but by a desire to reclaim that part of himself that he has lost. He had been accepted by the native tribe members, “…but guardedly; in the droll, half-apprehensive way that was proper to an in-between creature.” Now he is taken in by the McIvors, a family of Scottish immigrants who believe him to be essentially harmless and who feel a responsibility to bring him back to his white self. Gemmy bonds easily with the McIvor children, who develop a sense of protective possession of the much older man. But to most of the adult community, he represents a dangerous world of unknowns. Only the local minister, Mr. Frazer, is wholly sympathetic. Obsessed with documenting the flora and fauna of this fascinating continent, Frazer views Gemmy as representing Australia’s future - a man who has transcended his birth as a white European and has become “…a true child of the place as it will one day be…”.

The McIvors’ twelve-year-old nephew, Lachlan Beattie, is the first to interact with Gemmy and is quick to sense the meaning of his garbled communications. Lachlan’s status is immediately raised, as he learns what it means to exercise power over another human being, using the false bravado of a stick turned make-believe gun. But he has also experienced what it means to be an outsider, having come to stay with the McIvors following the death of his own father, his mother overburdened with children. His older cousin, Janet, is deeply intelligent and introspective. Conscious of the limits imposed on the lives of females, she resents Lachlan’s freedom, as a boy, to exert his will through direct action.

In the year that follows Gemmy’s arrival, Jock and Ellen McIvor find themselves at increasing odds with their neighbors, whose views of the proper response to the natives range from enslavement to extermination. They struggle with choices of whether to accede to the majority view or be themselves marginalized, and gradually they are changed, drawn together by a sense of injustice at the rejection and violence that Gemmy’s presence evokes from the settlers.

Malouf presents this story from the perspectives of various characters, each change adding layers to the richness of the themes of identity, what it means to live in a community where cohesion is essential to survival, and the ways in which fear engenders prejudice. In the hands of a less talented writer, this story might lend itself to moralistic simplicity, but there is none of that in this book. The setting is beautifully crafted, the storyline captivatingly layered, and the characters multidimensional and driven by complex motivations.

Scattered throughout the narrative are references to the defining nature of language, as the essential difference that stands between Gemmy and the settlers. The whites find Gemmy’s ability to speak a language they do not understand to be deeply disconcerting. Gemmy’s knowledge of English is at its best limited to words learned in the harsh brutality of his life in Britain – words and memories that have been long forgotten but are now returning. “It was as if the language these people spoke was an atmosphere they moved in. Just being in their proximity gave him access to it.” And the written word takes on a magical significance to Gemmy, who believes that in order to reclaim his life, he must take back the pages on which his story was written upon arrival.

Although Gemmy’s time among the aborigines is only briefly described, the natural world is an essential element of the story and seems always to be quietly shimmering in the background. Malouf’s main characters are authentic and grounded, while his descriptions of the tribal peoples are hazy and mystical. As the story unfolds, the adult McIvors experience a growing connection to their physical environment - Ellen in her understanding that the land holds no ties to their family history and they will be the first to be buried on it; Jock in experiencing through the living things around him, a pleasure for which he has no words. But it is Janet who is perhaps most intensely affected, as seen in a stunning scene where she is engulfed by a swarm of bees, yet emerges un-stung, transformed, and having found the missing vision of her future. In bringing the story to a close, Malouf jumps decades forward into the future, as Janet and Lachlan come together after a long separation. In a sense they have also fulfilled Mr. Frazer’s prediction of a new type of Australian, having been both a force for change and themselves profoundly changed, by the continent and by Gemmy.

Remembering Babylon won the first IMPAC Award and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Miles Franklin Award. David Malouf is not only a novelist, but a poet, and he has brought both sensibilities to this outstanding work. I found myself going back to re-read sections, savoring the language and finding more and deeper meanings buried within.

Highly recommended. show less

The setting is the north Australian frontier in the 19th century. Into a small, xenophobic community of Scottish immigrants stumbles a white boy, hardly even recognizable as human. The boy, one Gemmy Fairley, says “Do not shoot, I am a B-b-british object,” and thus begins the story. Gemmy is a castaway who was rescued by aborigines and has survived for several years in the wilderness until this contact. Having fallen overboard when he was very young, he cannot read or write and can now only recall a few English words. But he is a catalyst to all who meet him. For some, he is a threat, for others a treasury of botanical and zoological information, for others still a harmless and helpless visitor. For all, his presence is that of an show more alien other—one who sees them, communicates with them, thinks about them, and perhaps judges them.

Malouf’s writing is magical. The story unfolds as meaning dictates, not according to chronology, the same incident sometime receiving multiple treatments from different perspectives. Flashbacks and forays in other spatial or temporal directions help define the landscape of transformation at the settlement. The McIvors, at whose farm Gemmy first appeared, take him in but soon find themselves at odds with their neighbors when the community’s fear of the unknown landscape comes to be directed at Gemmy himself.

Throughout, the pages are filled with startling insights and memorable images making each paragraph a delight. I especially loved the passages describing how some characters became able to see, really see, the world they had lived in and struggled to subdue for so many sweat-blind years. It’s a novel of emerging consciousness told with grace and charm and compassion. I recommend it highly. show less