How was that, then?Īll this questioning helps today’s reader to enter into the settler’s mindset. The whole cast of his face gave him the look of one of Them. For the fact was, when you looked at him sometimes he was not white. The loss of the English language is also a source of distress for them:Ĭould you lose it? Not just language, but it. Gemmy has almost forgotten his native language, which doesn’t help the communication with the settlers. Either you’re white and with them and have no contact with the blacks, either you’re black and keep away from the settlers. The underlying question is: is he one of us? Can we welcome him in the community? Can we trust him? For them, you cannot be in-between. (That was hard to swallow.) But had he remained white? When he fell in with the blacks – at thirteen, was it? – he had been like any other child, one of their own for instance. In their mind, being white has value in itself and losing your whiteness is losing your humanity. And the nagging question is “Is he still white or has be become black by living with the natives?”. Bad enough if he was what he appeared to be, a poor savage, but if he was a white man it was horrible. They don’t know don’t know how to place him. How, when they found him he had still been half-child, half-seacalf, his hair swarming with spirits in the shape of tiny phosphorescent crabs, his mouth stopped with coral how, ash-pale and ghostly in his little white shirt, that long ago had rotted like a caul, he had risen up in the firelight and danced, and changed before their eyes from a sea-creature into a skinny human child.Īt the time the book is set, his arrival disturbs the settlers. In time his coming among them became another tale they told and he would listen to it with a kind of wonder, as if what they were recounting had happened ages ago, in a time beyond all memory, and to someone else.

He learnt the language, the customs and managed to fit in. Sixteen years ago, the Aborigines didn’t know what to make of him but took him in and he learnt to live among them. Gemmy’s arrival disturbed two communities. The children are afraid of him but recognize a bit of English in his words and bring him back to their parents.

Sixteen years before, when he was not much older than Lachlan Beattie, he had been cast overboard from a passing ship and had been living since in the scrub country to the north with blacks. When the book opens, three children, Janet and Meg McIvor and Lachlan Beattie meet with Gemmy when they are playing in the fields. Remembering Babylon by David Malouf is set in Queensland, Australia in the early days of the European settlements in this territory.

(1994) French title: Je me souviens de Babylone.

Malouf remembering babylon