Less is more . What is whiteness and can you loose it ? An isolated settler community in the nineteen century, high up on Australia's eastern flank , come up close and personal to this previous unexamined question when a white boy, but with all the gestures and habits of an indigenous man, emerges from the bush . He has no language , no story he can tell but is not hostile or violent . The community settles uneasily into a new phase and the novel explores the reactions , dilemmas and adjustments of its members.

Gemmy , the name they give him , has fragments of memory , of trauma and brutality which he can only access by his senses . The family that first encounter him are the most deeply affected and the novel opens and closes with two of the children , Lachlan and Janet , for whom Gemmy has had a transformative effect .

It could do easy have followed a predictable path but the genius is that Malouf chooses instead to take a different route , so that the last three chapters elevate the story above the hero/ villain into another place entirely . The whole nature of the colonial encounter is deftly held in these last three chapters , the mutual incomprehensible facing each other , the impossibility of understanding and the ways of knowing that gain dominance at the cost of so much harm .

I'm really not sure what to make of this, my first ever David Malouf book. What starts out as an exploration of Australian identity (a common theme) becomes something else from about 2/3rds of the way through. I've no doubt that Australia has its fair share of 'squib' writers but I greatly value Patrick White, Gerald Murnane and Helen Garner. And their honesty and pursuit of reason and causes within their books is what makes Australiana fiction so readable. It doesn't generally pull its punches and fall back on pat solutions and fatuous waffle.

I'm not sure where Malouf sits. I would say from what I have read here that he is quite clearly on the 'poetic', romantic side of writing, another Keneally perhaps, and I think this shows in the latter part of this book. The first part is really interesting - an examination of a non-aboriginal returning back from an aboriginal upbringing into settler life and how he really has become a square peg and unable to fit into either society. Despite a desire to accept him, as he is, by a minority of the white settlers - his original whiteness outweighs his aboriginal upbringing - the overrall majority of settlerdom express suspicion and outright bigotry, which is an expression in itself of the fear they feel for the aboriginal, which onwards again is an expression of a fear of the unknown. And despite all the good intentions of the minority it is always the power of the majority that holds sway. In some ways this is about what happens to the minority in the face of the majority. Jemmy is neither one thing or another; neither white nor aboriginal, but his perceived ties and the 'mythology' with the aboriginals leaves him as an outsider. Malouf is more concerned with the effects of this on the members of the white community. But Jemmy in some ways represents a greater understanding of the environment and 'place' and Malouf plays him out as such.

After Jemmy is assaulted and the attempt to murder him is made necessitating his distancing from the central settler community, the book to my mind loses focus; indeed I was left wondering where it was going. He is moved away from the McIvor's who took him in and goes to live with Mrs. Hutchence and her niece, themselves seen as somewhat outsiders to the main settler community. Why is Mrs Hutchence such an outsider? Why does she attract the children - or at least certain children. The two focussed on in the book are associated with the McIvors who originally took Jemmy in - Lachlan and Janet. What makes them special?

I just felt that there was too little character development within this novel. The characters ARE there but so much more could be made of each of them. And as such it is more than an interesting book but at heart is a bit of a let down to find that it all comes down to errrr..... love. Thats dodging the issues raised within the book big time. But then maybe thats just what Malouf wants; he wants US the readers to make the jumps, make the connections, find the reasons. The themes here are explored better within the canon of Australian writing. Even Keneally (not on of my favourite writers) came up with The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith as strong a book (and film) on racism and 'outsider-ness' as you'll come across.

Malouf needs to be further explored. There is much in this book which unfortunately I feel is not fully explored. There is much here on identity and 'otherness' and language in both the white and the aboriginal world.

The title comes from Blake, quoted at the beginning: “Whether this is Jerusalem or Babylon we know not”, although it seems an ill-fitting comparison between the kingdom of Nebuchadnezzar and the life of native black Australians.
For this is the story of the simple Gemmy, twice kidnapped and abused by fellow whites, left to drown aged 13, then raised by aborigines for 16 years. His reappearance among settlers in the 1850s raises the question of which culture he belongs to, to suspicion and the threat of violence between the two.
The novel is written more or less chronologically in a conservative style – it reminded me of Turgenev – with deracinated characters observed by an omniscient narrator.
There is little dialogue – partly due to the pattern of life at the time in rugged, outback Queensland where “there was too much space, up here, between words, even the simplest, as there was between objects.” Conversations are reported upon rather then heard, their consequences known and emotional reactions explained even before known to the participants themselves.
Indeed, the interaction of feelings and misunderstandings between them is one of the greatest achievements of Malouf’s perceptive imagination.
I didn’t get much feeling for the physical surroundings of Gemmy’s life with the white McIvor family that adopts him, but there is a clear sense of the social and personal tensions it engenders. This is beautifully encapsulated when many of the settlers, living on what had been traditional hunting grounds become alarmed by a report that two blacks walked in “as if they owned the place” and gave Gemmy a stone.
It takes the reasonable Jack McIvor to remark on the absurdity that delivery of a stone should unsettle the settlers with “all their education,.. know-how .. and the shotguns they carried.”
It’s a question of perception, just as his nephew Lachlan first scared Gemmy on his return to white society by threatening him with a stick that he pretended to be a rifle. It’s a deception that will later haunt the former for 50 years.
There are moments of social satire, such as the local wives’ attitude toward the comparatively wealthy newcomer Mrs Hutchence, a woman of uncertain, possibly disreputable past. “The one thing you could say of her was that she did not give herself airs. They would have complained if she had, but when she did not they felt cheated.”
Identity, class, race are at the heart of the novel, as one would expect from its setting. Had Gemmy, with his aboriginal ways, remained white? Can he find the words to become so again? What will be his fate?
Running around this central theme is the idea of skin – which Lachlan’s cousin Janet metaphorically sheds three times, feeling renewed each time as she peels off a scab, is released from a swarm of bees, and dons a nun’s habit.
Blake may not have been Malouf’s only literary inspiration. The words of the botanising minister Mr Frazer may be partly taken from a biographer of the real-life Gemmy when he speaks of the need “to make this place .. part of the world’s garden, .. be changing ourselves rather than it. … Our poor friend Gemmy is a forerunner. He is no longer a white man, or a European. But a true child of the place as it will one day be.”
The last words belong to Janet: “Let none be left in the dark or out of mind.” Yet commendably, Malouf leaves the outcome unclear.

This novel approaches its subject, the return of a white man raised by indigenous Australians to his community of origin, with a succinctness that almost renders the story slight. But the beauty of the prose and the deftness of the Malouf's choices make the book a surprise. There is a hint of Omensetter's Luck in the shape of the tale though Malouf is very much clearer in his prose than Gass. For me clarity is a plus. There is a story that emerges, and it has Gemmy at its center, but it ranges afield into the vivid others who surround him, question him, presume to know him, who once shared kinship with him, but who find him strange and dangerous in his return. The story is important, the depiction of the original peoples of Australia, though scant, is pure, though it has elements of the magical other. As if wiser, nearly invisible elves moved amongst the white settlers. There are moments of the fantastical in the effect of these people on Gemmy, in the way their culture has aligned him to different ideas of the world. This part of the book is unerring and really wonderful. For the first half of the novel I felt as thought I had stumbled on a treasure, though Malouf is, of course, well known. But the latter part of the book whimpers and fades. There is an odd choice to have Gemmy simply dissolve out of the book and the passage of time to take the place of the culmination one expects. I admired this as a choice but am sorry that the book did not end in some stronger way.

"Strange how unimportant eyebrows can be, as long as there are two of them"

In David Malouf's IMPAC-winning novel (novelette? 182 pages), a group of children in 1840s Queensland happen across a young man, unkempt and racially white, but exhibiting behaviour they and their community expect of the local Aborigines. The community is changed forever by Gemmy's arrival.

I don't understand how this won the IMPAC and was shortlisted for the Booker. It's So Incredibly Uninteresting. I couldn't bring myself to care about any of the characters, the setting, the writing, just any of it. Maybe that's a criterion for book prizes.

Each chapter is from a different character's point of view - we get Gemmy, Lachlan (the boy who found him), Janet (Lachlan's jealous cousin), Jock (Janet's father), the teacher... and none of them is an interesting person by themselves. There are some vague hints of interesting colonial life (dialogue is written in a strange Scotch hybrid sometimes) but it's not explored. The writing is... meh. It's not even exhilerating writing.

Urgh. Take it away from me.

This is a beautiful novel about love but not about Aborigines as I had thought, except in the negative spaces of the book, the rest as always dominated by whites, English subjects that choose to try their luck in the wilderness of Australia. The settlers are visited by Gemma Fairley who has actually lived with the Aborigines for 16 years after he is tossed from an English ship were he was entrapped into being a cabin boy. Many touching scenes about how we belong to each other and great writing.

i’m counting this sorry girls

’Til they arrived no other lives had been lived here. It made the air that much thinner, harder to breathe. She had not understood, ‘til she came to a place where it was lacking, the extent to which her sense of the world had to do with the presence of those who had been there before, leaving signs of their passing and spaces still warm with breath – a threshold worn with the coming and going of feet, hedges between fields that went back a thousand years, and the names even further, most of all, the names on headstones, which were their names, under which lay the bones that had made their bones and given them breath.

They would be the first dead here. It made death that much lonelier, and life lonelier too.

This is a novel of exile, both voluntary and involuntary. We’re dropped into mid-19th century colonial Australia, in a far-north outpost where European immigrants struggle to make a life out of the dust and rural isolation of their new land. They fear and misunderstand the native people, and both the immigrants and the aboriginals struggle with displacement. Gemmy, a white man raised by aboriginals for 16 years, becomes symbolism personified, neither here nor there, and for those of us who are immigrants ourselves the constant awkwardness was so brilliantly portrayed. Reverse culture shock was the most disorientating feeling I’ve ever experienced: that deeply lonely sense of being a two headed alien in your home country, and yet, still an outsider in your new one – Malouf nailed it. Both from Gemmy’s perspective, and from the Scottish immigrants who both long for home and struggle to put on a strong front and brave the elements. Identity is so deeply rooted in where we’re from and our early memories, and Thomas Wolfe was onto something when he said You Can’t Go Home Again.

The writing, quite simply, was beautiful. Lush, dreamy, emotional, and highly descriptive. Yet, this wasn’t a perfect book - mysterious characters disappeared when I wanted more of them, such as George the tortured schoolteacher, and Leona the “exotic” woman, and the ending felt a little rushed (“fast forward 50 years and this happened”), but it was a great introduction to Malouf’s work, and a dignified comment on culture, identity, and the beginnings of nationhood.

Exceptional. Gorgeous prose (Malouf´s a poet and it shows),each character, however minor, is exquisitely drawn. A story of identity, family,belonging, love, losses.Lyrical. Malouf deserves the Nobel.

The story of a white shipwrecked survivor living amongst the local tribes somewhere in the North of Australia and his encounters and eventual adoption into the local lives of a Scottish settlement in the new lands that the Scottish immigrants were promised.

There is a lot of reckoning in the story, with lots of allusions to Christian morality, man v. self conflicts, and the enlightenment of recognizing humanity. The race relations of Australia is exposed in its blistering severity and brutality, where even the notions of the unknown native populations were viewed with horror, fear, and skepticism that borders on mania.

What is expected between the characters and their interactions are deeply explored, as this psychological novel tends to drift and stay within the minds of its characters, rather than play out events amongst them. Although this doesn't detract from the story in any way, it does take a little more pondering and contemplation, as the inner workings tend to lead into long, big one-sentence paragraphs that depict a stream of conscious flow, but also pulls a lot of the story into itself and almost obfuscates the actions and events of the story, where even the audience may not fully be apprised of the situations.

Still a very well-written piece, and it is just begging for deep discussion amongst interested parties.

This is a difficult review to write because this book is to beautifully written. The prose is gorgeous and lyrical, and there are some sections that are tattooed on my brain. That being said, it is problematic. Malouf manages to have an entire book with many elements of the Aboriginal culture that almost completely silences the people of that culture. Aborigines are present as an idea, but not as individuals. In fact, the main representative of the aboriginal in the text is a white man. It is glaring and informed my perception of the text enormously.

I'm sorry to say that there wasn't a single kangaroo, dingo or wallaby in this book