In the Australian bush, in the mid-19th Century, a small community of families from Scotland and England have set up homes. The settlers are surprised when a "black white man" appears at a farm at the edge of the bush. He is Gemmy Fairley who had been cast off a British ship near the northern shore of Australia at age 13. He was found by the aborigines and lived with them for 16 years. He only remembers a few words of English, and seems neither English nor aborigine. His childhood in England had been the horrific life of a street urchin before he went off to sea. Gemmy was taken in by the McIvor family, but does not feel truly part of either culture--European or aborigine. Some of the settlers fear the black aborigines, and do not trust Gemmy.

Told from the point of view of many of the colonials, the virtues, flaws, fears, and opinions of the people are shown. For example, the minister loves botany and values Gemmy as a resource for identifying edible plants used by the aborigines. The isolated group of settlers were the first Europeans to live in that part of Australia, and they had to cope with many unknowns. But some neighbors are so terrified that the aborigines will attack their families that the men attack the timid Gemmy in the middle of the night. Fortunately, the eccentric Mrs Hutchence extends kindness to all, including Gemmy.

The adjustment to a different land where they had no history, the loneliness, and the isolation was difficult for the settlers. The Scottish Mrs McIvor thought, "It was the fearful loneliness of the place that most affected her--the absence of ghosts....She had not understood, till 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..."

Neither the aborigines nor the colonials understood the others' culture. Gemmy was white, but his experiences gave him the skills to live in the bush and to communicate with the aboriginal tribe. The settlers had the fear of the unknown in a new land, and many expressed racial and cultural intolerance. The book has an interesting title, "Remembering Babylon". The Old Testament has many references to Babylon. One reference is to the Hebrews in exile in Babylon, away from their homeland in Zion. Another reference is about the confusion and inability to communicate as people spoke in different tongues during the construction of the Tower of Babel. Both Bible stories would seem to fit the themes of the book.

I put off writing this review, because of worrying that I couldn't do justice to the book. This short, tight novel is like an archeological site, with many layers of richness, all of them disturbing but satisfying. The story is about early settlers in Australia, and the arrival of a white man who had spent the previous 16 years living amongst the Aborigines. He had been tossed off a ship, and saved by the natives, who graciously shared their lives with him. The novel asks both personal and sociological questions, such as:

* What is most important to prejudiced people -- race or culture?
* How do "civilized" people cope with the terror of wilderness during colonization?
* Why do men automatically assume superiority over women?
* How does fear morph into immoral, wicked behavior?

Malouf's brilliance lies in his ability to get into the minds of his characters, and interpret even the most subtle glance or gesture. His language is so poetic that I kept wanting to underline phrases or sentences. He understands the irrationality of being a human being, and how people succumb to lesser behavior when they know better. And the clarity with which he portrays relationships is amazing.

Perhaps the best thing about this novel is that it speaks the languages of anthropology, history, psychology and spirituality all at once. I want to learn more about the author, and read more of his books, right away.

First Aussie classic logged in on Goodreads. Let’s go.

It’s all about the psychology of different characters in a small town in Australia, and more so how they’re affected after a man named Gemmy—who has assimilated into aboriginal life for over a decade—happens upon the community. I wish it centred more on Gemmy and his story and his point of view, but it was pretty detached and left him a mystery. There wasn’t much going on throughout and the ending was confusing and just… eh. It focused on the habits and behaviours of people more than anything else, which I don’t think its potential was even tapped into. The book floated by the characters and it didn’t end up moving me or getting me to care for anyone. I was interested, nonetheless, to read the different perspectives of characters and what their motives are, but I don’t reckon I’ll remember much of this book.

Tragic and very readable story telling about a European who had been with the Aboriginal community early in the 20th century trying to integrate back in. But also about what it takes to be part of a small rural community in general and how we exclude or include others.

I wanted to like this - but despite the intriguing premise, it was a letdown.

The best I can say is that the prose was beautiful at times, though seemed overwritten and straining for poetic poignance that it failed to deliver. There just wasn't much there to be moved by - no story, no real characters, themes and ideas that felt muddy and unclear to me.

The book holds the characters at such a distance that I found no reason to care. They don't seem believable as people of the 19th century - they just seem like constructs.

I couldn't help comparing the book to seminal historical fiction by Toni Morrison or Cormac McCarthy that eviscerates the myths around the founding of a nation - books like Blood Meridian or Beloved. These works are incredibly rich, are a thrilling and intense experience to read, and have things to say.

I was hoping for something like that, but Malouf's goals were evidently very different. I'm not entirely sure what they were, or what the point was in the end.

Remembering Babylon is the story of Gemmy Fairley, a young British cabin boy who is washed up on the shores of Australia and adopted by the aborigines. Sixteen years later, he is discovered and (somewhat) adopted back into white society by a group of British settlers. The conclusion of the book then jumps forward again several years, and the reader discovers the outcome of several main characters.

This story is bigger than a simple survival tale, the life of a young boy forced to survive until he is restored to his rightful place (and people). It is more than a fictitious rendering of colonial life in the far-flung reaches of the Victorian Empire. And it is much, much more than the description of an encounter between black and white. These are all single strands that contribute to the creation of this story. At its very core, this book is about identity, the method through which one constructs their own identity, the homogeneity of larger social groups and the truths and lies told to establish and maintain one’s place within society.

Malouf establishes an encounter between self and ‘the Other’ which takes place within the very person of Gemmy Fairley and, as such, utterly transcends any easy interpretation or conclusion. Dubbed ‘the white blackfellar’, Gemmy, for all intents and purposes, IS the ‘savage’ Other (i.e. the native aborigines) that have been so thoroughly and harshly repressed to make room for white settlers; he also represents the perceived threat of white deterioration if the settlers ‘give in’ to the harsh land they seek to claim as their own. It is numbing to the mind and soul to read the existential anguish that Gemmy feels, torn between two worlds and able to exist fully in neither one. Even worse is to see how the community tries to cope with his existence and their struggles to understand and categorize him.

Heartbreaking and powerful, this book completely absorbed me and kept me thinking long after I had finished the pages…

Some books get better when you study them.. this is one

Malouf tells the story of Australia's past. He uses a white boy raised by an aboriginal tribe to center the action. The boy named Gemmy is rediscovered by white settlers and informally adopted by a family of Scottish immigrants. Gemmy presents a problem. The white settlers are in active conflict with the native tribes whose land they are confiscating. Set in the mid 1800s, the land is still sparsely populated by British colonists but the problems are clearly just beginning.

The white settlers are on constant guard against a potential attack from displaced tribes. Gemmy, though white, lacks the language skills and manners of his adoptive villagers. He remains more connected to his tribal past than his colonial future. He symbolizes the torn southern continent. Australia's past pre-colonial world is doomed to fall into extinction at the hands of the British.

Malouf rotates character profiles to introduce varied peoples who came to Australia during its early colonial days. The community he focuses on is largely comprised of Scottish immigrants. The society is effectively self-regulated. Various personalities, both men and women, hold and sometimes challenge the social cohesion of the community. With Gemmy, the loosely defined neighborly connections are frayed and divided.

Malouf closes the book with Gemmy's adoptive family children now grown. Two cousins reflect on this formative stage in Australia's history and remember their oddly out-of-place friend Gemmy. Malouf vividly brings Australia's past to life though the story takes a back seat to the commentary and history. The characters carry on and eventually separate and plod forward. The messages are subtle. Malouf leaves the reader to interpret this historical fiction on their own terms. It as a cerebral and well-written book but be forewarned, the plot and characters are more realistic than engrossing.

"A series of happenings strung together without a clear plot line," was one assessment at my book group. I could see where that assessment came from, but, it really misses the way Malouf's vignettes and language allow 18th century Australia to come alive: "the land, the sunlight, the spaces."

The clash between the cultures is intriguing and disappointing and revealing, in the way many settlers jump to conclusions and cannot allow the land to speak. Thankfully, some settlers are nudged toward listening, with Gemmy, who has learned to live with native Australians, as the impulse. For example, Jock: "It was as if he had seen the world till now, not through his own eyes, out of some singular self, but through the eyes of a fellow who was always in company, even when he was along; a sociable self, wrapped always in a communal warmth that protected it from dark matters and all the blinding light of things, but also from the knowledge that there was a place out there where the self might stand alone. Wading through waist-high grass, he was surprised to see all the tips beaded with green, as if some new growth had come into the world that till now he had never seen or heard of." (p 106)

Then there's Mr. Frazer, who amazes Gemmy with his drawings: "They are proof that Mr. Frazer, this odd whitefeller, has grasped, beyond colour or weight or smell, the SPIRIT of what he has been shown." (129)

Mr Frazer speculates, "We have been wrong to see this continent as hostile and infelicitous, so that only by the fiercest stoicism, a supreme resolution and force of will, and by felling, clearing, sowing with the seeds we have brought with us, and by importing sheep, cattle, rabbits, even the very birds of the air, can it be shaped and made habitable." (129)

Reading this book got me to study my atlases and encyclopedias, paying attention to 'Australianisms' such as "bandicoot." The land cries out through Malouf's words!

David Malouf is becoming one of my favourite novelists. I realise that I was late in discovering this great writer. I really enjoyed this excellent book.

The central character of this story, set in the In the 1840s, is Gemmy Fairley, a 13-year-old ship's boy from a disturbed and abusive childhood, now cast ashore in the far north of what was then a newly discovered, and yet to be fully colonised and settled, Australia. He was taken in by the Aborigines, absorbing their way of life. Malouf begins his tale 16 years later. The new white settlers in the region are suddenly confronted by 'black white-feller', who seems a fleshing-out of their unspoken fears of the Aborigines.

"This excellent book is not the first of Malouf's fictions to dramatise, in an edge-of-the-world setting, an exemplary encounter between traditionally civilised men and a seemingly uncultivated, cross-species conundrum. An Imaginary Life (1978) imagined the Roman poet Ovid, cut off in far-flung exile among an alien people, meeting and becoming obsessed by a child who is discovered living wild with wolves. In his relationship with the boy, the roles of teacher and taught are, Ovid comes to realise, increasingly reversed, the sophisticated urban poet led through areas of experience hitherto closed to him, his exile not a privation but an education" (Excerpt from an official review).

Through the unease which Gemmy's arrival creates through the settlement, Malouf manages to convey a superbly heightened sense of the suspicions and paranoia, fed by the uncertainty of living in an unfamiliar country, with an extreme climate, populated by a resident original tribe of hunter-gatherer like coloured people already in situ, living at ease and in tune with the challenging terrain and climate. He deftly describes what life was like in such pioneer communities: the underlying heartache of homesickness, which many of our families have experienced; the competition for social standing in a new community; the snobbery within the new society's pecking order; the existential dizzy spells.

Malouf shows how Gemmy's bizarre cultural predicament exacerbates the settlers' feeling of insecurity at 'being in a place that had not yet revealed all its influences'. Their lack of education and the challenges in surviving day-to-day feed off the diverse emotions that Gemmy generates in the settlers.

With great style and eloquent language, Malouf evokes a whole nascent society, from the insecure Governor of Queensland of Irish extraction to the housewife washing out an old frock with a faded pattern of larkspurs and experiencing a 'little pang' that she might never again see one.

A rift grows between the McIvor family who have taken in Gemmy and other suspicious neighbours within the community. The character of the father of the McIvor family is particularly well evoked, moving from suspicion of a new member of the household imposed on him to a genuine sense of caring for the troubled young man.

In many ways, this is Malouf's novel about the birth of the new Australia. The arrival of this white man, transformed into a black man, and the "unburying of this dark self-mistrust is offset in the novel by a contrary impulse, a miraculous leap, or escape-leap, into another form of consciousness. This is best illustrated here in the stunningly realised sequence where young Janet McIvor, straying near a hive, finds herself totally covered in a 'plushy, alive fur' of bees: in those moments of unbreathing, stock-still surrender, she feels that her mind has become one with the 'communally single' mind of the swarm."

It was to Janet, her younger sister, Meg, and her cousin, Lachlan, that Gemmy first appeared, balanced with his curled toes on the perimeter fence. The immediate affinity established between Gemmy and the children is a thread that runs through the novel.

Fulfilling the pioneer spirit, Lachlan raised a make-believe gun. Janet threw up a gaze of such recognising intensity that Gemmy felt it might have held him there forever, had he submitted to its power.

"This moment of suspended unsteadiness, which 'settled' the fate of all three, stands as a recurring image: Gemmy is a vertiginous vision of something their land could become, hung there against a pulsing sky before falling into the disappointment of history."

The conclusion of the novel is satisfactory, if inconclusive in respect of the fate of Gemmy, who deserts the settlement, but, most readers will draw the same conclusion.

Malouf captures the pioneering spirit of and challenges for the new settlers of this vast new continent, so unlike their native Scotland, and builds characters, whose fates, genuinely interest and worry the reader.

A good piece of literature from a writer in top form. Malouf, in my humble opinion, is top of the pile of Australian writers, whose works I have read, including Tim Winton and Howard Jacobsen. Perhaps, he is their John Updike? Now, that would be great!

Gemmy Fairley is a poor and probably developmentally challenged English boy who ends up working on a ship to Australia. Thrown overboard by other sailors, he washes up on a beach and attaches himself to the aboriginal tribe who find him. Some 15 years later he has to adapt to a new culture all over again when he tries to join a small community of white settlers.

I found this a very interesting and sensitive study of cultural alienation. Gemmy doesn't have much going for him and he's never completely accepted by any of the groups he encounters. His racial and cultural identities clash with each other and the white settlers in particular are deeply suspicious of him.

I would have liked to have heard more about his time with the aboriginal people but I still found it fascinating.

It was ok. A little boring, as nothing really happens in the book, but it's not badly written or anything.