Thursday, June 2, 2022

Remembering Babylon

Image credit: Goodreads

 I recently finished watching a rather fantastic show on iView called The Books That Made Us. Hosted by Claudia Karven, the show explores, dissects, and celebrates Australian literature and it really opened my eyes and made me realise just how little of my country’s own brilliant stuff I read. So now I have a rather lengthy list of titles and authors’ names and I making an active attempt to read more of the powerful gems that come from my own home. This week I discovered that I had a celebrated classic already on my shelf: David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon.

The book tells the story of Gemmy, a British urchin and castaway who is thrown overboard and ends up stranded and alone on the beaches of Queensland. He is taken in by a clan of Aborigines and for sixteen years lives awkwardly as one of them. His life changes again when he stumbles into the backyard of a family of Scottish immigrant farmers and they take him in. For a year Gemmy lives as an enigma amongst the white colonists, a flimsy bridge between the ‘civilised’ and ‘primitive’ worlds of men. 

Sitting just shy of two hundred pages, Remembering Babylon is a truly incredible use of language. Not only does Malouf creative this intensely rich, brutal, and beautiful world through his words, but language itself becomes the driving force of the narrative; what sparks change, fear, and growth in all the book’s characters. Through conversing with the white community, bits of Gemmy’s former life and trauma are revived as he remembers words that drag up images with them. A similar transformation happens to various townspeople as they become aware of their own true natures, or recognise the beauty and not the brutality of the bush that surrounds them as something to be embraced and understood rather than destroyed and rebuilt. 

The book is positively drowning in the central drama of identity within the colonial world and there are strong scenes of racism and social breakdown that will set minds whirring with messages and meanings. 

Image credit ABC

It’s poetic, dramatic, and sometimes brutal and what is truly incredible about it is Malouf’s intense power with words. Honestly, I’m shaming myself trying to write what I feel about it. I cannot stress enough how breathtakingly rich and vibrant the world is in these pages and his power to describe and illustrate entire lives within so small a space is mind-blowing. What he does is otherworldly, it’s supernatural, it’s unbelievable magic!

Author: David Malouf, 1993

Published: First published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus Ltd

Achievements: Winner of the 1996 International Impac Dublin Literary Award. Shortlisted for the 1993 Booker Prize.


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