Remembering Babylon

Remembering Babylon is a novel by David Malouf, published in 1993 and set in Queensland in the middle of the nineteenth century. Its narrative skips between perspectives on the same events, so a single arrival is seen differently by each of the people watching it, and the reader has to hold the accounts together.

Gemmy Fairley was thirteen when he was cast ashore in the far north of Australia in the mid-1840s and taken in by a group of Aboriginal people, and he lived with them for sixteen years. When white settlers reach the area he tries to move back into the world of Europeans, and the McIvors give him shelter, which at first looks like a secure place for him in the new community.

It does not hold, because the settlement carries its own fear of what it does not know and Gemmy cannot settle the question of who he is either. The story was influenced by the experience of James Morrill, a shipwreck survivor who lived with Aboriginal people in north Queensland for seventeen years, and the novel is about a man belonging to two places and being trusted by neither.