Remembering 'Remembering Babylon'

In getting myself into the mood of the Festival, I’ve revisited one of my favourites by David Malouf, Remembering Babylon. The book was first recommended to me by my cousin a couple of years ago, but reading it this time around left a far more pronounced aftertaste in my mind. The story, set in the mid-1840s, explores the tension between British colonisers and Indigenous Australian peoples, and reading it after taking the subject Postcolonial Reading last semester really illuminated the dynamics at work in the narrative.

Through the character of Gemmy Fairley, an English boy raised by Aboriginals who as a grown man attempts to reintegrate himself into a group of European colonisers, Malouf explores the ways in which the notion of the Empire informs the colonisers’ perceptions of identity, of self and the other, of known and unknown, with startling precision. As such, Gemmy epitomises the conflict between cultures resulting from the British colonisation of Australia, a fact reinforced by the suspicion with which the colonisers regard him.

Malouf is obviously passing a comment upon the historical events that inform Remembering Babylon, yet he avoids doing so in a blatantly didactic manner. Instead, the story flits between characters’ perspectives, delving deep into their lives – their fears and desires – to relate Gemmy’s emergence and absorbance into the group of settlers from a number of different angles, allowing Malouf to maintain a distance from the narrative without becoming an absentee author.

Malouf’s Remembering Babylon is a book that stays with you. It’s a timeless reminder of the importance of preserving history, the importance of reading – and of remembering.

 

Image reference:
Grigg, J 2009, Remembering Babylon, book cover, Caustic Cover Critic, viewed 14 August 2016, <https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLZYfvh0BNJ8D_OMfgZfhiax5ynMUG7iVCaICUlcpnMFh5Nimjo0oxMgPeAspqeKirMAmSe-SMCJPdXO65QL3fkcdWpBYsF2oR8Bn7-WqovNK_eNXYGUpCRgtayAQtC7oz_Wwh65L_xOI_/s1600/9781741667684.jpg>.