Remembering Babylon was published by Chatto & Windus in 1993. The novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. It is widely regarded as Malouf’s masterpiece and one of the finest Australian novels of the twentieth century.
The story begins with a dramatic image: a figure appears at the edge of a clearing in 1840s Queensland, approaching a group of children. He is white-skinned but dressed — or undressed — like an Aboriginal person, and his first English words in sixteen years are a mangled, desperate “Do not shoot. I am a B-b-british object.” This is Gemmy Fairley, a man who fell overboard from a ship as a child and was raised by an Aboriginal community for sixteen years before walking out of the bush and back into white society.
Gemmy’s return creates a crisis in the settlement because his very existence challenges the absolute boundary between “civilized” and “savage” on which colonial society depends. If a white man can become Aboriginal — can live happily among them, can prefer their world to ours — then what does whiteness actually mean? The settlers react with fear, hostility, and eventually violence: Gemmy threatens their most fundamental assumptions about who they are.
Malouf traces the effects of Gemmy’s presence on individual settlers — a minister’s family who takes him in, a botanist who sees in him a bridge between worlds, children who accept him naturally, men who see him as a threat to be eliminated — creating a portrait of a community under the pressure of its own contradictions.
Collecting Remembering Babylon
First edition (Chatto & Windus, London, 1993): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $40–$100
- Very good/very good: $15–$40
- Signed: $60–$150