AustLit

There is a symbolic moment early in David Malouf's Remembering Babylon (1993) when the nearly-naked Gemmy Fairley, the prodigal 'whitefella' who has grown up amidst mid-nineteenth century Australian Aborigines, tries to bridge a communication gap with the white villagers of a Queensland settlement and strips off the meagre strip of cloth tied at his waist. Gemmy can offer no more than a generally incoherent babble, and that strip of cloth, itself the remains of a jacket, is the only "proof of what he claimed" (Malouf 3) in his wild biographical gesticulations. It is a key moment because it draws attention to a cultural anxiety that is no secret in the novel: the villagers are all uneasy about Aborigines, "those presences they are unable or unwilling to acknowledge" (Brady 95), and Gemmy is a fundamental problem because "the settlers see themselves as a different species from the Aborigines" (Brady 96). Gemmy's appearance reveals an uncomfortable truth: colonial subjects can slip into that Aboriginal realm designated by Western imperial-colonialism as the degenerated Other.' (Author's introduction)