Remembering Babylon: Chapter 1 Summary & Analysis

In the mid-nineteenth century, partway through the settlement of Queensland, Australia, three white children are playing in a clearing, pretending to hunt wolves. Only the boy, Lachlan Beattie, is actually engaged with the fantasy. The two girls gasp, and Lachlan can see a "black” indigenous man in the distance who has emerged from the trees, balancing himself on the fence before falling off. At first the children fear a raid, but they soon realize it is only one man, skinny and strange-looking with a blue cloth tied around his waist. Lachlan raises the stick he has been pretending is his rifle and aims at the man, who throws his arms in the air and pleads in shaky English, “Do not shoot, I am a B-b-british object!”

What the children had thought was a black man is actually a white man with filthy blond hair and skin darkened by the sun. However, he speaks the Aboriginal Australians’ language, which unnerves Lachlan since he cannot understand it. Lachlan shouts at the man, who begins crawling on all fours in the dirt, and a sense of power and domination fills Lachlan’s young heart. Lachlan shouts another order and begins marching the man back towards the settlement to show the girls’ father, still pointing his stick as if it were a rifle. The man has a hobbling limp; one of his legs is shorter than the other.

Within an hour, the other settlers have arrived to see the strange man. The settlement is sparse and isolated, with a number of family-owned properties, a single store, a bare post office, and a shack that acts as a pub. They are twelve miles from the nearest town, which is itself quite small. The settlers look on, wondering if the odd man is mute, though they realize he can’t be, since he spoke some English words. Lachlan feels briefly insecure, being only a small twelve-year-old child, but he quickly recovers, feeling empowered by this hostage he has captured and hoping that the feeling of power does not leave him.

Janet McIvor, one of the two girls, reflects on how strangely her cousin Lachlan suddenly behaves, as if he were a powerful man and not a mere child like the rest. Her mother Ellen frets over Lachlan running about “like an actor on a stage” until her father Jock, Lachlan’s uncle, cuffs him upside the head, shaking him from his fantasy of power. Janet remarks that she and her sister Meg found the man just as much as Lachlan did, but no one is interested in their perspectives. They continue to observe the man, odd and hobbling, with the “baffled, half-expectant look of a mongrel that has been often whipped but still turns to the world, out of some foolish fund of expectancy.”

The man came from lands to the north that are unexplored, foreign, and hostile. His presence reminds the settlers that all around them, even among the settlement at night, tribes of Aboriginal Australians roam, crossing over borders and boundaries. Such borders can be enforced by a shotgun by day, but by night they become meaningless, mere features of the vast landscape that has always been there. At night, there’s no indication that the Lands Office in Brisbane, hundreds of miles away, dedicated each parcel of land to a certain family as their exclusive property. So the settlers do their best during their days to strip the land of “every vestige of the native,” to turn it civilized and cultivate it into a copy of their homelands.

Gemmy Fairley, as the “black white man” calls himself, manages to sign and summon the occasional English word. Over the course of the afternoon, the settlers form an idea of where he seems to have come from. As far as they can tell, Gemmy lived with the Aboriginal Australians for 16 years, before which he was aboard a ship until he was thrown overboard. Lachlan is particularly adept at interpreting Gemmy’s signs, and the man begins deferring more and more often to the boy. The excitement of it all—compared to the daily drudgery of the settlement—gives the whole encounter a “carnival” atmosphere; the young children especially enjoy it. Lachlan feels his sense of power return as he becomes the interpreter between the adults and the strange man.

Gemmy passes the blue rag from his waist to the adults and they examine it, noting that it seems to be part of a salt-stained sailor’s jacket, before Jock McIvor hands it back to him. Jim Sweetman, a former blacksmith and respected figure among the settlers, is ashamed at the spectacle the settlers are making of the man, who is hardly clothed and dancing about like a “plain savage, or marionette or imbecile.”

 Gemmy starts pointing to features of his body and shouting their names in uncertain English, his proximity to the white settlers seemingly restoring his faculties for the language. Gemmy pulls a hammer away from a surprised young man with a harelip—Hector Gosper—who is embittered when the other settlers laugh at him, since he is “very sensitive of his standing.” After Gemmy has pantomimed hammer and nail and remembered the names for both, he hands the hammer back to Hector, who strikes him in the chin and calls him a racial slur.

The next afternoon, Mr. Frazer, a minister and botanist, sits in the schoolhouse with George Abbot (the settlement’s 19-year-old schoolmaster), Gemmy, and Lachlan, though they soon send Lachlan away. Gemmy’s English continues to return to him as Mr. Frazer spends the afternoon interviewing him, getting as wide a grasp of Gemmy’s life as he is able and instructing George to transcribe all that he hears. George resents this and also resents Mr. Frazer generally, feeling that acting as a “mere clerk” is beneath him and will disrupt the image of power and authority that he has tried to foster for himself amongst the settlers and students. However, George “dared not challenge the older man, despised himself for it, and resented the occasion all the more.”

As George is transcribing the interview into pages of writing, he intentionally misrepresents a phrase every so often as an act of passive rebellion against Mr. Frazer, and feels an impish glee at his betrayal. Frazer does not notice, however, and when they are finished, he hands the seven pages of transcription to Gemmy. Gemmy regards them very seriously, even though he cannot read them, and sniffs them intensely, smelling the black ink. Mr. Frazer stores the pages in his pocket, though Gemmy hopes that they will reappear, for to him they seem magical, containing some of the essence of himself, which he feels has been lost to him. He is grateful to Mr. Frazer for wanting to know about his life, but imagines that if he could steal the pages back and sit with them, the whole of himself might return; Willet, the rats, all of it.