Remembering Babylon Quotes

After a time the man began to grunt, then to gabble as if in protest, but when Lachlan put the stick into his spine, moved on faster, producing sounds of such eager submissiveness that the boy’s heart swelled. He had a powerful sense of the springing of his torso from the roots of his belly.

The smallest among them, their young faces very grave and intent, looked up to see how their parents would take it, and when no protest appeared, wondered if some new set of rules was in operation, and this blackfeller’s arrival among them was to be the start of something.

Since [Gemmy] had somehow found his way into the world, his object, like any other creature’s, was to stay in it by any means he could. He had a belly to feed.

So when news drifted up from the south of spirits, white-faced, covered from head to foot in bark and riding four-footed beasts that were taller than a man, he was disturbed, and the desire to see these creatures, to discover what they were, plucked at him until he could not rest.

The man was troubled. Gemmy saw it and was watchful. Jock’s fear of getting on the wrong side of his friends might in the end be more dangerous to him, he thought, than the open hostility he met in the settlement, where he was always under suspicion, and always, even when no one appeared to be watching, under scrutiny.

It was the mixture of monstrous strangeness and unwelcome likeness that made Gemmy Fairley so disturbing to them, since at any moment he could show either one face or the other; as if he were always standing there at one of those meetings, but in his case willingly, and the encounter was an embrace.

The struggle between them was fierce. Till Lachlan came, [Janet] had been used to going her own way, unconditioned and free. She had no limit to herself. Now she resented his easy assumption that he was superior, should take the lead in all their doings, and that she must naturally yield to him.

When [Gemmy] first came among them he had been unable to tell from their wooden expressions, and the even more wooden gestures, what they had in their heads. They hid what they felt as if they were ashamed of it, or so he had decided; though whether in front of others or before themselves he could not tell.

Barney, in his anxious way, was forever out there pacing the line and looking for signs of trespass; except there was no line, and the trespass too might be no more than a shadow on Barney’s thoughts, and how could you deal with that?

[Ellen] lived in the demands of the moment, in the girls, in Lachlan, and was too high-spirited, too independent, to care whether other women approved of her.

[Janet] saw something else as well. That in playing his part, Mr. Abbot had no more to do than Hector had. They only thought they were playing, because Leona managed things so cleverly, putting words into their mouths they they had never in fact spoken, and taking both parts herself.

At one point, out in the open, [the Aboriginal Australians] paused and looked up, bold as brass, to where he stood, pretty well hidden he had thought, and saw him, he was sure of it; any road, recorded he was there. Then boldly turning their backs on him and with no further interest, in whether or not he was observing, the old one, high-shouldered and floaty, still in front, walked on. The bloody effrontery of it! The cheek! The gall!

And the stone, once launched, had a life of its own. It flew in all directions, developed a capacity to multiply, accelerate, leave wounds; and the wounds were real even if the stone was not, and would not heal.

“For God’s sake, man, when did ye ever tak heed o’ what Andy says? We’re no’ scared o’ stones. Ah thought that was the difference between us and them.”

They got him to his feet, brushed him down, told him he wasn’t hurt, that he was a good fellow and that they had meant no harm. (It was true. They thought they didn’t.)

Laying aside his rifle, [Jock] crawled with [Gemmy] into that musty, dark-smelling place, and did a thing he could not for his life have done a week, perhaps even an hour ago: he sat huddled close to him in the dark, and when he shivered, drew him closer, pulled the old moth-eaten blanket round the two of them.

I think of our early settlers, starving on these shores, in the midst of plenty they did not recognize, in a blessed nature of flesh, fowl, fruit that was all around them and which they could not, with their English eyes, perceive, since the very habit and faculty that makes apprehensible to us what is known and expected dulls our sensitivity to other forms, even the most obvious.

[Janet] loved the way, while you were dealing with [the bees], you had to submit yourself to their side of things.

[Lachlan] was sorry for it. But it was absurd to have Gemmy always tagging at his heels, and he blushed now to recall a time when he regarded it as a sign of his power. How puffed up he had been with his own importance! What a fool he must have appeared to the very fellows he had meant to impress!

Something had been destroyed in [Jock] that could not be put right. [Lachlan] watched his uncle drift back after a time to his friends, to Barney Mason, Jim Sweetman, but the days of unselfconscious trust in his standing among them, and the belief that to be thought well of by such fellows was the first thing in the world, were gone.

Sir George, [Mr. Frazer] decides, exudes a magnificent air of unreality that includes everything he looks upon. He has got close enough to feel its disintegrating effect in every part of him.

“Grandeur” was the word that came to [George], and he did not reject it. It did not seem too large for what he saw at times in a man [Gemmy] who had been kicked from one side of the world to the other, not even knowing perhaps what part of it he was in, except that he was there in his own skin.

[Janet] was surprised, reading his letter, by its courtesy, its tentativeness, its tenderness she might have said, and recalling her own prickly tone felt foolish.

“I sometimes think that that was all I ever knew of him: what struck me in that moment before I knew him at all. When he was up there [on the fence] before he fell, poor fellow, and became just—there’s nothing clear in my head of what he might have been before that, and afterwards he was just Gemmy, someone we loved.”