Remembering Babylon

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In the mid-1840s, thirteen-year-old Gemmy Fairley is cast ashore in the far north of Australia and taken in by Aboriginals. Sixteen years later, when settlers reach the area, he moves back into the world of Europeans.

Given shelter by the McIvors, Gemmy seems at first to be guaranteed a secure role in the settlement, but there are currents of fear and mistrust in the air. Remembering Babylon is the story of a boy caught between two worlds from David Malouf, the prize-winning author of The Great World.

ONE DAY IN the middle of the nineteenth century, when settlement in Queensland had advanced little more than halfway up the coast, three children were playing at the edge of a paddock when they saw something extraordinary. They were two little girls in patched gingham and a boy, their cousin, in short pants and braces, all three barefooted farm children not easily scared.

They had little opportunity for play but had been engaged for the past hour in a game of the boy’s devising: the paddock, all clay-packed stones and ant trails, was a forest in Russia — they were hunters on the track of wolves.

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