Where do the loyalties of this man, who is white like them but seems to have more in common with aborigines, lie? As Gemmy tries to find a place for himself in the community, friendships are strained to breaking point, brutality begins to surface but one family finds a new way to look at the world. As the settlers attempt to impose their own kind of order on an environment which they perceive as hostile, many of them find Gemmy’s presence both unsettling and threatening. At first his eccentricities are greeted with the amusement of novelty but in time the settlement becomes riven with suspicion. Gemmy Fairley has spent almost sixteen years living with aborigines. On a sweltering day in the mid-nineteenth century, a strange and ragged figure dances out of the Australian bush and into the lives of a small group of white settlers. It’s both an examination of the arrival of an outsider in a small, close-knit but barely established community and a commentary on colonialism, filled with vibrantly poetic images.

My favourite novel by him – so far – is the Booker Prize shortlisted, IMPAC Award-winning Remembering Babylon. This is the latest in a series of occasional posts featuring books I read years ago about which I was wildly enthusiastic at the time, wanting to press a copy in as many hands as I could.ĭavid Malouf is one of those writers who seems to be able to turn his hand to anything: fiction, poetry, libretti – he’s mastered them all.

Remembering babylon review