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Authors: David Malouf

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All that, fifty years ago. An age. They were living in another country. He could afford to admit now that it had
not ended. Something Gemmy had touched off in them was what they were still living, both, in their different ways. It would end only when they were ended, and maybe not even then. They would come back, as they had now, from the far points they had moved away to, and stand side by side looking up at the figure outlined there against a streaming sky. Still balanced. For a last moment held still by their gaze, their solemn and fearful attention, at the one clear point, till this last, where they were inextricably joined and would always be.

 

Later, when he was gone, Janet sat in the fading light at the window of her room – she still thought of herself mostly by her original name, and the more so today, under the influence of her cousin’s visit.

Her room was on the other side of the house from the garden. Her hives were out of sight here but they were not out of mind; her work went on, continuous somewhere in her head, and she was pleased to have in sight this other view, these flatlands that as they approached the bay became mud, and later, when the tide rippled in, would be moonlight.

Out there were the houses her little visitors came from: one-roomed shacks on low stumps, behind tumbledown paling fences or rusty wire; yards straggly with sunflowers and strewn with rubbish, old bed frames, a collapsed buggy with only its shafts visible above a riot of morning glory, lines of colourless washing, and in a weedy pile, old beer and castor-oil bottles, charred stick-ends, broken bricks.

Behind the squares of light out there her children would be sitting down to boiled potatoes or bread and dripping, and in a short time now, would sleep, and silkworms, in the dark of shoeboxes, rustling, feeding, would be spinning the sticky gold out of their mouths, the finest thread, and miniature tables and chairs made of white beeswax from which children – Alice, Kevin, Ian, Isabel, Ben – had chewed the last faint sweetness, and on which they had left, in the moulding, their giant fingerprints, would stand in idea! order in the dark of little partitioned rooms, in houses that had been butter-boxes.

It pleased her to let her mind drift so far, then further – out
over the muddy, stinking flats towards the waters of the bay, which were not visible yet, but approaching.

Her mind, even as it entered the ravaged yards, the shacks, the heads of sleeping children who were forbidden for the time being to visit but would come back when all this nonsense was over, the jaws of silkworms softly spinning, was at the same time stilled, dreamily attendant, beyond tinted glass, to the life of the hive, moving closer now to the spirit of it, to the language they were using, those angelic creatures in their world of pure geometry, of circles, half-circles, hexagons, figures-of-eight.

When she glances up again, for she has been dozing, the misty blue out there has become indigo; the first lights have been doused, though the houses themselves do not fade from her mind, or the children who are sleeping in them. The first bright line of moonlight has appeared out on the mudflats, marking the ever moving, ever approaching, ever receding shore. All this a kind of praying. It does not make a house any less vivid out there because she can no longer see its light; or the children any less close because they no longer come to visit; or Willie because she has never known him except for what she has felt in Lachlan, and through him, in herself, the wedge of apple in his mouth; or her mother, long gone, standing out on the hillslope in the dark, the dark of her body solid through the flimsy stuff, the moonlight, of her shift; or her father slumped at the breakfast table, the loose skin of her mother’s hand, like an old glove, on the leathery back of his neck; or in darkness now, on the other side of the house, the single mind of the hive, closed on itself, on its secret, which her own mind approaches and draws back from, the moment of illumination when she will again be filled with it; and Mrs Hutchence who has led her to this; and always, in a stilled moment that has lasted for years, Gemmy as she saw him, once and for all, up there on the stripped and shiny rail, never to fall, and Flash slicing the air with his yelps in clear dog-language, and his arms flung out, never to lift him clear; overbalancing now, drawn by the power, all unconscious in them, of their gaze, their need to draw him into their lives – love, again love – overbalanced but not yet falling. All these,
Lord, all these. Let none be left in the dark or out of mind, on this night, now, in this corner of the world or any other, at this hour, in the middle of this war …

Out beyond the flatlands the line of light pulses and swells. The sea, in sight now, ruffles, accelerates. Quickly now it is rising towards us, it approaches.

As we approach prayer. As we approach knowledge. As we approach one another.

It glows in fullness till the tide is high and the light almost, but not quite, unbearable, as the moon plucks at our world and all the waters of the earth ache towards it, and the light, running in fast now, reaches the edges of the shore, just so far in its order, and all the muddy margin of the bay is alive, and in a line of running fire all the outline of the vast continent appears, in touch now with its other life.

 

T
HE WORDS GEMMY
shouts at the fence in Chapter 1 (the seed of this fiction) were actually spoken at much the same time and place, but in different circumstances, by Gemmy Morril or Morrell, whose Christian name I have also appropriated; otherwise this novel has no origin in fact. E. Gregory wrote a brief account of Morril’s life from which I have taken the three descriptions of local flora at the beginning of Chapter 14. The Herbert letters in Bruce Knox’s
Robert Herbert: Premier
provided some of the detail for Chapter 18.

My thanks to Joy Lewis, Brett Johnson, Christopher Edwards, who typed the manuscript and, as its first reader, made many valuable suggestions, Professor Alan Sanderson of the University of New England, and my editors at Chatto & Windus, Jonathan Burnham and Carmen Callil.

David Malouf
is the author of short story collections
Dream Stuff, Every Move You Make
and
The Complete Stories
(winner of the Australia-Asia Literary Award) and of acclaimed novels including
The Great World
(winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ and Miles Franklin Prizes),
Remembering Babylon
(shortlisted for the Booker Prize and winner of the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award) and
Ransom
. He also writes poetry, drama and libretti for operas. Born and brought up in Brisbane, he lives in Sydney.

Praise for
Remembering Babylon

‘Fascinating … Malouf’s prose shimmers with
the sights and sounds of the continent.’

Daily Mail

‘A really impressive achievement.’

Doris Lessing

‘Breathtaking … To read this remarkable book
is to remember Babylon well, whether you think
you’ve been there or not.’

The New York Times Book Review

‘There are books we like so much we don’t want to finish them.
In this case the same applies to paragraphs and even sentences …
David Malouf has written a profound and poignant book.’

Boston Review

‘A deft and economical evocation of an entire nascent
society, punctuated by moments of dazzling, revelatory
language and unforgettable images.’

Independent on Sunday

‘A profound and elliptical history, thrilling in its
style and its adventurousness.’

Michael Ondaatje

‘A quietly masterful tale … Delicate but relentless in its
focus on the manifestations of racial intolerance, this is
enhanced by a naturalist’s keen eye for detail, bringing
landscape and states of mind together in a probing,
resonant vision of discovery and despair.’

Kirkus Reviews

‘A dazzling novel … The story has moments of such high intensity
that they remain scorched in memory. As the story moves forward
to its conclusion, we go unwillingly with it, not wanting this book,
with the wisdom it contains, to stop speaking to us.’

The Toronto Star


Remembering Babylon
is another rare chance to read a work
by one of the few contemporary novelists who examines
our constantly battered humanity and again and again
brings out its lingering beauty.’

The Globe and Mail

‘There are passages of aching beauty in
Remembering Babylon
,
and passages of shocking degradation. Mr. Malouf has
written a wonderfully wise and moving novel,
a novel that turns the history and mythic past of Australia
into a dazzling fable of human hope and imperfection.’

The New York Times

ALSO BY DAVID MALOUF

Fiction

Ransom

The Complete Stories

Dream Stuff

The Conversations at Curlow Creek

The Great World

Antipodes

Harland’s Half Acre

Child’s Play

Fly Away Peter

An Imaginary Life

Johnno

Every Move You Make

Autobiography

12 Edmondstone Street

Poetry

Selected Poems

Wild Lemons

First Things Last

The Year of the Foxes and Other Poems

Neighbours in a Thicket

Bicycle and Other Peoms

Typewriter Music

Libretti

Jane Eyre

Baa Baa Black Sheep

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including printing, photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian
Copyright Act 1968
), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

Version 1.0
Remembering Babylon
9781742749617

Copyright © David Malouf 1993

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

A Vintage book
Published by Random House Australia Pty Ltd
Level 3, 100 Pacific Highway, North Sydney NSW 2060
www.randomhouse.com.au

Addresses for companies within the Random House Group can be found at
http://www.randomhouse.com.au/about/contacts.aspx

First published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus Ltd. 1993
This edition published by Vintage in 2009

National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication Entry

Malouf, David, 1934–.
Remembering Babylon.

ISBN 978 1 74166 768 4 (pbk).
Aboriginal Australians – Fiction.

A823.3

Cover image adapted from a Worcester plate from the collection of the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney.
Cover design by Jenny Grigg

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