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Chapter 2
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Remembering Babylon, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Racism and Xenophobia
Gender and Power
Community and Insularity
Coming of Age
Colonialism and Property
Summary
Analysis
Gemmy is taken in by Janet, Lachlan, and Meg’s family, the McIvors, who let him sleep under a lean-to against their wooden hut with a blanket to cover himself. Gemmy is eager to work and help, though his mind often wanders and he struggles to stick to tasks. Even so, he teaches the girls how to forage and Lachlan how to track, as he learned to do from the Aboriginal Australians. The children lead Gemmy around like a dog, but he complies, feeling bonded to them and particularly to Lachlan by the power he had exuded that first day, even after Gemmy realized his “rifle” was only a branch. When they are in public, Lachlan swaggers, but in private, Lachlan is affectionate toward Gemmy.
In his eagerness to help but inability to focus, Gemmy behaves rather like a child even though he is a grown man, which is reinforced by his bond to the McIvor children. Lachlan’s response to Gemmy typifies male behavior in the story: bragging in public, eager to project an air of confidence and power, though privately sentimental and affectionate. The disparity between Lachlan’s public and private behavior towards Gemmy once again suggests that he is insecure about his own manhood.
Themes
Janet enjoys fretting over Gemmy’s appearance, combing his hair and trying to make him look presentable. However, there are moments when Janet gazes at him as if she can see through him and sees that he should not be “treated as a child or plaything.” In these long stares, which Gemmy felt the first time he saw her, while he balanced upon the fence, he feels vulnerable and exposed even to himself, but Janet is in turn so open and vulnerable that he allows it and even enjoys the feeling of being seen and laid bare. Gemmy often returns to the moment on the fence in his mind, when Lachlan chose to dominate him and Janet chose to see him, each establishing their permanent relationship to him in that moment.
Janet’s maturity in recognizing—even if not all the time—that Gemmy is a human being who must be treated with dignity casts a damning light on Lachlan’s self-centered belief that Gemmy is a token of Lachlan’s power to command and dominate. Here, as often throughout the story, Janet is depicted as far more mature and astute in her ability to understand people and to respect them, which makes restrictions placed on her because of her gender seem all the more unjust.
Themes
Gemmy feels affection for Ellen in a way that he has not experienced before, never having known a motherly figure. Jock and Gemmy, however, are immediately uneasy with each other. Though Jock tries to be gentle with him, his presence makes Gemmy want to flee. However, Gemmy can see that “the man was troubled” and that Jock’s insecure concern with maintaining his good standing among the men of the settlement could potentially be dangerous.
Like Janet, Gemmy possesses an uncanny ability to read people’s emotions and insecurities, an ability which the novel suggests is often fostered by a particularly hard early life. This notion is reinforced by Gemmy’s fear of Jock, hinting that he has known harsh and insecure fatherly figures, even though he has never known the love of a motherly figure such as Ellen.
Themes
The other settlers treat Gemmy with “open hostility,” fearing that he is “in league with the blacks” and will bring some sort of invasion or attack. Most recognize that Gemmy is mentally deficient, though some believe that it is because some part of himself still lives among the native people. Even Ned Corcoran, himself a scheming and thieving fellow, feels that Gemmy is exploiting their generosity. He seems to the settlers a “parody of a white man” and many wonder if he could even still be called such. Obviously he had “started out as white,” but they wonder if perhaps, after spending over half of his life with the black Aboriginal Australians, Gemmy could have lost his whiteness.
The settlers’ general fear of Gemmy and his association with the Aboriginal Australians frankly exposes their racism. Ironically, their consideration of whether Gemmy could have somehow lost his whiteness exposes their belief in a categorical distinction between white and black people while also revealing the absurdity of it. There seems to be no way to quantify or define what whiteness even is, since it apparently has little to do with skin color, and yet the settlers are convinced that some such quality exists.
Themes
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For all the washing and clean clothes and soap that Ellen gives Gemmy, he still keeps “the smell he came with, which was the smell of the myall, half-meat, half-mud, a reminder, a depressing one, of what there might be in him that could not be reclaimed.” Gemmy’s presence is a constant, unwelcome reminder of the Aboriginal Australians in the bush (wilderness) all around the settlement. There is a recent rumor that nineteen white people were killed by Aboriginal people at another settlement, and the settlers fear being “overwhelmed.” This fear is particularly strong at night, when even the bravest man cowers at every snap of a twig. It is the echo of childhood fears of “the Bogey, the Coal Man, Absolute Night,” and Gemmy seems the very embodiment of this imagined monster, showing signs of both whiteness and blackness within the same grinning, eager face.
It is telling that Gemmy’s position as a man between worlds—not fitting into the settlers’ categorical notions of white people or black people—is so disturbing to the white settlers. Their frustration that Gemmy does not fit within their already-established view of the world once again demonstrates their racist xenophobia and suggests that what truly frightens them about Gemmy, and perhaps about all Aboriginal Australians, is that the settlers do not understand them. The fear of an unknown people or of a single man who defies easy explanation seems to stoke their racial animosity.
Themes
