Remembering Babylon

by

David Malouf

Racism and Xenophobia Theme Analysis

Themes and Colors
Racism and Xenophobia Theme Icon
Gender and Power  Theme Icon
Community and Insularity Theme Icon
Coming of Age Theme Icon
Colonialism and Property Theme Icon
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 Theme Icon

Remembering Babylon tells the story of a Commonwealth colonial settlement living in the remote Australian bush (wilderness) near Queensland in the mid-19th century. The white settlers fear the Aboriginal Australians—whom they refer to and regard as “black” in comparison with their own whiteness—and view them as fundamentally different beings from themselves. However, those conceptions are challenged by the arrival of Gemmy, a white man who was raised by an Aboriginal community, speaks their language, and follows their customs. Although the settlers believe that white people are inherently separate from and superior to the Aboriginal peoples, Gemmy’s presence and the conduct of the white settlers suggests not only that the notion of racial superiority is foolish, but also that the hard distinction between “black” people and white people is similarly meaningless.

The settlers’ racism is primarily based upon their fear of people they do not understand, demonstrating how xenophobia (fear of others, especially those different from oneself) can lead to vicious racism. Upon first seeing Gemmy, Lachlan, the McIvor’s Scottish nephew who lives with them in Australia, immediately assumes that they are being raided by Aboriginal tribesmen because Gemmy has dark skin and is dressed like an Aboriginal person. However, looking closer, Lachlan can see that Gemmy’s hair, though filthy, is actually blonde, and his skin is merely tanned dark by the sun, indicating that he is white. Even so, Gemmy’s speech frightens Lachlan, since it is the Aboriginal people’s language and “the idea of a language he did not know scared him,” suggesting that the mysteriousness of it is what makes such speech frightening. What’s more, Lachlan and the white settlers are largely ignorant of the indigenous people who have lived in the territory for hundreds of years, which is demonstrated by the fact that Gemmy is able to teach Lachlan and Mr. Frazer, the botanist, basic aspects of survival and foraging that the Aboriginal tribes hold as common knowledge. This ignorance adds both to the Gemmy’s mysteriousness and to the settlers’ fear of the Aboriginal people, since they know nothing about how the indigenous people live, what they think, or where they travel. The settlers’ fear that anything may occur suggests that their racism, though vicious, is based primarily in their fear of the unknown. This is reinforced by the fact that Lachlan and even Jock McIvor—the father of the McIvor family—gradually grow less fearful of Aboriginal people as they become comfortable around Gemmy, since through him, the indigenous tribes of Australia feel just a little less unknown and unfamiliar.

Although most of the settlers maintain that white people are inherently superior to the “black” Aboriginal Australians, the settlers themselves actually end up perpetrating many of the behaviors for which they criticize Aboriginal people. For example, the settlers despise the Aboriginal Australians for their supposedly superstitious minds, which seem to be the mark of uncivilized people. However, in their fear, the white settlers become superstitious themselves. When a farmhand spies Gemmy speaking with two Aboriginal men and tells his boss, he untruthfully adds that they gave Gemmy a stone. The settlers’ minds run wild imagining what the powers of such an item—which doesn’t even exist—could be. Jock, in frustration, exclaims, “We’re no’ scared o stones. Ah thought that was the difference between us and them.” As Jock recognizes, if rationality and the lack of superstition are marks of civilized or superior people, then the settlers themselves have no claim to such superiority. The white settlers fear that the indigenous people will someday arrive to attack them, due to their supposedly “savage and fearsome” nature. However, the settlers never suffer any violence from the Aboriginal community. Rather, the settlers commit violence amongst themselves: a small mob abducts Gemmy from the McIvors’ home and attacks him, and Jock fears that the settlers will attack the Aboriginal people as well and start a war of retribution. Yet again, in their fear, the white settlers prove themselves to be much more savage than the “black” Aboriginal people, flatly disproving any notion that the white settlers are superior for being more civilized or peaceable.

Furthermore, the novel suggests that distinctions between races might be more a matter of perception than a matter of genuine difference. As a white European who is raised by a “black” Aboriginal tribe and adopts their customs, Gemmy challenges the notion that there is any true distinction between white and black human beings. Most of the settlers try to maintain a hard categorical separation between black and white people, and Gemmy’s very presence thus confounds them. In his first days in the settlement, the settlers are unsure of what to call Gemmy, since aside from his behavior and scant English, he is obviously white; he is eventually referred to as the “white black man.” However, even after he lives with the McIvors for several months, many of the settlers are still inclined to view him as a black person, since he does not fit their concept of a white person. That such a person can exist contradicts their racist and absolutist notions of black people and white people. But Mr. Frazer, rather than being bothered by Gemmy’s hybrid status, is encouraged by it, seeing him as a “forerunner” of what all the settlers should someday become, after they learn to adapt to the Australian wilderness and live from the land as the Aboriginal Australians do. Mr. Frazer’s interest in Gemmy’s position between the races further suggests that the division the settlers perceive between black people and white people has little meaning, since both groups of people are ultimately interchangeable as human beings.

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Racism and Xenophobia ThemeTracker

The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Racism and Xenophobia appears in each chapter of Remembering Babylon. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
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Racism and Xenophobia Quotes in Remembering Babylon

Below you will find the important quotes in Remembering Babylon related to the theme of Racism and Xenophobia.
Chapter 1 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.

Related Characters: Gemmy Fairley, Lachlan Beattie
Page Number: 4
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Characters: Gemmy Fairley
Page Number: 15
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 2 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Gemmy Fairley
Page Number: 25
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Characters: Gemmy Fairley
Page Number: 29
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Gemmy Fairley
Page Number: 43
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7 Quotes

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?

Related Characters: Gemmy Fairley, Barney Mason
Page Number: 71
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 9 Quotes

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!

Related Characters: Gemmy Fairley, Andy McKillop
Page Number: 94
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Characters: Gemmy Fairley, Ellen McIvor, Barney Mason, Andy McKillop
Related Symbols: The Stone
Page Number: 102
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10 Quotes

“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.”

Related Characters: Jock McIvor (speaker), Gemmy Fairley, Barney Mason, Andy McKillop
Related Symbols: The Stone
Page Number: 105
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 12 Quotes

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.)

Related Characters: Gemmy Fairley
Page Number: 119
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 14 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Mr. Frazer (speaker)
Page Number: 129-130
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 20 Quotes

[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.

Related Characters: Gemmy Fairley, Lachlan Beattie, Janet McIvor
Page Number: 188
Explanation and Analysis:

“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.”

Related Characters: Janet McIvor (speaker), Gemmy Fairley, Lachlan Beattie
Related Symbols: The Fence
Page Number: 194
Explanation and Analysis: