Boundaries in David Malouf's "Remembering Babylon"

Abstract or Introduction

The process of natural selection is very common to us today. However in the time David Malouf's Remembering Babylon takes place, Darwin's Origin of Species is not very widespread yet and the naturalist movement in general is only at its beginning. According to the theory of natural selection people have to “adapt to their environments“, which of course sounds very reasonable. If we look back at the 1840's in Australia when Gemmy Fairley is cast ashore, convicts and other people from Britain inhabited the new continent for a short period of time. White settlers lived isolated in settlements and tried to make this tiny space they discovered on this gigantic island their home. Most settlers did not want to have any contact to the indigenous people living there, because they were either ignorant or afraid of them. Their way of thinking was that they just needed to inhabit a piece of land long enough to call it their own. Obviously this way of thinking lead to conflicts with the aboriginal people on one hand, but also to conflicts with their environment on the other hand. The conflicts with the environment existed because they did not accept the country as their new home country and paid very little attention to their surrounding. Perhaps this syndrome is also caused by the fact that the settlers never had a real connection to the land, while the indigenous people had a very deep bound to the earth they lived on. The boundary fence, boundaries of the mind and real as well as imagined cultural boundaries are reasons for the conflicts between aboriginal people and white settlers and the lacking connection to the land in Remembering Babylon. Eventually it is a matter of closed- or open-mindedness that decides between war and peace or misfortune and fortune.