Strangers in a Strange Land : REMEMBERING BABYLON, <i> By David Malouf (Pantheon: $20; 202 pp.)</i>

There is no fully satisfactory word to oppose to exile, that forced removal and dismayed regret for a land that will always be home. Contemporary Australian writers need such a word; it would denote the forcible remover, and the dismay of occupying a land that will always be alien.

“Invader” doesn’t quite do it. What such gifted authors as Rodney Hall, Janette Turner Hospital and Peter Carey conjure up is more like the notion of crime in Greek tragedy than in our present-day world: a transgression against the gods committed without knowledge or intention, but which must be paid for anyway. Explicitly or by remote implication, these authors evoke the land-spirits of the aboriginal culture as the deities who punish white settlers and their descendants by estrangement or even wreckage of the spirit.

David Malouf, too, makes settler estrangement the theme of his new novel. He uses it quite as powerfully as the others but in quite a different way. Where their writing is drastic and nightmarish, his is muted and elusive. They launch boulders over crags to demonstrate the force of gravity; he floats twigs and straw down a rivulet and demonstrates something similar. To use a film comparison, he is Ozu to their Kurosawa.

There is another difference. Running through Malouf’s novel there is a note of reconciliation. Even the most penitential nightmare, he suggests, is a dream, which life undermines by its insistence on waking up. Malouf’s story is a multiplicity of story fragments, in fact, and they persist in undermining each other. There is some disorientation in reading him from page to page, and a rich accumulating subtlety.

“Remembering Babylon” is placed at the settlement of Queensland, the steamy territory on the northeast coast. The settlers have a precarious footing in their enclaves, surrounded by swamp and gray endless wilderness. Shadows live in the wilderness, itinerant bands of aborigines who respect the shotgun-enforced boundaries by day, but at night wander through the farmers’ lands and restless sleep.

One day a tattered, scarecrow-like figure lopes out of the horizon and approaches the little nephew and daughters of Jock and Ellen MacIvor, at play in the paddock. Lachlan, defending the Empire, raises a stick at him. “Do not shoot,” the figure shouts. “I am a B-b-british object.”

Gemmy Fairley was a London slum-child who became a ship’s cabin boy. At 13 he was put ashore in the shallows off Queensland. We do not know why; Malouf’s story is full of holes which, like lace, let through the blurred light of a larger reality. An aborigine band found him unconscious and gave him water. They took him for a sea-spirit and, when he stood up, a sea-spirit turned to a child. For 16 years he wandered with them; they accepted him while patiently waiting for him to turn, as they saw it, fully human.

His arrival in the little settlement is an eruption that tests its inhabitants in different ways. There is intense curiosity. Mr. Frazer, the minister, patiently coaxes a story out of Gemmy’s few English words and extravagant gestures. The young schoolteacher writes the story down, adding some details himself out of creative vanity. There are other distortions; Malouf writes a lovely spoof of how history is achieved. The saintly and solicitous Frazer supplies phrases out of sympathy for Gemmy’s anguished stammering.

There is the settlers’ fear of the Other, their antipathy for Gemmy’s outlandish appearance, and their sense of duty toward what seems to be an unfortunate fellow white. “It was the mixture of monstrous strangeness and unwelcome likeness that made Gemmy Fairley so disturbing to them.” Jock MacIvor, out of his wife’s insistence and his own conscience, takes Gemmy in, but with nervous distaste. Others are more outspoken; eventually a gang abducts Gemmy at night, pushes him around and gives him a dunking.

Jock brings him back, then holds him in his arms all night to calm him. Gemmy raises a double question for them all: Is he the Other or is he us; and who are we? The question turns Jock from a self-reliant settler to a man who begins to question himself, to look about him, to open up to his wife. In a tender night-scene, Ellen recalls the amiable crowding of lives in their native Scottish town. Once she saw a tightrope walker cross above the thronged street. She takes a few steps to show her husband. “Ah’d gie aenethin’t’hae seen it,” he says. “You, Ah mean, T’hae seen you.”

Less directly, Gemmy changes other lives. An epilogue shows Lachlan, the endearing young imperial boy, as an old politician whose rise is curtailed by an act of conscience. His cousin Janet, who burned with puzzled envy of his boy’s freedom, will find a different identity in her mother’s charity toward Gemmy, work with him and an old woman neighbor on her beehives and eventually become a renowned entomologist. Malouf is never insistent; far from stressing what happens to his characters, he lets them fall away or wander off. His touch can be as fugitive as a trick of light.

Gemmy, awkward and misfitting, we feel intensely and never see entirely. He did not come to join the settlers, but to pull together a haunted memory. His stay is an act of exorcism. He never relinquishes what the aborigines instilled in him, and eventually he will quietly go back among them. Gathering plants with Frazer, he had sensed the hidden presence of a group of black watchers. He knew what they were seeing:

“He himself would have a clear light around him like the line that contained Mr. Frazer’s drawings. It came from the energy set off where his spirit touched the spirits he was moving through. All they would see of Mr. Frazer was what the land itself saw: a shape, thin, featureless, that interposed itself a moment, like a mist or cloud, before the land blazed out in its full strength again and the shadow was gone, as if, in the long history of the place, it was too slight to endure, or had never been.”

Malouf, however, does not condemn his whites to invisibility. They can open up to the country, he suggests. He speaks, above all, through the polymathic and inquisitive Rev. Frazer. Perhaps he will become more than a shadow. Botanizing with Gemmy, learning all the plant names and getting some wrong, he is the antithesis of the settler mentality that seeks to implant England in Australia. A vegetable idealist, he petitions the governor to alter the emphasis on growing lamb and wheat in favor of developing the continent’s own native fruits and roots:

“This is what is intended by our coming here to make this place, too, part of the world’s garden, but by changing ourselves rather than it, and adding thus to the richness and variety of things.”