About the Book
In the mid-1840s, thirteen-year-old Gemmy Fairley is cast ashore in the far north of Australia and taken in by Aboriginals. Sixteen years later, when settlers reach the area, he moves back into the world of Europeans.
Given shelter by the McIvors, Gemmy seems at first to be guaranteed a secure role in the settlement, but there are currents of fear and mistrust in the air.
Contents
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Praise
Also by David Malouf
Copyright Notice
Join the Conversation
Whether this is Jerusalem or Babylon we know not.
WILLIAM BLAKE:
Strange shapes and void afflict the soul
And shadow to the eye
A world on fire while smoke seas roll
And lightnings rend the sky
The moon shall be as blood the sun
Black as a thunder cloud
The stars shall turn to blue and dun
And heaven by darkness bowed
Shall make sun dark and give no day
When stars like skys shall be
When heaven and earth shall pass away
Wilt thou Remember me
JOHN CLARE
1
ONE DAY IN the middle of the nineteenth century, when settlement in Queensland had advanced little more than halfway up the coast, three children were playing at the edge of a paddock when they saw something extraordinary. They were two little girls in patched gingham and a boy, their cousin, in short pants and braces, all three barefooted farm children not easily scared.
They had little opportunity for play but had been engaged for the past hour in a game of the boy’s devising: the paddock, all clay-packed stones and ant trails, was a forest in Russia – they were hunters on the track of wolves.
The boy had elaborated this scrap of make-believe out of a story in the fourth grade Reader; he was lost in it. Cold air burned his nostrils, snow squeaked underfoot; the gun he carried, a good sized stick, hung heavy on his arm.
But the girls, especially Janet, who was older than he was and half a head taller, were bored. They had no experience of snow, and wolves did not interest them. They complained and dawdled and he had to exert all his gift for fantasy, his will too, which was stubborn, to keep them in the game.They had a blue kelpie with them. He bounced along with his tongue lolling, excited by the boy’s solemn concentration but puzzled too that he could get no sense of what they were after: the idea of wolf had not been transmitted to him. He danced around the little party, sometimes in front, sometimes to the side, sniffing close to the earth, raising his moist eyes in hope of instruction, and every now and then, since he was young and easily distracted, bounding away after the clippered insects that sprang up as they approached, or a
grasshopper that rose with a ponderous whirring and rolled sideways from his jaws. Then suddenly he did get the scent. With a yelp of pure delight he shot off in the direction of their boundary fence, and the children, all three, turned away to see what he had found.