Synopsis
Thirteen-year-old Gemmy Fairley is cast ashore in northern Australia and adopted by Australian aborigines during the mid-1840s
Reviews
The prodigiously talented Australian author of the magnificent and award-winning The Great World (1991) is working on a much smaller scale here, but he writes with such beauty and universal resonance that his story has epic force. In a tiny pioneer corner of Queensland in the mid-19th century lands Gemmy Fairley, a pathetic, stammering wreck of a young man left for drowned as a boy and brought up by Aborigines. He becomes the center of attention among the local farming folk, mostly immigrants from Scotland and the North Country, already overwhelmed by their solitude in this hot, strange land, and convinced that the primitive original inhabitants will slaughter them if they drop their guard for a moment. A naturalist minister sees in Gemmy and his native skills a way for the bone-poor colony to prosper and live in harmony with the land; a decent, struggling Scottish couple take him in and by doing so tear apart their relations with their neighbors, though their children's lives are forever changed by Gemmy's presence; and the governing class, in distant Brisbane, try to do the right thing by him for all the wrong reasons. It seems the slight tale can only have a sad, violent end, but Malouf is after a much less predictable resolution. In his hands, the story acquires overtones of poetry and magic, so that death and time's passage are as palpable as the luminous landscapes he paints. This is a book that actually expands a reader's consciousness.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
A quietly masterful tale from Australia's colonial past, depicting the savage and painful nuances of racism evoked when a white youth raised by aborigines returns to his own people: from award-winning novelist and poet Malouf (The Great World, 1991, etc.). When Gemmy Fairley encounters the children of Jock McIvor as they play on the fringe of their mid-19th-century settlement in the Outback, a chain of events is set in motion that changes all their lives. Gemmy, cast ashore as a child after a brutal life in the streets of London and at sea, joined the natives who found him, spending 16 years with them before seeking out other whites to find answers to questions about his origin still tormenting him. Adopted by McIvor's family, proud Scottish immigrants, he is accepted by them but not by the community, which views him with distrust as his otherness remains intact--and when native visitors are seen with him, fears of an attack turn the whites violently against him. Saved by Jock--who finds his own growing estrangement from his neighbors a disturbing development that he's powerless to change- -Gemmy is removed to more secure lodgings, but he wishes only to escape and vanishes soon after. Meanwhile, his presence among the McIvor children has proved a turning point for them, as they witness both Gemmy's innocence and the barbarity of others, and in the process the whole family becomes increasingly open to the subtle natural wonders of their new homeland. Delicate but relentless in its focus on the manifestations of racial intolerance, this is enhanced by a naturalist's keen eye for detail, bringing landscape and states of mind together in a probing, resonant vision of discovery and despair. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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