Remembering Babylon

In the mid-1840s, a 13-year-old boy, 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, men and women who are staking out their small patch of home in an alien place, hopeful and yet terrified of what it might do to them. The boy’s otherness both fascinates and repels them, just as his own identity is unsettled by this strange new world.