How To Create Renewal In Remembering Babylon

Remembering Babylon
Remembering Babylon is a contemporary story set in the 1840’s written by the Author David Malouf in 1993 and published in 1994. It is about a young white boy (Gemmy) getting raised by Aboriginals and ending up in a small settlement and gets taken in by white settlers and having to choose between the white and aboriginal culture. Renewal is represented as a positive force for change in adapting to the Australian society. This renewal is shown through the characters experience of fire, hybridity and epiphany.
Janet shows renewal in a positive way through fire when she is working with Mrs Hutchence and the bees. The fire is shown when the bees cover Janet’s body, like “little flames. She had remained cool inside, and when the

Gemmy was neither Aboriginal nor a white man, he was a hybrid, he was known as the white black man or the black white man. “Do not shoot…I am a B-b-British object!” (3) Gemmy’s few English words, he thinks of himself as British, a white man still even though he has just come from living with Aboriginals. Gemmy did not feel that he fit in with the white people or the Aboriginals, even though he made friends and had people who liked him; there were still people in the settlement that thought of him as trouble and danger, a “half-starved look of a black”(3). Janet sees him as an ideal on the fence, “never to fall” (181), but he had to; Gemmy was caught between two worlds, the aboriginal and white culture unity, and had to choose if he was black or white just because he spoke the tongue of the Aboriginals. Gemmy renews himself when he goes off and disappears; no one knows what happened to him, but Gemmy himself. Gemmy grew as a person and found the real him after he was attacked and once he left, he didn’t want to cause any more trouble for the settlers. He decided to go off and start a new life, with a new him and new people. The reader is positioned with sadness and sympathy towards Gemmy because of the way he was treated and was an outcast; he didn’t fit in anywhere he went. Readers follow along with Gemmy and experience the changes of