Written by the internationally admired novelist and poet David Malouf, this is an unusual take on the interactions between the European colonists and the native Aborigines in C19 Queensland.

The central character, Gemmy Fairley, is based on the life of James Morrill, a sailor who was shipwrecked and washed up on the Queensland coast where he lived for sixteen years with the Aborigines, before returning to the settlers’ “civilisation”. Both men announce themselves with the same words, “Don’t shoot! I am a British object!”, but the Gemmy of Malouf’s imagination seems to be a more poignant and touching character who seems to have adapted quite easily to Aborigine life, after an even harder childhood as an orphan exploited by a London rat-catcher.

At first, Gemmy is a source of curiosity and amusement, but in an isolated, insecure white immigrant community, he soon arouses suspicion mingled with a repulsion which is heightened by the nature of his difference – physically damaged by adversity, he is between two cultures, a white man who looks and behaves like a native. In a community which lives in a constant sense of fear of the unknown, uneasily aware of the presence of elusive, possibly menacing strangers, they dare not trust him, particularly when he is reported to have received a visit from a couple of Aborigines.

In this subtle psychological drama, Malouf tends to portray the Aborigines in a more sympathetic light, as more sensitive and empathic than the white settlers, although they remain more two-dimensional than the latter. The Aborigine couple “were concerned that in coming here, among these ghostly white creatures, he might have slipped back into the thinner world of wraiths and demons he had escaped, though never completely in his days with them. They had come to reclaim him; but lightly, bringing what would feed his spirit”. As tensions rise in the colonial village, those who have supported Gemmy feel rejected by the community, but disillusioned with their former friends in return.

The Minister, Mr Frazer, makes use of Gemmy’s local knowledge and labour to dig up the unfamiliar local plants he wishes to study. This gives him the idea of developing a market for local fruit and vegetables, but the plan is bound to wither in the face of a Governor who thinks only of imposing his own British culture.

By turns disturbing and beautiful, carefully crafted, Malouf’s prose needs to be read slowly, like a poem, to appreciate more fully the vivid pictures created of Queensland, to note the small details which may prove relevant later and to understand fully the thoughts he wishes to convey.

From the outset, I felt that the novel which focuses on small insights was building up slowly to a powerful climax but this drifted away in the last three chapters which seem disjointed, rushed and too disconnected from what has gone before, featuring insufficiently developed relationships, or characters who have not even appeared previously. Perhaps the author is simply most interested in showing how , for instance, a single incident may have particular significance in one’s memory; a person may have a lasting influence which may be hard to grasp, perhaps only when it is too late.

This novel is worth reading for the quality of the writing and observation, and the issues it addresses, although I would rate “The Conversations at Curlew Creek” more highly from the viewpoint of structure. ”Remembering Babylon” could be a good choice for a book group, since it could spark discussion over the experience of being a colonial settler, the relationships with indigenous groups, and the psychology of individuals in groups under pressure, or living in a world where they need, but do not have, “a sense of the presence of those who have gone before”.