Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Remembering Babylon, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Racism and Xenophobia
Gender and Power
Community and Insularity
Coming of Age
Colonialism and Property
Summary
Analysis
In the subsequent few days after “Gemmy’s visitors had appeared,” the other settlers begin harassing the McIvors, breaking fence and slitting the throats of the family’s pet geese. The children are saddened and disturbed, as are Jock and Ellen. Lachlan is filled with a righteous anger, wanting to prove his devotion to Jock and Ellen with some act of brave retribution, but Jock does not want him to carry the burden of it all. In his eyes, Lachlan is still too young, and should not have to consider such things.
The hostility the McIvors experience from the other settlers is even more threatening since they are the only people the McIvors can depend on. If even the neighbors are a threat, then the McIvor family is truly alone, demonstrating the difficulty of defying one’s peers—even for a righteous reason—when one lives in an isolated or insular community.
Themes
Three days after the “slaughter of the geese,” Jock sees Gemmy running across the yard, terrified, as if something were pursuing him. Jock ventures down to where Gemmy had fled from, finding the shed smeared “with shit.” Jock is enraged, knowing this is the work of one of his neighbors, someone he knows personally and well, though he does not know who specifically. The thought of standing face to face with the man who defaced his shed, a man whom he once considered a friend, “horrifie[s] him.”
The settlers’ harassment of the McIvors is pointedly ironic: although the settlers have long feared attacks by the Aboriginal Australians—who have never done anything threaten at all—it is the settlers themselves who hurt and prey on each other. This flatly contradicts whatever notions the settlers have of the Aboriginal peoples as being savage, violent, or uncivil.
Themes
