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
Decades later, as an old man, Lachlan Beattie arrives—wearing a three-piece suit and carried by a modern car with a personal driver—at St. Iona’s to see Janet, who is now a nun named Sister Monica. The other sisters watch eagerly and suspiciously, knowing that Lachlan and Janet are the subject of a scandal that has not yet resolved. Even so, Janet meets Lachlan, kisses him on the cheek, and walks with him to the garden where they can be alone.
Although the narrative jumps ahead, it effectively shows what both Lachlan and Janet have become, resolving each of their personal journeys toward adulthood and maturity. Janet’s position as a nun fits with her frustration with male dominance as a child, since a convent is a society run exclusively by women.
Themes
They go to their favorite spot to visit—for Lachlan has been visiting for the past five weeks—which is a small, bare terrace with a bench to sit on. Janet gives him an apple, which he cuts with a knife in the same manner that Jock once did. She notes that his hands are scabbed, like hers and her father’s, since they have “the wrong skin for this country.”
The idea of “the wrong skin for this country” suggests that Janet now recognizes that the colonists, who have largely displaced the Aboriginal Australians, are ill-suited to living in such an environment. This observation perhaps suggests that they never should have come.
Themes
Prior to the previous month, they had not spoken for many years, with Janet consumed by her work as a nun and dedicated apiarist, and Lachlan by his work as a politician and Minister. Janet finally reaches out to him in hopes that he can help her regain contact with an associate, a German Catholic priest who is threatened by the war and the public’s anti-German sentiment. Lachlan treasures the letter for the glimpse of her it gives him and uses his political authority to fulfill her request. He also writes a letter in return to congratulate her on her accomplishments and ask if he might come visit, especially now after the death of his wife. Janet is touched by the “courtesy” and “tenderness” of his letter, though she fails to reply for an entire year, until one morning she finds both their names in the local paper amidst a storm of public anger.
The tenderness of Lachlan’s letter suggests that he has truly and fully grown up as a man. As a youth, Lachlan was domineering and arrogant, and he assumed that he should naturally have his way over Janet because he was a man. His new tenderness implies that, even though he is successful in his career, he is much humbler and less demanding than he once was and is now able to respect the feelings of others. Such a change in demeanor is evidence that the painful process of growth that began with Gemmy’s arrival reached its fruition during Lachlan’s adulthood.
Themes
The public scandal arises when a German baker is harassed and then arrested on the grounds of his ethnicity, and he and his family are threatened with deportation and their assets are seized. Lachlan is among those who defend the man against fierce public sentiment, and in response his home is broken into and several documents are seized and made public. Among these documents is the damning letter from Janet, which seems pro-German and provides an embarrassing example of a government official misusing his power to grant a personal favor. Although Janet’s fellow nuns do not take the scandal seriously, parents stop sending their children to the convent for music or beekeeping lessons or to while away their afternoons. Someone throws a stone wrapped in the Union Jack through one of the convent’s windows.
The racial animosity towards the German baker—presumably stemming from the actions of Germany during World War I—mirrors the senseless racial animosity leveled against Gemmy due to his association with the Aboriginal Australians. Particularly for Janet and Lachlan, who have seen the same racism and the destruction it can cause, the parallels to their own childhood suggest that sadly, such racism and xenophobia are far-reaching and enduring. The novel suggests there that human beings have a constant urge to take out their anger and fear on those who are different from themselves, or those who somehow represent a threat in their own minds.
Themes
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The first time they meet after the scandal, Janet is apologetic but Lachlan will hear none of it, telling her that he does not place any of the blame upon her shoulders. The other politicians simply want him out, and though he will fight them for as long as he can, they will inevitably have their way. Janet shows Lachlan her beehives, where she still investigates “the great secret” that has consumed her life since Mrs. Hutchence taught her to keep bees: discovering how the bees communicate within the hive. Lachlan tells her of his son Willie, who was killed in the war in France ten months before, with the same pen-knife and an apple with a single slice cut out found in his pocket after the body was retrieved. Janet imagines along with him that when Lachlan’s son died, he may still have had the wedge of apple in his mouth.
Once again, Lachlan displays his growth and maturity by his gentleness towards Janet and the graciousness with which he accepts his hardships. Where a much younger Lachlan might have raged at the injustice of the situation, Lachlan as a mature adult accepts his own responsibility in the matter and does not simply surrender, but rather accepts that his career will end and recognizes his own limitations in the matter. Janet’s continued beekeeping and investigation into bees’ communication reveals that she, too, has kept on her journey of growth and successfully found a pursuit in which she is not constrained by being a woman.
Themes
The intimacy between them makes Janet think of love, though she cannot bring herself to speak it, and when she takes Lachlan’s hand he seems startled, so she quickly releases it. Even so, it seems they have recovered some of the distance between the present and the day that they, along with Meg, first spotted Gemmy balancing himself upon the fence. Janet reflects that in that first moment, she knew all she would ever know of Gemmy: that he was “someone we loved.” Lachlan looks at Janet with red-rimmed eyes, thinking about the boy who’d aimed his make-believe rifle at Gemmy’s heart, intending to bring him down.
Since the fence symbolizes the divide between the world of the Aboriginal Australians and the world of the white settlers, it is significant that Janet declares that she loved Gemmy in the moment he still teetered upon the fence. That is, the McIvors loved Gemmy not because he chose to be white—as the settlers demanded—but simply because he was there. Such unconditional love in the first moment contrasts greatly with Lachlan’s first impulse, which was to dominate Gemmy by “shooting” him down, which his red-rimmed eyes suggest he now regrets.
Themes
Janet knows how the story ends. Nine years after Gemmy leaves the settlement, Lachlan is working on a government surveying crew, clearing track for a highway to be installed. Whenever the crew meets a group of indigenous Australians, Lachlan asks if they have heard of Gemmy, until he meets a young woman who tells him Gemmy was killed in a “dispersal” of natives six years before—“too slight an affair to be called a massacre.” The young woman leads Lachlan to where the bones of the dead were laid, bundled in bark is as the custom, and Lachlan inspects them until he finds one set with a distinctive jaw and enlarged joints. Although he does not know if these are Gemmy’s bones, he chooses to believe they are so that he may close the wound upon his conscience, “which might otherwise have gone on bleeding forever.”
Lachlan’s guilt confirms that he regrets his treatment of Gemmy and the way that he treated Gemmy first as a badge of power and later as an annoying tag-along. Tragically, there seem to be no true resolution for Gemmy himself. Despite his “naked endurance” and ability to survive, he was still ostensibly killed by white men. Within the frame of the narrative, although Gemmy has his own motivations, he functions more as a catalyst for change and growth in other characters, especially Jock and Lachlan, who seem to reach more resolution in their own character arcs than Gemmy ever does.
Themes
That was fifty years before, when Australia was “another country” than it is today. After Lachlan leaves, Janet sits alone in her room, staring through the glass window, and reflects on all of the events in her life that have led her to this. She thinks of of Jock and Ellen and Meg and Lachlan, but most of all of Gemmy and of her family’s unconscious “need to draw him into their lives.” She can see him balanced on the fence and thinks once more of love, love for all things that live in Australia.
Speaking of their unconscious need to draw Gemmy in, the narrative suggests in its closing that the McIvors somehow sensed that Gemmy would be such a catalyst for change, someone to love and who would love them but also teach them in turn to love all that surrounds them. This seems particularly true for Lachlan and Jock, consumed as they once were by their concerns of power and authority. The final mention of all things that live in Australia also reinforces the idea that the divisions the settlers imagine, whether between different races or different pieces of property, are ultimately meaningless.
Themes
