“An Environmental Reading of David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon”

David Malouf’s acclaimed novel Remembering Babylon (1993) fictionalizes the first years of European settlement in Australia focusing on the interrelations of people and place. Aware of the risks of speaking of or for Aboriginal people, Malouf adopts the figure of Gemmy Fairley, a white man gone ‘native’, to explore obliquely the black/white interaction and provide an opening for questions of belonging and not-belonging. In an interview with Nikos Papastergiadis, however, Malouf affirms that Remembering Babylon is not a book “about a purely Australian experience. It is about an experience of landscape”. Reading Malouf’s novel in an ecocritical frame, this paper intends to investigate the interconnectedness between land, sense of rootedness and (dis)possession during the colonizing process, as well as to see if and how the land can be recoverable through imagination, through stories able to trespass the anthropocentric nature/culture divide while fostering a new paradigm based on a “reciprocity of perspectives, in which man and the world mirror each other”.