Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Peter Otto

Critical Essay by Peter Otto

SOURCE: "Forgetting Colonialism," in Meanjin, Vol. 52, No. 3, September, 1993, pp. 545-58.

[In the essay below, Otto analyzes Malouf's portrayal of male-female relationships, the sublime, the political, and the social in Remembering Babylon, noting Malouf's delineation of the evolution of Australia's colonial identity into a national identity.]

Whether this is Jerusalem or Babylon we know not.

                          Blake, The Four Zoas

Remembering Babylon begins 'One day in the middle of the nineteenth century, when settlement in Queensland had advanced little more than halfway up the coast', at an imaginary line that purportedly divides colonial settlement from its Unknown. It may at first seem odd to associate this locale with Babylon but, as the first of the book's two epigraphs suggests, one of the title's allusions is to Blake's Babylon, a city formed by the dismemberment of Albion (England). The allusion suggests that colonial Australia is a dismembered Albion, formed...
(read more)