SOURCE: "A 'Black White Man' in Colonial Australia," in The New York Times, October 19, 1993, p. C19.

[In the following favorable review of Remembering Babylon, Kakutani praises Malouf's characterizations and his focus on Australian history.]

The Babylon referred to in the title of David Malouf's new novel Remembering Babylon is Australia: a 19th-century frontier that many of its settlers regarded as Eden, a New World paradise where they might make a fresh start and begin new lives, tabula rasa. Yet as we learn in this astonishing novel, Australia was also a harsh, dangerous land, a place that brought out in its colonizers the dark passions of racism, brutality and hate.

Remembering Babylon, Mr. Malouf's seventh novel, takes place "one day in the middle of the 19th century" in a small British settlement in the desolate territory of Queensland on the eastern coast of Australia. Three young children, Janet and...