She is annoyed by his insistence that she always yield or defer to him because she is a girl, even though she is both older and tougher than he is. When he is not working, he follows Lachlan around.Īlthough Janet had once looked forward to her cousin Lachlan’s arrival from Scotland, now that he has lived with the family for a few years she resents his presence. Although the other settlers are still nervous about Gemmy, since he reminds them of the Aboriginal people and brings to mind their fears of invasion and attack, Gemmy is good with the children and helps the McIvors with what chores he can understand. So when Gemmy eventually hears that other white people have been spotted settling along the coast, he ventures to meet them.īack in the settlement, the McIvor family-which includes Lachlan (a cousin), Janet, and Meg along with the girls’ mother Ellen and their father Jock-takes Gemmy in and lets him live on their property, sleeping in a lean-to next to their shack. Even so, Gemmy learns the Aboriginal people’s language and customs-forgetting his own in the process, along with his former identity-but some part of him longs for a world he cannot quite remember.
A wandering group of Aboriginal Australians finds him and allows him to join their group and live amongst them, though because of his light complexion they never fully accept him as one of their own.
Frazer writes, believing that they hold some part of himself in them, but Frazer locks them away for safekeeping in the schoolhouse.ġ6 years earlier, 13-year-old Gemmy washes up on the Australian shore, nearly dead and unsure of where he is. Frazer, the town’s minister and botanist, spends an afternoon interviewing Gemmy and taking his story down as best he can. Though Gemmy is only slowly recovering his grasp of English, Mr. The settlers are mostly disturbed by the man, who calls himself Gemmy. They march him back to the settlement, Lachlan’s ego swelling with an image of himself as a powerful dominator, and show the other white settlers. However, after taking the man captive by pretending a long stick is actually a rifle, Lachlan and his cousins, Janet and Meg, discover that the man is in fact a European, though he speaks and acts like an indigenous person. Lachlan, the young boy, sees the man’s darkened skin and assumes he is one of the Aboriginal tribesmen who live in the Australian wilderness. In Queensland, Australia in the mid-1800s, three children of Commonwealth settlers are playing in a clearing when a strange man appears, sitting balanced upon a fence.
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