Essay Questions

Sir George is described as someone for whom “analogy is his drug” because he finds analogies everywhere. How is this a commentary on colonialism?

The central character trait of Sir George is not that finding analogies is like a drug to him. That addition is merely a symptom of his larger and deeper problem, which is that he can’t actually do anything. He dreams, he pontificates, he plans, he envisions and he does see the ways that the wildness of Australia can be tamed into a more domesticated if less cultured and sophisticated version of England. Sir George has been discharged to Australia with the commission of creating “a new self-governing state.” Another term for this mission is, of course, colonizing. And what is colonizing at heart if it is not the attempt to impose an analogous situation between an existing self-governing state and one created entirely anew in the image of that pre-existing nation?

What does the physical, emotional and mental state of Gemmy relative to how the settlers react to him say about the nature of cultural discrimination?

When Gemmy is initially spotted, he is assumed to be black—in Australian terms, an Aborigine. He is such a state of nutritional deprivation that he is mistaken for a scarecrow somehow come to life. His difficulty with language and communication make him a target of derision. Foremost among the settlers, however, is an emotional response coincident with xenophobic mistrust and discomfort of someone who appears different from them despite the fact that actually spent the first dozen years of his life in a relatively normal life growing up in England. Genetically—or, for lack of a better word—“racially” he is no different from the settlers who castigate him.

What makes them unnerved or outright hostile toward him is his appearance and the emotional and mental ravages of living a hard life among an alien culture in the wilderness of Australia before there really was an Australia. He certainly presents no actual or even perceived threat either individually or collectively to the settlers’ society. The state of cultural discrimination is revealed in its entirety being divorced any of the rationales to which those who indulge it are prone to give and instead exhibited for what it is: irrational fear and hatred based on nothing more substantial than others looking and behaving differently.

What is the significance of Andy McKillop’s stone?

The single most significant thing about it is that it does not exist. Andy spies from afar as two Aborigines engage in a brief “powwow” with Gemmy. He cannot hear them, he would not be able to understand them if he had heard them and he has absolutely no idea what the three men were discussing, but from his mere paranoid racism-fueled suspicions, he creates from nothing a story about the transfer of a stone which takes on the properties of black magic as the story gets passed from one settler to another. The stone which does not exist is nevertheless a powerful totem—every bit as a powerful as a modern-day conspiracy theory which, despite having no basis in fact, is believed to be true by enough people to ensure that violence is inevitably perpetrated against others.