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<title> "Ah told ye Ah was the wan!" The character of Lachlan Beattie in David Malouf's Remembering Babylon </title>
When Gemmy, a white man who has been living with Aborigines for many years, is confronted with the civilisation of the settlement, the boy Lachlan Beattie is the only one to really become friends with him. Though Lachlan is only a twelve-year-old boy when they first meet, he obtains power and respect over both Gemmy and the other people of the settlement. He wants to show that he is the one in charge and the only one who can understand Gemmy's language.
	 Below, I intend to make a description of Lachlan's character and analyse how we as readers become familiar with his feelings and thoughts.

Lachlan Beattie is brought from Scotland to his aunt and uncle in the settlement in Australia as a nine-year-old when his father is killed. Though he is warmly welcomed by the McIvor family he is unhappy with his new life. He keeps to himself, talks about "at hame in Scotland" and his hometown, Airdrie, to which the settlement seems like the bushes in the middle of nowhere. As David Malouf writes (p.55):

But when he arrived he showed no gratitude for the chance they were offering him, and wasn't at all pleased to see them (...) He scoffed and swaggered. Nothing here was good enough for him.

Lachlan has lived with the McIvors for about three years when Gemmy appears. The boy is by now, we understand, dominating his cousins Janet and Meg. On the very first page of the novel when we meet the three children, they are "engaged for the past hour in a game of the boy's devising", but he has to "exert all his gift for fantasy, his will too, which was stubborn, to keep them in the game".
	 However, through Gemmy's arrival Lachlan takes the opportunity to develop his power over both his cousins, other adults, his schoolmates, and, above all, over Gemmy himself, and this dominance we see as Lachlan's main feature. Firstly, he feels that he must, as the boy among the three children, take his responsibility and protect the weaker girls against this alien creature (p. 2-3):

The boy too was struck but had begun to recover. Though he was very pale about the mouth, he did what his manhood required him to do. Holding fast to the stick, he stepped resolutely in front. (...) 
Whatever it was, it was the boy's intention to confront it.

This is the beginning of what later is developed into Lachlan's very strong belief that he is the "chosen one", with a mutual understanding with Gemmy that no one else possesses. This is clearly described in the scene where Gemmy is introduced to the neighbourhood and the people gathered cannot understand his incomprehensible language (p. 12):

You see, the line of his mouth proclaimed, as once again the fellow laughed and paid tribute to his cleverness with a slap of the thigh, Ah told ye Ah was the wan! Or he would deliberately hold back and make them wait, screwing his face up, pretending to be stumped, so that, with a shout of triumph and a little knock of his knuckles against his skull at his own stupidity, he could more dramatically come up with an answer. 

We understand that Lachlan's behaviour is clearly connected to the fact that he has difficulties finding his place among the people, both young and old. His search for identity forces him to act dominantly, doing his best to assert himself. Especially at school he does everything to be seen as the brightest pupil, but the teacher deliberately neglects him, only making things worse. He is a dreaming child with a vivid imagination - at first he sees Gemmy as a mere object in another exiting game, but as time goes by the two get to know each other. To Gemmy, Lachlan is both his friend and master, whom he follows everywhere, and Lachlan is proud, feeling important. His task, he feels, is to protect Gemmy from the other children's scorn. 
	 About a year later, his world of fantasy is shattered, when he, now a thirteen-year-old standing in between childhood and the world of grown-ups, realises that he must take his stance. If he wants to take the step into the group of older fellows and get rid of the taunts he has been exposed to for so long, he has to leave Gemmy behind. Malouf writes (p. 158):

But it was absurd to have Gemmy always tagging at his heels, and he blushed now to recall a time when he had regarded it as a sign of his power. How puffed up he had been with his own importance! What a fool he must have appeared to the very fellows he had meant to impress!

David Malouf uses the voice of an omniscient narrator when describing his characters. We as readers get to know Lachlan's deepest feelings directly, as we see in the quote above, and also through the thoughts of other characters: When he was fired up with something he had to let it out. That was what made things difficult for him. (Janet's reactions; p. 60). In fact, there are very few detailed descriptions of the characters' external looks throughout the novel. Their essential qualities are instead conveyed through their acting and reactions in different situations.

An interesting point of view came to my mind while reading. Why does Lachlan make good friends with Gemmy, while others, especially the adults, see him as a threatening alien? Have the two of them got anything in common which makes them identify with one another? They are roughly in the same situation: taken into a family where they do not actually belong. But eventually Lachlan learns to adjust since he, after all, is one of their kind, sharing their language and is able to communicate. (In the very last chapter we also learn that Lachlan has become a Government minister and found his place in a leading position in society.) Gemmy has stepped out from the unknown wilderness and is inevitably regarded an alien. When first meeting Gemmy people ask themselves (p. 40): Could you lose it? Not just language, but it. It. It is this "it" that makes the difference between being accepted in a community or not.
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