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<title> Lachlan Beattie- a boy with fearful but fearless stance. </title>
One of the main characters in David Malouf's novel Remembering Babylon is Lachlan Beattie who at the age of nine arrives to Australia to live with his aunt and uncle in their new settlement. We learn that his father just have been killed in a mine accident back home in Scotland and as his mother have trouble supporting her five children, Lachlan is sent away. The reader first meet Lachlan in the novel when he and his two cousins Janet and Meg are out in the wood playing a game he had initiated. They suddenly bump in to this strange being, neither black nor white, who you later in the novel get to know as Gemmy, a man who sixteen years earlier was thrown from a British ship and taken in by aborigines. What kind of person Lachlan is and how he reacts in different situations are conveyed to the reader not through dialog as much as from how the narrator portraits him and what people involved in his life think of him. Especially Janet, his one-year-older cousin, who follows him all the way through the novel, portrays his development. As she sees him he develops from having been "...a stocky, tough lad of nine, a town boy." when he arrives to their family to having become a pillar of the society when they meet in the final pages of the novel.
Janet's expectations on him as he arrived from Scotland were great. He was the one arriving with a bit of Scotland with him. He would still have its light on him, alive and actual. He would have its speech in his mouth. She was very disappointed when he finally arrived. He showed no gratitude for the chance they were offering him and wasn't at all pleased to see them. He was still very much a child and what he did was protecting himself. His refuse to enter their world was a sign of fear of loosing more than he had done already: the one he had left and was heartsick for. Probably feeling the hostility and lack of sympathy from Janet he had a desperate need to make her jealous. He talked to her mother in Scottish, enjoying the fact that Janet didn't understand and sang songs from home that made her mother cry. He had a strong will and Janet always felt as though he was easy to get along with so long you gave in to him. According to her he had always to assert himself and be first. "He was in love with his own nobility but at the same time needed to boast of." 
As time progressed he adopted to his new environment. He set out, in a determined way, to learn all the skills and tricks of bushcraft and because he was quick and have to be first in everything soon was as much a bushman as the rest of them. "It was a flame in the boy, this power he had acquired over the world they moved in. He gave up being contemptuous, since he was the one who ¨ knew things ¨, assumed an easy, masculine air that he had picked up by imitation from his elders, and was so good at it that it looked like nature." Jock Mc Ivor, the father of the family was very proud of him. However, when he was fired up about something had had to let it out. The boys in school quickly learned that he was an easy tease as he always let his affections rule "At the first touch he would fly red-faced to attack." The boys at school came to respect him and though he was smaller than the rest he held authority over them and commanded fellows older than himself.
How Lachlan reacts in the encounter with Gemmy reflex well his personality. The narrator tells us that "He had a powerful sense of the springing of his torso from the roots of his belly. He had known nothing like this! He was bringing a prisoner in. Armed with nothing, too, but his own presumptions daring and the power of make-believe...The air crackled around him. He shone." The rest of his family thought he was acting like an actor on the stage, making too big deal of his own involvement. Gemmy arriving to their settlement had a great impact on Lachlan's life. He felt at first proud and important that Gemmy had chosen him as his protector. As the settler started to oppose Gemmy's presence, Lachlan as a leader was questioned as well. He refers to this time as his enlightment. He wanted to establish himself at the group of young men instead of being one of the children and in doing so Gemmy couldn't tag along. "...he blushed now to recall a time when he had regarded it a sign of power. How puffed up he had been with his own importance. What a fool he had must appeared to the very fellows he had meant to impress." It was a clear strategy from his part and it had set his face in the direction of manhood, he could not turn back. However, when the neighbours abuses his family and Gemmy he is loyal and outraged. He loses his innocence and learns not to take people for granted. This is an indisputable confirmation that he is turning in to a grown-up man.
In the last pages of the novel we learn that Lachlan had done well in his life and had become a minister in the Government. Janet used to criticise him for being full of bright schemes for the future, heroic visions in which the limitations of mere boyhood would at last be transcendent. It was as though he felt that if he could only se them clearly enough they would be there, up ahead, waiting for him to catch up bearing the details at last of place and time. There was no end, no limit either, to his plans. His confident, hope and great schemes for his future evidently paid off and he became the man of his dreams.
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