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<title> Gemmy Farley: A misplaced human being or a man on the voyage of life </title>
Gemmy Farley is a man that has witnessed and experienced most in life and for sure the main part is a display of how mother nature can turn up-side-down on a human being's life. The interesting and eye-catching part in this novel is how societies greet and receive new and different people. This shows that mankind has always been the same in reacting on new things and changes. Perhaps reactions are not as radical now as in the mid nineteenth century but the novel show the nature of humans. He also shows the contrast between British settlers and Aborigines, and in this case the contrast between the civilization and the primitive. Therefore I have decided to take a closer look at the character of Gemmy Fairley and his experiences.
	The adventurous life of Gemmy starts somewhere in London where he get to feel how it is to live as a streetchild. Already from the beginning of his life he is raised by harsh and cruel rules associated with the life in the street. At the age of five he is taken in by Willet the rat catcher. This man scars his soul for the rest of his life by bulling him physically and sexually. For this reason he sets Willet's house on fire resulting in his death. Consequently, as many young men in this era, he went out sees to explore and perhaps find a more meaningful life. However with his bad luck, or more likely fate, things go very wrong when a he becomes sick and is thrown overboard. The author has already at this stage built up a feeling of sympathy toward Gemmy and this feeling stays with me throughout the book. In some way you can not do anything but to be on his side because you get the feeling that it is the world, or at least the settlement, against Gemmy. For instance when he meets Lachlan Beattie for the first time he know that it is only a stick and that he probably will not get hurt if he resist but follow along anyway. This shows his ability to cope with people without offending them. After sixteen years among Aborigines he know confronts the new white settlers and they react as they are witnessing a ghost. Perhaps this reaction was not so strange because he is not a pretty picture, the narrator describes him in page seven and eight: "He was a man who had suffered a good deal of damage" and it continues "One of his eyebrows was missing...", "His joints were swollen and one leg was shorter than the other and a little twisted". Moreover these covered up insults keep showering him all the time and it gets really frustrating, as a reader, that he does not stand up for him self. Of course his situation is not the easiest but does he not have one ounce of pride in his body you ask your self.Gemmy display a personality of an abused and used man when he seeks love from the wrong kind of people. The fact that he still miss Willet stands clear: "Having known on better life than this, he cannot imagine one. Willet provides the only bit of closeness he has ever been offered, and since he has nothing else to love, he loves him with fierce intensity, a fear too, which is the greatest he knows, that he may get lost, or that Willet one day may abandon him...". In addition his admire for Lachlan is also great who has shown Gemmy a dominant role and it seems as Gemmy is drawn to some sort of authority figures. He undermines his own authority when he defend the bullies and blames him self for it. By placing himself in an inferior position he believes he will be loved and accepted.

In a narrative point of view Gemmy's story is told in third person, always referring to him as he, never as I. When the picture of Gemmy is painted up for the reader the narrator uses the other characters to explain and describe him. This technique gives even more the feeling that he is a renegade and very alone and different. Something he has inherited by the Aborigines is the love for the nature and spiritualism. "The land up there was his mother, the only one he had ever known. It belonged to him as he did to it...". The spiritual side is clearly shown when he feels that his soul has been parted from his body when Mr. Abbot writes down Gemmy's life story on the seven papers. The only way to get his soul back is by recovering the papers. When he managed to get hold of the papers he felt a great relief and the power to do what ever pleased him. No-one decided matters for him ever again. "...he looked about him, felt for the first time that he could do any way he pleased...". Throughout the book the reader grows with Gemmy and so does his character. He is a complicated man with a complicated life coping with his situation probably better than any other normal person would have managed. The narrators way of revealing Gemmy's character bit by bit makes one understand him bit by bit giving the reader varying emotional feelings towards Gemmy. In conclusion the general feeling I got when I closed the book was happiness, and I believe that Gemmy also found happiness.
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