Australia will miss the gentle power of David Malouf

Australia is a foreign country. Our best writers know that it does not make for a comfortable home. We have built our nation against silence. An “unhuman” silence, Les Murray called it.

“Things are so wordless,” he wrote.

True, this land does not lend itself to extravagant words. When we speak too loudly, we make fools of ourselves. The noise that has followed Anzac Day has been as embarrassing as the booing was foolish.

Booing a welcome or acknowledgement is oafish. It is also rare. Overwhelmingly, Australians are comfortable with the ceremony. Some may feel Welcome to Country is overdone – personally, I would rather we reserve it for sacred, solemn occasions, like Anzac Day but not the footy – yet whatever our quibbles we are too well mannered and respectful to boo.

In the fortnight since April 25, some media commentary has sought to make rudeness a virtue. The booing by a handful of people at a few Anzac Day services has been elevated to an act of patriotism.

I do not believe thousands of Australians are booing on the inside. Why do such commentators think so little of us? My experience of Australians is that we are friendly, decent, helpful. We are not demonstrative.

We generally prefer to keep politics out of conversation. Should it intrude, our disagreements are generally lighthearted. Australians do not easily lose friendships
over politics.

We are not prey to the fevered culture wars, the hyper-racial politics of the United States, Britain or Europe. Why would some wish it here?

On the other side, booing the booers seems shrill. Calling for their arrest seems counterproductive.

It seems to me that ignoring the booing might be a more commensurate response.

Labelling booing as racist is prosaic. I am not saying racism is not a factor, but the word does both too much and not enough work to explain the booing.

Would those same people boo an Aboriginal bugler playing the last post? No, the boos speak to a disturbance in the Australian psyche, something deep and unresolved.

It asks, whose country is this? Do we belong here? Can we truly call this home?

On occasions like this, Murray is right: things are so wordless. He writes of the axe blow that will bring down a red gum between trunks. And then, I know, of the knowledge that led my forebears / to drink and black rage and wordlessness, there will be silence.

A few days before Anzac Day, David Malouf died.

Malouf was an elegant man of Australian letters. He wrote into the soft spaces. An Australian of Lebanese and British heritage, he peered into our soul with an outsider’s eye and a tender heart.

David Malouf knew that love redeemed us. He wrote with love about a land he loved.

Australia was his muse, even when he lived and wrote abroad. Given the timing of his death, I found refuge and wisdom in his writing last week. His words will linger long after the media blowhards have exhausted themselves.

I read again Malouf’s Remembering Babylon. It is the work of a writer who would go where others fear to tread or tread too heavily. Few Australian writers – Indigenous and non – handle the question of dispossession and the brutality of the Australian frontier with the poetry and honesty of Malouf.

He was neither self-conscious, self-righteous nor self-flagellating. Malouf gently led this Aboriginal man to question my belonging and complicity. Malouf’s words call me to a grace that I admit I have not always extended towards my fellow Australians.

This is my failure.

I lingered on the epigraph he chose, a quotation from William Blake: “Whether this is Jerusalem or Babylon, we know not.” Is this a holy place or a place of sin? With Malouf’s light touch the big sins of history are leavened by moments of stillness, silence and beauty: the behaviour of bees, sketches of flora, duties to our neighbours.

Our sins are never irredeemable.

Sovereignty is always negotiated, extended, shared. It starts with a human touch, with generosity, a welcome to all and
a gratitude for what we have.

This place is something bigger than us. It holds us all. This land defines us. We do not define it. This place has worked its defeats on us.

“It was the fearful loneliness of the place that most affected her – the absence of ghosts.”

Yes, Malouf tells us, this is a haunted place but haunted by the very lack of us.

The novel tells of a “wild man”, a stranger who appears out of the scrub. The frontier community is unsure if this man is white or Black.

Gemmy had been raised by Aboriginal people. This “white” man becomes a mirror to reflect the fear and insecurity of a new people making a home in a land that will always be an impenetrable dark.

Gemmy is someone entirely new. He is something the world has never seen before.

“Our poor friend Gemmy is a forerunner. He is no longer a white man, or a European, whatever his birth, but a true child of the place as it will one day be … in allowing himself to be at home here, he has crossed the boundaries of his given nature.”

Gemmy is all of us. He is certainly me, a man who has the blood of Black and white, who still finds it hard at times to quell the warring tribes of my conflicted heritage.

Malouf takes us beyond the limitations of race. We fear in the stranger what is missing in ourselves.

These past weeks, I have found it more difficult to square the country I live in and the country I read about. Am I missing something? Does the country I love have such a cold heart?

No, we are not that.

I attended a beautiful dawn service on Anzac Day. I remembered my grandfather, a Wiradjuri man and a Rat of Tobruk. I honoured what he and others fought for. I felt the promise of their sacrifice, that we be better than our worst.

No one booed. No one did.

Yet for a while I allowed the booing elsewhere to define my country. I hear the echo still.

The media commentators have shifted their attention to the death of Kumanjayi Little Baby. Her family, her community, our nation, did not have time to grieve the loss of this beautiful little girl, before we turned her death into a lightning rod for anger, suspicion and blame.

The rioting does not honour her.

The poverty porn, masquerading as media concern, demeans our nation. Those so eager to see Aboriginal failure miss Aboriginal love. That little girl was loved.

We miss the love when all we hear are the boos.

We have failed Kumanjayi Little Baby.

We have failed each other.

What a loveless vision of Australia.

David Malouf knew that love redeemed us. He wrote with love about a land he loved. History is what we make, but love is who we are. It must be.

“Love, again love – overbalanced but not yet falling.”

Jerusalem or Babylon? Still, we know not.

By God, we will miss David Malouf.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on
May 9, 2026 as ” David Malouf (1934-2026)”.

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