This mystery of the Child’s nature and origins is sustained in a variety of
detail throughout the novel. However, in the final section of the novel the Child’s
timeless, psycho-spiritual nature is stressed:
I t is spring. I t is summer. I am three years old. I am sixty. The
Child is there. He turns for a moment to gaze at me across his
shoulder, which is touched with sunlight, then stoops to gather
another snail from the edge of the stream. He rises and goes on.
The stream shakes out its light around his ankles ... then wanders
upstream on the other bank ... and with the stream rippling as he
steps in and out of it, walks on. He is walking on the water’s light.
And as I watch he takes the first step off it, moving slowly away
now into the deep distance, above the earth, above the water, on
air (Malouf, 1978:151-152).
Walking on the water’s light, the Child is almost a Christ-like figure. I n
traditional symbology the child is a symbol of the future, as opposed to the old man
who signifies the past; but the child is also symbolic of that stage of life when the
old man, transformed, acquires a new simplicity. Hence, the conception of the child
as symbolic of the mystic centre and as the youthful re-awakening force. I n
Christian iconography children often appear as angels. I n every case, C. G. Jung
argues, the child symbolizes formative forces of the unconscious of a beneficent and
protective kind (Jung, CW 9 (i), par. 260 and 270). Psychologically speaking, the
child is of the soul, the product of the coniunctio between the unconscious and
consciousness: “ ... one dreams of a child when some great spiritual change is about
to take place” (Cirlot, 1962:45).
Malouf’s Child has all the necessary antecedent credentials of a divine or
primordial nature, as Ovid, enchanted, reveals:
My mind moves out continually to the deer forest and the Child.
How does he survive out there? Naked. Unhoused. I see him
often in my sleep, a ghost moving over the snow among the
birches, chewing at lichen, digging under the ice for mold ...
meanwhile, night after night, I hunt the Child in my sleep. I warm
him with my breath. Or is it the breath of some animal that
warms him, wolf or deer, even there in my dreams? Or does he
perhaps sleep out the winter like one of the creatures, curled up in
some hollow and tied to the continuance of things only by his own
slow breathing (Malouf, 1978:54).
This child is at home in the elemental world and the pre-conscious instincts
which once guided human beings at the participation mystique stage of evolution.
I n this sense he is not unlike Gemmy Fairley in Remembering Babylon, who has