by Murray Bail

A certain Mr Holland came into a large grazing property in western New South Wales. His coming in was a matter of chance. Holland had made a deliberate bet against the odds, taking out an insurance policy against his wife giving birth to twins. Transforming the riches with which unreliable emotions surround us into reliable terms of mathematics and science is a transactional alchemy to which Holland cleaves despite all signs it is not worth a wizard’s spent wand. True, the odds were beaten. Twins there were. Yet one died and their mother pined her way in loss to an early death.

Eucalyptus merits a place among the books that have moved me most because it so often wafts into my mind. My recollections are as much of the story and its telling, as about the aroma of a eucalypt stand, the taste of eucalypt oil in the air, the thud of boots on a farmhouse verandah. Eucalyptus is a sensation. Eucalyptus quarenda – a tree that is searched for, one that is desired. Enough now. What of the surviving family members?

Holland and the surviving twin, Ellen, came into the grand property through the gate opened by the insurance company payout. While Ellen grows into her childhood and through her teenage years, Holland studiously, furiously curates his newfound land as an eucalyptus arboretum, planting it with every gum tree known to stand within Australia’s extensive bounds. There’s a low patch of mallee hither, an imperious cluster of alpine gums on yon rise, and:

*E. syderoxylon*, via Bunjilaka Aboriginal Cultural Centre

Parallel to one side of the house, he planted 110 seedlings in scientific formation. Chosen were species renowned as windbreaks: the fast-growing Steadman’s Gum, and the Mugga Ironbark – its specific name E. sideroxylon points more to the blast furnace than to pretty flowers and leaves. In the midst of this elongated geometry Holland placed an intruder, a single Grey Ironbark. Only many years later would it begin to be visible, with consequences for Ellen almost too horrible to bear. (p.39)

Bail maintains across his unhurried pages the telling ring of fairytale. There is magic, but it is incidental and, in each case, entirely possible. Unlike Grimm fairytales, there is no menace or mendacity. The people at the heart of Eucalyptus deal fairly, honestly, and respectfully with each other. They do nothing that deliberately or inadvertently summons surprise. Predictably it is chance that unsettles certainties. It is gently welling desire that proves disorderly and disruptive. Fairytales leave us not with fairies but with flinty observations about what works and what does not. The morals of the story. You can collect a pocketful of flints from a slow wander through Eucalyptus. The sharpest of them are that you can’t plan a life; that it is best to follow your heart; and that imagination and logic can both furnish useful answers, but imagination is the better tool for fashioning wellbeing and happiness. Holland does not ascribe to these morals.

Eucalyptus is a love story. Holland is wary of love. Its untidy mix of personal affection and physical attraction is a threat to his beautiful daughter. And to be fair, it is Ellen’s beauty that has attracted local and national notoriety, not her character.

‘Beware,’ Holland told his daughter, ‘beware of any man who deliberately tells a story. You’re going to come across men like that… it’s worth asking, when a man starts concocting a story in front of you. Why is he telling it? What does he want?’ (p.53)

To protect his daughter from lascivious suitors, Holland devises a plan. Ellen will marry the first man who can name, on sight and without error, every eucalypt planted on the property. To Holland, it seems, sedulously applying Linnaean conventions bestows libido antibodies. Fifteen-year-old Ellen accepts her father’s plan with apparent diffidence. Marriage is for later, and anyway, is someone really likely to list her father’s trees with such adept accuracy?

It is later, after the challenge is launched, and a eucalyptically talented suitor is ready to claim his prize, that Ellen is felled by lassitude and filled with doubt. Mr Cave, her suitor, wearied her, and she hardly knew him. He seemed not to know the art and soul of the Grey Ironbark, E. paniculata, which arranges its flowers randomly, beautifully. Mr Cave could not, it seems, divine any narrative that explained this discomposed spray efflorescing among her father’s meticulously catalogued timbers. He waned her energy.

She wondered if it was her own tiredness which made her father just then look… not exactly elderly, decidedly worn and settled. His ears had grown larger. And bits of his chin missed while shaving suggested somehow a lack of judgement in all other things. (p.164)

Ellen slowly, surely fell in love with another suitor who at first sight surely, categorically fell in love with her. A man who inexplicably turned up time and again among the gums as Ellen wandered the property. He did not follow the strict rules of the challenge, but he is as knowledgeable as any about the taxonomy of eucalypts. In their early acquaintance, Ellen thought this reticently passionate young man was like all the others who could not see the eucalypts for the forest:

Anyone who entered the world of eucalypts came out narrowed and reduced, was her opinion. And now this one standing beside her, pulling off a leaf, he was surely another one. Although he didn’t exactly come out with the special name, the Narrow-leafed Mallee (E. foecunda) he seemed to know, for he glanced at it and cleared his throat. (p119)

And so they grew towards each other. Not least because,

His roundabout way of telling one story after another depended on imagination, and a breadth of experience, and meant he was spending hours with her and her alone, revealing a little of himself at a time – only to disappear whenever he felt like it, sometimes with just a brief wave. To be then left surrounded by nothing but grey trunks, and a near absence of anything stirring, added a scratchy, unsatisfied quality to the silence. (p.159)

His stories were carefully arranged bouquets given with deepening tenderness, attentiveness, love. His stories were mostly about ‘women who followed the idea of hope. It seemed to be their greatest obedience. These women, one by one, moved about with a form of lightness, and obeyed their ideas of truth to feelings.’ Each story finds its spark in the scientific or common name of the gum tree under which they met. The name serves imagination, or helps illuminate its moral. Ellen comes to know more of herself through her suitor’s stories. She begins to imagine her futures. Her admirer in the woods is moved by the Ellen that is and will be. He is smitten by her beauty. They are both charmed by physical closeness and the possibilities of sexual and emotional intimacy. Being smitten and charmed seems to both of them more grounded in lived reality than choosing a lover by applying the principles of logic.

‘It’s a mystery how an attraction can spring up in one person for another. Who can say why? It should be amazing, except it happens all the time… It can’t be explained, a real mystery. There’s no logic to it.’ (p.190)

There is a logic to it, of course, embedded in the sciences of evolution, of biology, of psychology; the logic of assortative mating and mates, cooperation and competition, survival, personal history. That logic does not illuminate the love that blossoms just between us, we two, and just us alone. Ellen is aware that Mr Cave, the man who matches her father’s challenge, has a good heart. She knows too that his gentility is not sufficient to conjure love. He is a match, but not a mate. ‘All Mr Cave could offer,’ she observes to herself, ‘was patience, which is a variety of kindness.’ Admirable and comforting, but not enough for Ellen. The winning suit is worn lightly by a man who also matched the challenge but wanted to story it rather than stow it away. In the beginning, and not the end, what must be in evidence is intimacy and companionship well-tailored to a well-suited couple ready and willing to journey together:

A story never ends, she could see. In any life, the neat finish cannot be. It is only the beginning. (p.107)

Eucalyptus was first published in 1998 by Text Publishing, based in Melbourne, Australia. That’s the edition I read again.

Text’s promo page for Eucalyptus is here.

Eucalyptus

by Murray Bail

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Eyewitness