Eucalyptus

by Murray Bail

  She and the others unravelled into the shadows, tittering. The eldest was left then to say something, or at least sit there.

  From the doorway Holland could see her clearly, whereas his face was draped in shadow. By not moving she appeared to be offering herself. Later she wondered if she had decided there and then.

  That was how it happened. Holland had not taken his eyes off her. And she found herself listening to what he was saying. After a while she began answering, eventually raising her arm slightly, which drew attention to her extraordinary hair.

  • 3 •

  Australiana

  SOME DESCRIPTION of landscape is necessary.

  At the same time (be assured) strenuous efforts will be made to avoid the rusty traps set by ideas of a National Landscape, which is of course an interior landscape, fitted out with blue sky and the obligatory tremendous gum tree, perhaps some merinos chewing on the bleached-out grass in the foreground, the kind of landscape seen during homesickness and in full colour on suburban butchers’ calendars handed out with the sausages at Christmas (‘Pleased to meet, meat to please’ etc.). Every country has its own landscape which deposits itself in layers on the consciousness of its citizens, thereby cancelling the exclusive claims made by all other national landscapes. Furthermore, so many eucalypts have been exported to different countries in the world, where they’ve grown into sturdy see-through trees, and infected the purity of these landscapes. Summer views of Italy, Portugal, Northern India, California, to take obvious examples, can appear at first glance as classic Australian landscapes—until the eucalypts begin to look slightly out of place, like giraffes in Scotland or Tasmania.

  A few descriptive passages then of Holland’s property, west of Sydney, which receives rain and dry winds at certain times of the year.

  Actually the trouble with our National Landscape is that it produced a certain type of behaviour which has been given shape in story-telling, all those laconic hard-luck stories, as many as there are burrs on the backs of sheep, and just as difficult to remove. Yes, yes: there’s nothing more dispiriting, déjà vu, than to come across another story of disappointment set in the Australian backblocks. And now, towards the end of the century, just when you might think they have reduced to a trickle, the same kind of pale brown story has appeared in the cities, in disguise! Figures move about between asphalt and engines, displaying a familiar solemn sentimentality; sometimes it’s dressed up in a poetic mist, a pleasure to read: stories such as the ex-POW with heart of gold, or else we have lovesick young women by the harbour, others opining on verandahs in the mountains, and if there are painters in stories naturally they are made to live in the purity of squalor… At regular intervals the stubborn maleness of an unsuspecting father is put under the inner-city microscope, so to speak, the old peeling away of layers. Not to mention the many hundreds of stories told in the confessional first-person singular, with still more to come. A kind of applied psychology has taken over storytelling, coating it and obscuring the core.

  What is frail falls away; stories that take root become like things, misshapen things with an illogical core, which pass through many hands without wearing out or falling to pieces, remaining in essence the same, adjusting here and there at the edges, nothing more, as families or forests reproduce ever-changing appearances of themselves; the geology of fable. In Alexandria, eucalypts were grown in front of houses to ward off evil spirits, including fatal diseases.

  From his front verandah Holland’s land went away to the right in the direction of the town.

  It was the most visible unbroken stretch, although it ended in a purplish blur, and a faint glitter as if someone there was flashing a mirror—a small mystery which Holland would never solve. Along one side a treeline stood up like a haircut, where Holland occasionally emerged, pale flesh against grey wash. The land then sloped down plump and smooth, as if patted unevenly by hand, worn in patches to river frontage. It rose and fell along the floor, though less so, broken by outcrops of rock. The rabbits had left erosions of miniature ravines. There were snakes. River Red Gums hogged all the water in their usual dishevelled manner, resistant to the axe and just about everything else; there are many stories about their hardness. Following the river Holland trod carefully over the rotting elbows of wood, black mud, then stooped, to reach all corners. And large dark birds floated overhead, rags torn from the dead anywhere else, except the air was clear, the sky wide open; for a moment anything felt possible here.

  People on the surrounding properties were called Lomax, Cork, Cronin, Kearney, Gulley, even a Stain (old Les) and the Sprunt sisters; the Sheldrakes, the Traill, Wood and Kelly families were further afield. One man out there changed his surname to that of his best friend, who was killed under a horse. No greater love hath one man… In town there was a Long and a Short (Les again); Manifold lived there; Mr Brian Brain ran the one and only hotel with a buck-toothed wife. The visiting signwriter who appeared every third year on the dot, looking more like a plumber in his green vibrating truck, to touch up the serifs on the shopfronts, was called Zoellner, but unfortunately he doesn’t count. For these names had roots going way back, bog-Irish, Yorkshire, bony Scot. Christian names followed the crooked streets of Sydney: Clarence, Phil, George, Bert, Beth and a Gregory. No one had come across a Holland before.

  Usually Holland was seen at mid-distance poking around in one of his paddocks. People on the road to town would say, ‘Behind that Stringybark, look.’ Or, ‘One of these days I’m going to buy him a hat.’ And men would run their eyes over the place to spot his daughter.

  Holland’s father had been a baker in Tasmania; a little chap, gold fillings. More or less a convert to Methodism he could hardly wait for the next day to begin. Behind the counter of the town’s cakeshop was a thin girl with a very small mouth. She gave attentive encouragement to his ideas and schemes for the near future, mostly in the field of buns, some containing hidden almonds—just a thought.

  Soon after, she made it clear they should move—and as far away as possible from the village split by the main road. ‘I don’t see myself as an island person,’ she explained.

  As a consequence, Holland was born in Sydney, in the suburb called Haberfield. Even today the feeling remains in Haberfield of space beginning to spread and open in every direction.

  Here Holland’s parents set up a little business making boiled lollies in the shed in the backyard. Holland grew up with the treacly smell of over-heated sugar, and a mother with sticky hands, which could help explain why for the rest of his life he never allowed, under any circumstances, sugar in his tea, and resisted for so long before finally planting, though out of sight from the house, a Sugar Gum (E. dado-calyx), when everybody knows the Sugar Gum is central to understanding eucalypts, at least visually.

  Black Peppermints with a zebra stripe became the Hollands’ specialty, wrapped with (mother’s idea) a deluxe twist of cellophane. In the afternoons Holland’s father changed his shirt and made deliveries throughout the suburbs.

  For a time everybody in Sydney seemed to be ruining their good teeth sucking on a Black Peppermint made in the shed in the Haberfield backyard. Printers, bank managers, insurance agents, suppliers of fancy cardboard boxes, hopeful distributors and health inspectors all made their way to the source, schoolchildren too, and none left without a small bag of Black Peppermints.

  A builder, who happened to be the local mayor, was drawn to the humid feminine sweetness of the shed, the concrete path to the shed. He had windswept ginger hairs on his hands. One afternoon Holland glimpsed in a corner his mother’s floury nakedness, circular and fluid, her mouth angled, the mayor’s bare shoulders overlapping.

  During it all Holland’s father saw no reason to stop smiling; in his sleep he held a gold smile at the ceiling. Everything before him, including strange feelings and warnings, had equal value. And instead of caressing him with well-being the perpetual smiling left him in the opposite position: his face prematurely worn, like a jockey’s after stra
ining too long to keep under the weight. The morning he left with his suitcase his mouth was clenched into the same smile of optimism or equality, although the tan comb bravely clipped to his shirt pocket alongside the ballpoint suggested a different story.

  The builder now occupied one end of the kitchen table, where he signed his papers and worked the telephone; pencil stubs and receipt books and samples of veneers and tiles piled everywhere.

  Aside from building entire streets of red-brick houses, as well as shop fronts, garages, motels and long orange-brick walls, he had his mayoral duties, which meant dressing up in robes, and attending all kinds of functions.

  And because he was a successful builder, or was a mayor, or perhaps because he was a man, he developed a strong belief in patriotism; he even tinkered with the idea of turning out flagpoles and selling them more or less at cost. He had one made up and placed in the front yard at Haberfield, the only flagpole for miles; but there in the side street our national flag hardly stirred, occasionally catching the land breezes at night, when nobody could see it.

  He couldn’t keep his fingers still, even when talking on the telephone. A businessman, he explained to the boy, is simply shorthand for busyman.

  ‘If you’re not doing anything, wear these in for me.’

  A shoebox landed at Holland’s feet. Holland’s first thought was whether he’d fit into his stepfather’s shoes.

  ‘If my feet are killing me, I’m not doing myself any favours. You understand? You would not believe how many functions I’ve got on my plate.’

  The businessman subdivides the world into manageable units, some as small as a split second. It becomes all-absorbing managing the units, fulfilling the possibilities within them. Success is based on a constant reference to scepticism; that’s right, deploying scepticism in a truly positive sense, which is why business is not a difficult calling for men. Hardly any time is left for ordinary things. For a spec-builder who doubled as a mayor even buying clothes was a problem. He got around it by every few years buying off the rack six of everything—six of those plain white shirts, the diamond-patterned socks, black lace-up shoes with toecaps.

  To break in the shoes Holland numbered the soles. He then tried on the first pair and squeaked about the house. He did the same with the second pair, before retreating to the comfort of his own shoes, and so on. In the third week he ventured out onto the street—until, in less than a month, he handed all six pairs back to his impatient stepfather, ready to wear.

  Any mention of this episode was enough for Ellen to send a hand flying to her mouth. ‘How could you do it? Why couldn’t he do it for himself?’

  ‘I got paid,’ Holland said.

  ‘It’s awful, it’s one of the most awful things I’ve ever heard. I hope I never have a stepfather.’

  Holland looked interested. A daughter indignant on his behalf was pleasing, even if it was well over the top. ‘Until you bring it up I don’t give it a moment’s thought,’ he shrugged. ‘It’s a mildly interesting story among dozens, if you see what I mean.’

  Still, the saga of the shoes was the early sign of his instinct for completeness, classification, order; his way of encompassing to all corners a given subject or situation, and the enjoyment of the absorption it brought!

  She always liked it when he became absorbed; but you never knew where it would end. Somehow their different reactions to the story of the shoes represented something of the separation of father and daughter, even though they felt as one, and in this she saw the uncertain distance which apparently existed between her and all other men: not distance so much as a shelf at her elbow, with a high right-angled edge.

  From the property Holland displayed a certain caution towards the surrounding rural values, evident too in the nearby town. Early on he had packed his daughter off to the nuns in Sydney, until—for no apparent reason—abruptly bringing her back. At least in Sydney she learned to sew and swim and to wear gloves. In the dormitory she developed the eager way of talking, between girlfriends, and the uses of silence; on weekends at distant relations’ Ellen while scraping vegetables liked to overhear the stories told by men, and she could watch as lipstick was carefully applied. On the property she roamed about wild. He seemed to allow it. Then she became quiet: in her teens. Almost unconsciously, he supervised her movements; it felt like the bestowing of protection. God knows, he didn’t want his daughter bolting off to the shadowy Odeon in town, where the stammering projector drowned out a good 70 per cent of the words, and then sliding about on the seats of the fluorescent milk bar, like others her age.

  If these were restrictions, they didn’t trouble Ellen.

  Around this time she stopped going about the house naked, though her father continued the habit in the corridor to the bathroom, all elbows and red knees, and in a similar cantilevered action most days of the year jumped into the river with swinging cock, something farmers never do, and floated in the brown water towards the suspension bridge, gazing up at the clouds: one minute brain-shaped, framed by boughs, before stretching into the windswept head of a sage or a scientist—Albert Einstein, say.

  There was something unpleasantly ravenous about Holland’s naked rush and the complete obliviousness of his splashings. If Ellen thought as much she didn’t say. Almost overnight she had become beautiful. She had grown from a small darting-about figure to a gliding, drifting, fuller one. It was a speckled beauty. She was so covered in small brown-black moles she attracted men, every sort of man. These few too many birthmarks of the first-born tipped the balance on her face and throat: men felt free to wander with their eyes all over, across the pale spaces and back again to the factual dots, the way a full stop brings to a halt a meandering sentence. And she allowed it, her face was unresisting; she didn’t seem to notice them. So the men felt unstoppable, going from one point to the next, even under her chin and back to the one touching her top lip, and it was as if they were running with their eyes over every part of her nakedness.

  Word of Ellen spread gradually from the town and across the paddocks and hills; she was unzipped by the railway line to other country towns; to the suburbs of Sydney; faint aftershocks reaching distant capitals of other states and other countries. And the idea of her beauty grew with its scarcity value. The face and limbs with the birthmarks and everything else generally remained on the other side of the river, out of reach, as it were, through the trees. And as her speckled beauty became legendary the suspicion grew the father wanted it hidden.

  A paragraph is not so different from a paddock—similar shape, similar function. And here’s a connection worth pondering: these days, as paddocks are becoming larger, the corresponding shift in the cities where the serious printing’s done is for paragraphs smaller. A succession of small paddocks can be as irritating as long ones wearisome. The single-idea paragraph which crowds the newspapers is a difficulty. Newspaper writers spend their lives trailing after people above the ordinary in some way or other—the human equivalents to earthquakes, train crashes, rivers in flood—and write small paragraphs about them, when everybody knows that a brief rectangular view is not enough. The people written about in newspapers have already made something visible of their lives, large or small, brief or lasting, which is surely why journalists take an interest out of all proportion in newspaper proprietors: for here is one of us, or almost, who is larger than life. Holland too would attract journalists, some with the bedraggled photographer in tow from the Sydney broadsheets. These days it’s common to trudge (as the reporters were forced to do) across a paddock that seems to go on forever and ever, amen. Other paddocks may be congested, untidy, restricting movement. It’s just as easy these days to get clogged up or tripped in the middle of a paragraph! As in a paddock it is sometimes necessary to retrace our steps. Easy to lose heart, lose your way. In these and other situations the impulse is to take the short cut. ‘A problem paddock’—there’s a common description. Words, yakety-yak, are spoken within the paddock (paragraph). The rectangle is a sign of civilisa
tion: Europe from the air. Civilisation? A paragraph begins as a rectangle and by chance may finish up a square. Who was it said the square doesn’t exist in nature? A paddock has an alteration in the fencing for the point of entry, just as a paragraph has an indentation to encourage entry. A paddock too is littered with nouns and Latin in italics, even what appears to be a bare paddock. When Holland began planting the trees it was casually, no apparent design.

  A paragraph is supposed to fence off wandering thoughts.

  • 4 •

  Diversifolia

  THE WORD eucalypt is from the Greek, ‘well’ and ‘covered’. It describes something peculiar to the genus. Until they open, ready for fertilisation, the eucalypt’s buds are covered by an operculum, in effect putting a lid on the reproductive organs.

  It is all very prudish. At the same time—and here we find paradox is a leading characteristic of the eucalypt—the surrounding leaves are almost promiscuous in their flaunting of different thicknesses, shapes, colours and shine: ‘fixed irregularity’ is botany’s way of putting it. One or two species even sport variegated leaves. Strangely with eucalypts, the higher on the tree the smaller the leaf. Another paradox: the largest eucalypts have the smallest flowers.

  The barks come in a bewildering range of textures and colours and so on, unusual for one genus, and often end up as final arbiters in the game of identification.

  There is still learned debate over the precise number of eucalypts. It’s well into the hundreds, but the figure keeps changing. At regular intervals there’s a career move from an institutional dark corner somewhere to reduce the total. Recently it has been suggested the Ghost Gum, which has long stood as the archetypal eucalypt, is not a eucalypt at all, but a member of the ‘Corymbia family’. The new name, if you don’t mind, would be Corymbia aparrarinja. Isn’t that a marriage of the Mafia and the Aboriginal? A good many people are trying to come to terms with this. A young nation has shallow roots and the slightest disturbance can throw out the equilibrium, patriotically speaking. Nationalism is nothing less than clutching at straws. It can only be hoped the ruling on the Ghost Gum will be revised again, or at least delayed. On the other hand, the invisible eucalypt, known by hearsay as E. rameliana, though never actually seen by anybody of authority, at last had a confirmed sighting in 1992 in the waterless wastes west of Uluru, so adding one to the eucalypt’s grand total. Monsieur Ramel, by the way, was the man who introduced eucalypts to Algeria.