by Murray Bail
It is this chaotic diversity that has attracted men to the world of eucalypts. For here was a maze of tentative half-words and part-descriptions, constantly expanding and contracting, almost out of control—a world within the world, but too loosely contained. It cried out for a ‘system’ of some kind, where order could be imposed on a region of nature’s unruly endlessness.
This attempt to ‘humanise’ nature by naming its parts has a long and distinguished history. Once a given subject is broken down into parts, each one identified, named and placed into groups—the periodic table, strata of minerals, weight divisions of prizefighters—the whole is given limits and becomes acceptable, or digestible, almost. It may as well be regarded as residual evidence of the oldest fear, the fear of the infinite. Anything to escape the darkness of the forest. Some men and women have been known to devote their lives to the study of nothing but the leaves of the eucalypts and grow old without mastering the subject. In time they resemble those gentle maiden aunts who reveal on request tremendous genealogical knowledge, the Christian names and histories of the family’s branches, who has been married to who and how many children, their names and illnesses, who died of what, and so forth; the history of hybrids.
The point is, in the world of trees, only the acacia has more species than the eucalyptus—but look at the acacia, a series of pathetic little bushes. Whenever on his property Holland saw clumps of wattle, as the acacia is called, he lost no time pulling them out by the roots.
The Black Peppermint on the slight slope between house and river was planted soon after Yellow Bloodwood. Accordingly it is engraved in Holland’s pantheon, like the bevelled names in small towns of soldiers who led a charge against all the odds across no-man’s-land. As he studied the botanical names and saw that Black Peppermint, a native of Tasmania, was also known on the mainland as E. australiana, the tree evidently began waving attention to itself as a sort of flagpole of the subconscious.
Of course, from any angle the Black Peppermint looks nothing like a flagpole (and Holland had no right to load a simple eucalypt with worthless associations).
It’s not slender and certainly not white-washed: see instead the one called Boongul or the Candlebark or the Wallangarra White, splendid examples decorating Holland’s land, not to mention the white-as-a-sheet Ghost Gum. In fact, the eucalypt’s normally smooth lower trunk is obscured on the Black Peppermint by a mass of twigs and leaves, the way a beard rushes to the weak chin of a man, filings to a magnet.
The sight of E. eximia and E. australiana flourishing with their brave glossy little leaves must have heartened Holland. With no particular design he planted a few more.
Trees were better than nothing, instructed the eye; this wasn’t the Sahara.
Even then (that is, from the very beginning) it never occurred to him to opt for introduced species—the oaks, willows, walnuts and what-have-you, the various shade-producing elms, cedars, the cypress of the Mediterranean, let alone the terminally gloomy pine—better left to be pulped into newsprint and the low-rent paper used these days in literary and philosophical works. His affinity with eucalypts was both vague and natural; and before long he was having slow-motion dreams about them. (There’ll be no descriptions of Holland’s tree-dreams here! They would only try the patience of the reader, or else encourage interpretation. In city life, forests figure in dreams, as well as flowers and teeth and noses in close-up, and the usual slow flying, floating and zooming in, whereas someone asleep in the country, where shadows are fewer, and greater space exists between objects and people…)
After a dozen or so plantings Holland stood back and saw he would have to add others here and there to avoid giving a false, lopsided look.
In this he followed the greatest painters and English landscape gardeners who struggled with the difficulty of reproducing the randomness of true harmony, demonstrated so casually in nature.
Of course, plenty of eucalypts were already growing on the property when Holland arrived. Not all had been ring-barked by the brothers. Red Stringybark and Red Ironbark were dotted about—these were native to the region; similarly, Yellow Box, the beekeepers’ favourite—all over the place. Tumbledown Gums showed along the ridge, Scribbly Gums were on the flat, and Rose-of-the-West, which barely comes up to a man’s head. A few Inland Red Box remained: farmers take the axe to them for fence posts. Other species were distributed by wind and chance, each different from the rest. Out of sight of the homestead, paddocks here and there contained unusual eucalypts in amongst the common local ones. Nobody knew how they got there. A rogue Mountain Ash reigned on the slope above the house, forcing a pregnancy on the fence. Easily the tallest tree in the district, it was the base for generations of wedgetails, crows and parrots, their constructions of aerial sticks like the shadowy congestions in a sieve. Not far from it was a stocky Tuart (E. gomphocephala). Again we have a tree rarely seen east of the Nullarbor. A seed must have dropped out of the sky or a man’s trouser cuff. Something like that, Holland decided.
With a boiled egg and the standard textbooks in a knapsack Holland criss-crossed his land, absorbed in identifying each and every eucalypt. Often it was necessary to send specimens of fruit and leaves to a world authority in Sydney, and seek a second opinion in other places. No one expert in eucalypts had all the answers. So pale and hypersensitive were these experts, relegated as they were to the backwaters of irrelevant institutions, they replied by return with a helpful vehemence, supplying far too much detail.
In those days Holland would listen with interest to anybody. He was leaving the hotel one morning when a man with a wrecked face took an Ancient Mariner hold on his elbow and raved about the advantages of the scientific windbreak, and the very same evening Holland heard on the radio the same thing explained in a sober, altogether more reasonable voice.
Parallel to one side of the house, he planted 110 seedlings in scientific formation. Chosen were species renowned as windbreaks: the fast-growing Steedman’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.
Blue Gum, Salmon Gum and others quickly followed. Blue Gum is the one below the house which appeared from some angles as a pin stuck in a woman’s hat, awash in patriotic grasses—golden in summer. Holland set up a swing for Ellen on its lower branches. Here the land fell away and rose again in gentle waves. It was as bare and as dusty as shorn sheep, until rendered park-like by Holland’s hand. The Blue Gum is easily recognisable. The name E. globulus, for the shape of its fruit, now describes the imperial distribution of this majestic tree: throughout the Mediterranean, whole forests in California and South Africa, and all states of Australia.
As for E. salmonophloia, Holland had given it prime location at the front gate.
Holland must have known it would stop the locals in their tracks. The Salmon Gum is normally found on the other side of the continent, near the goldfields of Western Australia. Salmon refers to the pinkish bark. Transplanted, the trunk of Holland’s was powdery-smooth, more like a rubber-band; ‘the colour of a nun’s belly’, someone else would say.
Trees have followed the great migrations of the Irish, the Italians, the Jews, the Brits, the Greeks as they put down roots in foreign soil. The superimposition of different colours, shadows and water usage, as well as droppings of leaves, attracts misunderstandings and downright hostility—in Portugal the peasants have been ripping out young eucalypts—until the trees grow as part of the scenery, in front of which all cultures go through their motions.
On the flat ground alongside the river, species of smooth girth had been chosen to represent (so it seemed) the uniform stillness of a rubber plantation; and long rectangles of silverish light angled in through the round-trunk verticals like searchlights seeking a solitary escapee, catching only a f
ew moths and carefree birds.
Ellen liked to run blindly into the centre of it all, until the silence replaced her footsteps, blanketing her eyes and mind with Slow Inevitable Growth and Patience Forever and Nothing Is One; and surrounded by the multiplications of impassive trunks of the same diameter and same grey-green smoothness she’d half-imagine herself lost, and losing all sense of direction would let out a feeble cry, little more than a squeak, which was really the thrill of knowing her father and the house were only a few minutes away. She did this the day she first menstruated; a celebration of growth and confusion. The pale red of her fingerprints she tested on a trunk was the only primary colour in the grove.
Remaining very still she noticed all manner of insects and little reptiles shifting about on uneven surfaces, while from a far distance the clip-clopping of a horse was her father’s Kelly axe ring barking a tree surplus to his requirements.
Stillness is beauty, always.
In our country a harmless tradition has been for the larger properties to lead the eye from the road up to the homestead via an avenue, a green artery of plane trees, or poplars that stand up like feathers. It depended on the history of the property and associated feelings of grandiloquence in the owners; how they saw themselves in the district.
After going through the available anthographies Holland selected eucalypts for density of foliage, each different but set to reach the same height.
Ellen helped by holding the surveyor’s string.
‘One fine day this is all going to be yours,’ Holland gave a violent twist on the post-hole digger.
As always her father spoke in brief assertions. Now a question seemed to lengthen his jaw, ‘Do you like the house, as a place?’
She thought of her bedroom with her things and the blue curtains, the verandahs, the warmth of the kitchen. There were many empty rooms. Some dolls she’d left in the tower she found faded when she returned months later. Now and then the idea of having a brother had an urgent appeal, though she wondered whether he’d let her follow him around. And he, this father-shape, could almost be a brother when—an example—he allowed her to laugh in his face the moment he began explaining yet again that foxes at night have mauve eyes, and spiders glitter on the earth like stars.
After the windbreak, the ‘rubber plantation’ and the ornamental avenue, Holland turned his back on mass formations. From now on he concentrated on individual species, planted singly. Otherwise there was no plan behind his program. Gradually he filled in the landscape. He slept for long periods. Days and weeks of inactivity were spent in bed, followed by intense activity. All along he avoided planting duplicates; and soon he ran into problems of supply. The more successful his program the more difficult it became to continue.
Many years were spent culling, reducing most species to a single healthy specimen.
At the same time he strengthened his lines of supply; it was necessary to go far beyond the state of New South Wales. Useful information came from the most unlikely sources. Holland’s land was looking different and people began to look at him differently. When they listened they wore what may be called conservative grins. It was only natural the locals would be imprecise on the subject of eucalypts, and suffer appalling memory lapses, or casually mention something without realising its importance. Often while talking on the street Holland pulled out a scrap of paper and made a note; for example, the address of an obscure roadside nursery in the Northern Territory run by the second cousin of somebody’s stepsister, a Latvian, who had every known Australian parrot in cages, and who had perfected the art of painting desert scenes of photographic precision on emu eggs. That was where Holland acquired the island-loving E. nesophila, which has the urn-shaped fruit, and the Rough-leaved Range Gum (E. aspersa), very rare, difficult to grow.
Every other week Holland was seen on the railway platform collecting seedlings wrapped in damp hessian, and one of the Sprunt sisters complained to anyone who’d listen that the dusty trucks delivering still more specimens were keeping her awake at night. The postmistress too reported a steady flow of seeds rustling around in manila envelopes, as well as monthly journals, and invoices decorated with sprigs.
On days when Holland secured an especially rare specimen he felt like a pearl-diver who has burst to the surface, holding up a treasure. Certain eucalypts were rare because they rarely took root beyond a narrow radius. They were sensitive to drainage, lime in the soil, degrees of frost, elevation, rainfall and God knows what. Some stubbornly refused to grow in the month of March, others the week after Christmas. One tree would thrive in the shade of another; another would not. They were hypochondriacs, demanding esoteric manures and watering by hand.
How he managed to cultivate to healthy size a Darwin Woollybutt (E. miniata), or those born in sandy deserts, is a mystery. The Silvertop Stringybark (E. laevopinea) requires 1000mm rainfall every year, and the Snow Gum, its name proclaims, thrives on altitude, sleet and ice. Somehow he had eucalypts coming forth on ordinary ground when normally they demanded clay, flat marsh or granite. After many false starts he encouraged the little Yellowtop Ash, so called, to poke out of some rocks. And so on.
This vast labour with axe, crowbar and bucket, and the hatless traversing of paddocks gave him coarse hands and split fingernails, lined his face and made it brown; though as he came forward on the main street there was no doubt he still had trace elements of delicacy, of pastry, the only son of a disappointed baker.
Did he eventually manage to have growing on his property every known eucalypt? What was he going to do next? With his daughter, Ellen, he’d always encouraged questions; but she didn’t seem interested. He was always waiting. The father is always waiting for the daughter. If only she had asked he would have told her everything he knew. He was a world authority in a narrow field. It was not that he wanted to give out bits and pieces of knowledge, he wanted to share his interest. Early on she’d been his helper. Together they planted well over a hundred trees, until she seemed to lose interest.
It was virtually an outdoor museum of trees. A person could wander amongst the many different species and pick up all kinds of information, at the same time be enthralled, in some cases rendered speechless, by the clear examples of beauty. The diversity of the eucalypts itself was an education. At the slightest movement of the head there was always another eucalypt of different height, foliage and pattern of bark, and there was the weird-looking homestead as well, impressive in its dark imbalance, and glimpsed at a window or in a cotton dress at the middle distance, with an elbow welded to a tree, his daughter.
Holland had toyed with the idea of fitting labels to the trees.
Eventually he had them made up by the same firm that supplied the Royal Botanic Gardens in Sydney, the common and specific names neatly engraved on rectangles of weatherproof aluminium, about hand-size. A bright young chap had delivered them personally—a partner in the firm. Together they checked them over on the verandah, while talking about this and that. It took them hours. When Ellen came out with tea on a tray they were so engrossed all she could see was the stranger’s neck, and Holland didn’t introduce her. Later Holland would leave the names piled in the corner of his office which doubled as his bedroom. After all, by then he could identify each and every eucalypt, almost without looking.
A few notes, nothing definite, on feminine beauty. Briefly, and in a timid, earnest voice. Of course; why not? The idea of Ellen’s beauty had travelled long distances (was said to have crossed two oceans) and in the process inscribed a small legend.
Here it’s worth noting that beauty composed of porcelain niceness produces a weaker response in men than a ‘beauty’ that appears more aware of itself. Smoothness, niceness—they’re the kiss of death. In the male they activate obscure notions of the Mother! And—sexually speaking—who wants that? Whereas if the main component in beauty is a certain dissatisfaction or bad temper, it banishes in men all associations with the mother and so allows an immediate, unencumbered attraction across a br
oad front.
All this was multiplied in Ellen by another factor.
In the brief time when women wore little hats with veils screening their faces, like delicately crumpled graph paper, the little squares filled in here and there gave the face a random distribution of oriental birthmarks and moles. And Ellen’s speckled beauty resembled this veiled effect—protected, veiled, even in close-up; a kind of provocative, insincere modesty.
In order to survive she grew aloof, avoiding the eyes of men in town.
The first man who saw Ellen naked was the only son of a local tractor dealer, Molloy. He was popular, a strong footballer. His father had recently given him a motorbike with an iridescent petrol tank.
There was that dirt road alongside Holland’s property: it had no other function but to go on towards town, while its twin, the similar-coloured river, took a sluggish lunge away from the road, establishing on the distant curve a density of River Red Gums which never failed to attract the eye of sportsmen, even if to reach it meant crawling on all fours through the undergrowth. There was a sandy pool on the curve, concealed by overhanging branches which mottled and browned the water to tortoiseshell.
