Eucalyptus

by Murray Bail

  Not long after that Mr Cave decided in his deliberate way he would win the hand of Holland’s speckled daughter.

  • 7 •

  Regnans

  ‘TALL TIMBER’—a term used locally by the Sprunt sisters in unison to render male flesh abstract. Seated on the sofa reserved for suitors, Mr Cave protruded from a bed of blushing roses, shoulders almost coming up to Ellen’s. It is hard to imagine a more unsuitable name than Cave for someone so straight and tall. Accordingly, people forgot about his first name, Roy, and tacked on Mister in front. ‘Cave’ implies the horizontal, whereas this man was vertical—a telegraph pole fashioned from a tree.

  What interested Ellen was his hair. At first she thought it was as black as a crow. Then she remembered the pair of shoes she’d liked in Sydney, small and glossy blue-black, parted like Mr Cave’s hair to one side, which is why she looked upon him favourably.

  He was almost old enough to be Ellen’s father; yet where her father’s face had become a reddish terrain of boulders, ravines, flood plains and spinifex, Mr Cave’s face was magically smooth. It didn’t generate any lines, not even when he talked. The black hair can be set in context: apparently it was part and parcel, a healthy by-product, of self-possession. The only lines on his person came from the crisp safari suit, a khaki construct of paramilitary lines, like a jacket sketched in pencil, pointing up to his face where, except for his carefully combed part, there were no lines.

  Those vertical lines from the unfortunate safari suit helped make him appear taller than he actually was.

  Talking to Mr Cave, Holland nodded more than usual; at the same time he offered a grain of patience—unusual for him—which grew into a canny watchfulness. It wasn’t that Holland was showing respect; hardly. In the world of eucalypts everyone knew about Mr Cave, but then they knew all about Holland and his trees too.

  In Mr Cave’s Adelaide, the distinction between city and country, as proposed by the Greeks, was blurred. The country penetrates the city almost to the town hall steps, depositing gum trees on the way, along with vast rectangles of dry grass. As a consequence, Adelaide people may be said to possess a certain physical clarity of country people, at the same time a blurriness within and careful faces from crossing daily the boundaries between city and country, and back again.

  Meanwhile, Ellen wanted to reach out and touch the blackness of Mr Cave’s hair. So much so she had to hold back a laugh.

  ‘How are your teeth?’ her father shouted. ‘Try one of my daughter’s rock-cakes!’

  Food as a therapeutic offering between strangers has never been satisfactorily explained. Here is an ordinary-looking action which goes far deeper than mere hospitality. By producing food and presenting in full view a portion to a stranger, a woman is offering an extension of herself; it can be enjoyed, but is not flesh. All he, the stranger, is allowed is a morsel representing the woman. A fragment is all. She remains the giver, but at one remove.

  This use of food as a medium—giving while denying—and without a bitter aftertaste—has harsh origins, rather obviously among the nomads. Food as an interceptor, as a deflector! It may be said to continue to this day as a protection in married life.

  And Mr Cave was now demonstrating the deeply held process by accepting one of Ellen’s slightly burnt rock-cakes matter-of-factly, not quite acknowledging her, like the peevish date-eaters of Arabia deserta. Then removing any crumbs from his creases and pleats he placed them one by one on his tongue.

  ‘I’m nothing more than an amateur,’ Holland reminded their visitor. ‘And an amateurish one at that.’

  They were talking about others in their field.

  ‘Did you ever come across…’ Mr Cave began click-clicking his ballpoint—the frustration. ‘His name was, what’s his name? It was the name of an English town.’

  Ellen smiled. She liked him for saying that.

  Straining to remember the surname of the man whose specialty was said to be the Northern Territory species her father screwed his face up like a dog while, equally determined, their black-haired visitor sat still, his face smooth in concentration more like an elbow.

  ‘You don’t mean Hungerford?’

  ‘No, he’s in grapes. And this one passed away. A tractor rolled over him. You must have exchanged letters during your researches.’

  ‘I haven’t kept up with the experts for years,’ said Holland. ‘Once I got this place up and running I didn’t need any experts.’ Holland gave a laugh. ‘These days they’re more inclined to make contact with me, I’m now the receiver of letters. I’ve had them writing to me from overseas as if I have all the answers.’

  It was after ten-thirty and Mr Cave hadn’t made a move. He showed no sign of nerves. On the verandah he stretched his long legs out on one of the planters’ chairs. Without yet bothering to identify a single tree he already was making it look easy.

  Ellen couldn’t remember the last time her father had talked to anyone on the verandah for more than three minutes, aside from herself. ‘I’m the encyclopaedia around here!’ he once said in a kind of triumphant good humour. Her father was a man who didn’t have any close friends, she noticed. Yet there he was leaning against the verandah post, a reminder to Ellen that she would always associate cigarette smoke with him and the texture of his clothing.

  Mr Cave was smoking too.

  ‘Eucalypts dominate the streetscapes of Adelaide, more than any other city. The things are everywhere.’ (A sure sign of confidence: to call eucalypts ‘things’.) ‘We had a fasciculosa and a cosmophylla growing in the backyard, the next-door neighbours had the finest Candlebark Gum you’d ever be likely to see, and there was a quite outstanding megacarpa on the footpath. You see what I’m saying? At school we were taught to recognise different timbers by their grain, and we’d be hit and hit hard with a polished wooden ruler if we missed one. I had the methodical mind drummed into me. At school, to fill in time, did you chuck gumnuts at each other? There were eucalypts in the school yard; cladocalyx, if I’m not mistaken. We had eucalypts coming out of our ears.’

  ‘I don’t know exactly what happened to me,’ Holland said more or less in reply. ‘I came here and I planted one, then I planted another. Other parts of the property needed a tree. I kept going. At a certain point I had passed a threshold; I couldn’t go back or leave the plantings as they were. By then the whole situation became…what do you say? An end in itself. Everything about eucalypts was interesting. Before the trees I didn’t have a clue about anything much. The eucalypts gave me an interest.’

  ‘They grow on you,’ Mr Cave went extra-passive at his joke. ‘Something else happened to me, I think this had a bearing.’ He looked out over the trees. ‘My mother had subscription tickets to the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. Always the same two seats. Remember the way regulars used to have their names stencilled on church pews? And always sitting in front of us was a Miss Dora Heron, a woman in mauve, who never opened her mouth. To keep everybody’s germs at bay she kept dabbing eucalyptus oil onto her hanky from a little jar throughout the concert, whatever was playing. Those seated around her, myself, my mother, couldn’t escape the fumes. On top of everything else, no wonder eucalypts took a deep grip on me.’ Mr Cave shifted in his seat. ‘Mind you, it’s given me a life of sorts.’ He began nodding. ‘Everything is a comparison,’ he said for no apparent reason.

  Ellen had been standing by the window. It was odd how two men repeatedly put down blocks of matter and left it at that. In tone and steadiness they were tarpaulined trucks with heavy loads, now and then changing down a gear, rather than light and sprightly birds, hopping from one bit of colour to another.

  Mr Cave stood up. ‘Let’s look at a few of these things of yours,’ he said with ominous casualness.

  And Holland let go of the bevelled verandah post as Mr Cave made his way over to the Black Peppermint which had snookered the town’s part-time plumber, so commonplace to Roy Cave he hardly gave it a glance, then onto the Blue Gum which can be seen on the dry hills of
Algeria, South Africa and California, and the Silvertop Stringybark by the gate which opened the long narrow paddock alongside the house, sloping up to the treeline. There, eucalypts were dotted about in apparent randomness, in every direction.

  To Ellen, Mr Cave appeared to be strolling ahead with her father in tow—an optical illusion which increased over distance. So tall was the suitor that her father looked like an old jumps-jockey hurrying after the owner or trainer for instructions. In fact, Holland was giving the instructions as he ticked off each tree identified.

  If a species presented any difficulty Mr Cave said, ‘What is it we have here?’

  Otherwise, he sauntered, one paddock at a time, one tree followed by the next, methodical, very methodical. It was altogether shocking in its steadiness; he was always going forward. Continuing the display of relaxation he often paused between trees to talk about something entirely different.

  By one-thirty he decided he was finished for the day.

  Tall trees breed even taller stories. There was once a woman called Thistle. If a man touched her on any part his skin turned blue, a permanent blue, so people would see he had touched Thistle. One day Ellen would be told about a man in Scotland (Highlands?) who would never talk to anyone under six feet tall. Her father, not so long ago, had read out a story in the morning newspaper about a sixty-three-year-old woman in Brazil who had been X-rayed after complaining of stomach pains and was found to be carrying the skeleton of a foetus conceived outside her womb up to fifteen years earlier. Imagine a man on a property in western New South Wales setting out single-handedly to plant every known eucalypt, the property and the man’s life transformed to that purpose. Ellen one day overheard the postmistress, ‘She made a necklace out of lavatory chains. She was very clever.’ A man drowned himself in the River Murray at Mildura by weighing himself down with German dictionaries and German encyclopaedias. Another man, just retired, and not so long ago, swam the entire length of the Murray—from its source to its mouth—suffering severe cramps and getting snagged and sunburnt in the process, pleased in the end to have done something no one else had done, let alone (his words) ‘even dreamed of’. All the people in one small town—it would have to be Eastern Europe—were deaf, except one. What happened then was—‘According to my mother,’ Ellen was told by the small woman in town, ‘I was conceived under a gum tree.’ She had eyes set close to her nose like glove buttons. In Iceland a young man leaving home for America spent the night before his departure counting all the wrinkles on his grandmother’s face. Do you believe in ghosts? There was the story of the brave woman who put on secret trousers and became a ‘man’ for an hour. Stories of everlasting depth are told at night. What about the lady who saved the town of Coventry by riding through the streets naked on a white horse? It has to be a story because the horse is white. Man falls in love with a river. Young man in perfect health spends a night with a woman and leaves a tooth behind.

  The tallest trees have the tiniest seeds. ‘Great oaks from little acorns grow.’ Obviously the Europeans who produced that maxim could not have seen the larger eucalypts. A monarch such as E. regnans, which shakes the earth when it falls and provides enough timber to build a three-bedroom house, grows from a seed scarcely larger than the following full stop.

  In the days when timber-workers in Victoria and Tasmania were photographed measuring the girth of gigantic trees it was subsequently announced—it was repeatedly trumpeted abroad, the way a film star’s vital statistics were once made public—that Eucalyptus regnans, better known as Mountain Ash, was the tallest tree in the world, just as Salzburg is said to have the highest suicide rate in the world, surpassing anything the United States had to offer. After the most rigorous measurements possible were taken in the congested forests at least two Mountain Ash were found to be over 100 metres high; one reportedly came in at 140 metres.

  Naturally in the rural parts of Australia it was a matter of quiet satisfaction that something native was the world’s best, or at least could not be beaten when it came to size. The anxieties of youth are displayed in the New World; phallic symbols, as they were once called, are seized upon, along with military defeats, to brandish in triumph.

  For their part the Americans could not accept the verdict. As far as America was concerned the sequoia of California reigned over the world of trees. They didn’t have to wait long for the position to be restored. In less than a generation the tallest E. regnans began losing their tops in storms or lightning strikes! Either that or one or two of the surveyors’ original measurements were faulty. What is the reason—the underlying impulse—for exaggeration? It is most noticeable immediately before and after a person’s death.

  • 8 •

  Signata

  THERE ARE five different Scribbly Gums, like five brothers in mythology, each bearing a significant name: sclerophylla, signata, rossii, racemosa and—see the red rim of its fruit—haemastoma.

  The Scribbly Gum is concentrated in and around Sydney; only E. signata, for example, is found along a narrow coastal strip of northern New South Wales and—state boundaries having no meaning to trees and weeds—protrudes into southern Queensland.

  Eventually all five had been transplanted on Holland’s property, although the smallest, E. rossii, grew at an angle in juvenile protest.

  The distinctive calligraphic markings on the trunks left by the tunnelling of insect larvae resemble scribbled words, hasty signatures. It is the almost human qualities of these ‘scribbles’, idly composed, invariably elegant, that draw our eye: there may well be a secret message written on this tree.

  E. signata here can represent all five Scribbly Gums.

  For a long time Ellen found herself staring in wonder whenever her father wrote his signature. It always began with the forefinger vibrating on the one spot, as if he was intent on squashing an insect, before suddenly breaking free with a circular flourish. Once she actually let out a laugh of horror as his pen tore a hole in the ruled writing paper. The signature itself was as knotted and twisted as a cluster of mallees—low-grade eucalypts with shallow roots. When he set about acquiring from all over Australia dozens of selected tubestock, as the seedlings are called, his cheques were often returned for verification.

  As the tree-growing program spread around the property Holland found it necessary to compile an anthography.

  The little black book went with him everywhere. He kept it under his pillow like a grubby Gideon. Each page recorded each eucalypt, its location and date of planting, special characteristics, supplier’s name. After the butcher misquoted him, Holland was fond of referring to the catalogue as his ‘cattle-dog’; anything to be light-hearted about it.

  It was not an ordinary catalogue. Trudging across paddocks encouraged rumination. Holland jotted down in pencil all kinds of things. Unfortunately just about all of them fall into the category of homilies; rest is rust, for example—it doesn’t tell us very much.

  But on another page he scribbled something altogether more interesting, nothing is one. There we have a multiple truth on offer, something to live by, or at least to believe in; an attempt at texture. Nothing is one is repeated on several pages, and by repeating it Holland appeared to endorse it, although aside from the multiplication of the eucalypts—his belief in variety—it hardly showed as his life-principle.

  All this scribbling on Holland’s property multiplied as Ellen reached marriage age.

  At that time Ellen wrote many more words than she spoke. In her journal she described conversations with herself, and real and imaginary conversations with her father; there were descriptions of certain large birds, of the sea and the school gates in Sydney; also recorded were unusual dreams, and impressions of many of the visiting suitors, the latest being Mr Cave. The journal had a silver cover decorated with coloured stars. Within its pages she could discuss her feelings. It was her best friend. There she confided, she floated away. It was all softness in its privacy, a fluttering enfolding world. Ellen especially liked the moment sh
e opened a clean page and the sunlight came in a white fold onto the bed. Then she felt curled up, warm and enclosed in her thoughts; and the dry strokes of the eucalypts and the undulating land outside no longer existed.

  A few of the eliminated suitors made direct appeals to her. These Ellen read with interest and sympathy even. Some had used a stub of pencil; one, on butcher’s paper. Their humorous misspellings! Sometimes she felt sorry for men. A large sheet of paper arrived from one called Thomas Leigh, who Ellen remembered had spent years somewhere in Italy. It was almost incomprehensible; it might well have been in a secret language. It was really a composition of scribbles, adjustments, half-starts, rubbing-outs and space; she was intrigued by its general delicacy though, and in the bottom corner he’d drawn what appeared to be a tree. As for the local schoolteacher, his elimination released a creek flow of gentle notes, eloquent, honest and resigned, as well as a couple of fruit bowls he’d carved out of Karri or Jarrah, just for her.

  Until now Ellen believed her father knew all there was to know about a given subject. It was enough to look at the accumulation of years in his face, and his brevity when answering questions of a factual nature—for it too suggested stored-up knowledge. And importantly his voice was always there. Certainly she found it impossible to imagine another man on earth naming all the eucalypts; anyone succeeding would have to be like her father, only more so.

  As for the marriage being more or less arranged by her father, her original shock had been hysterical, that was all. She now regarded it with curiosity, little more. Each and every suitor had fallen by the wayside. Only a few had managed to pass the halfway mark.

  So far Mr Cave was the most impressive; the way he took his time, hands in pockets, should have been a warning. Instead of following his progress Ellen wondered to herself and in the pages of her journal why he avoided looking in her direction. ‘Does he like me?’ Taking part in the contest may have been nothing more than a sort of intellectual exercise, a way to fill in his annual holidays.