Eucalyptus

by Murray Bail

  And in those busy years Kearney himself became a familiar figure with his battered face, crooked leg and permanent camera bag.

  In one of the newspaper offices in London he met an Australian journalist from a country newspaper in New South Wales. She had strident views on everything under the sun. Perhaps he saw something of his old self in her! Besides, she found his extreme ability to see both sides attractive. He tended to balance her; at the same time, she could see she’d be able to manage him—a life of some consistency.

  No sooner had they married than she suggested they move to Sydney. One city was the same as any other city, as far as he was concerned, although in Sydney it meant beginning all over again with his camera doing police work.

  It was she who convinced him to avoid black-and-white photography, and turn to colour. That was all right by him. Colour could achieve things that black-and-white couldn’t, and vice versa. From a terrace house in Newtown, where doors and windows open and gasp in the humidity—gritty suburb, Newtown—they started a small business producing photographic calendars for stock agents, greengrocers and butchers to hand out in December, every year featuring a photograph of a paddock full of merinos, or a view of the same solitary Ghost Gum from different angles.

  The business has not prospered. Nor has it declined.

  To get an opinion out of Kearney is still impossible. He never argues. She has begun going to church. They appear to be a contented couple.

  • 22 •

  Rudis

  THE IDEA that a tranquil man would have a violent imagination doesn’t seem possible; and yet signs of the Napoleonic phenomenon are quite common in the outer reaches of Protestantism. In fact, it may not be at all farfetched to claim that tranquillity and violent imagination are precisely what have attracted men to serve in the church in the first place. So common is this trait among ministers, pastors and missionaries it can be ignored by the Protestant leaders at their own peril. In certain conservative parishes, or when a seemingly tranquil man is shipped out to a strange and difficult country as a missionary, there’s always the possibility of unseemly conduct. Missionary work, incidentally, appears to be at odds with the cardinal rule, ‘In seatedness and quietness the soul acquires wisdom’.

  The story of Clarence Brown—the Reverend Clarence Brown—begins, for our purposes, not in Edinburgh where he was born, but on a river in 1903 in West Africa, in his early thirties, and finishes up (more or less) in suburban Adelaide and other parts of Australia, his traces scattered.

  His father was a preacher in Edinburgh who loved the ocean-rolling surge of his own voice. Even ‘good morning’ on the steps of the church was spoken with such conviction that veins bulged in his temples and forehead. It came as little surprise to the congregation one Sunday when he seemed to stammer, with his arm raised as if holding up a broad sword, and pitched forward in the pulpit.

  Clarence knelt beside his father. ‘Go ye…’ he seemed to be trying to say, before letting out a final sigh from the deep. Clarence had decided anyway. In early 1903 he landed in Lagos with his young wife, and the following day travelled up the River Niger to a remote hot village.

  Nothing had prepared the Reverend Brown and his bonneted wife for Africa’s incredible heat, the signs of illness and starvation, and everywhere an air of impassive hopelessness. He had been to London once, that was all.

  The bewildering strangeness of the country was made more melancholy by the breadth of the river and the distance between people and objects. From the moment they landed in Africa and the further they went up river they felt forgotten by their own people, another tribe decked out in elaborate clothes and customs. Rubbing his hands the Reverend did his best to console his wife who was missing the piano and her many sisters in Edinburgh. In the heat she had gone red in the face and breathed through her mouth. She hated the slightest noise outside and refused to handle babies.

  No rain had fallen in that part of the world for seven years.

  The crops had withered away affecting the eyesight and bones of second-born children, and the communal wealth which consisted of untidy herds of black-and-white goats was decimated, permanently altering the dowry system. For the first time in living memory the River Niger had stopped flowing, and from upstream came reports of it flowing backwards. To the people who grew up along its banks, the world as they knew it was coming to an end.

  If the entire shape of the river was simple and visible, like the sun or the moon, or a tree, or even fire, it might have been worshipped. The people took their river seriously. It passed by their lives, always there, and gave life to others. There were stories, again from upstream, of bodies floating down in flood and stopping outside houses to point to a faithless wife.

  Normally the river’s strength could be felt with a hand. Now that it had stopped flowing and was nothing more than a long warm pond a similar lassitude entered the people, which caused the Reverend Brown to weaken, then rapidly to lose all appearance of tranquillity.

  He was like something out of the Old Testament. The gaunt figure stumbling around in a barren landscape is cannon fodder for the fables. He was a good man; it showed in a kind of hectic innocence. He could not bear to see people suffer—the children, the children. As a new arrival and a white man invested with religious powers he became the point of focus. He had to do something.

  They kept looking at him, singly, in groups.

  Wearing his full religious regalia the Reverend Brown prayed for rain, first in private, then alongside his silent wife—who had become unaccountably savage to the natives; then in the sweltering corrugated-iron church; and, when that failed, by the river itself before a large crowd. He looked up into the heavens: hot, entirely cloudless. This went on for weeks. He heard his own words rolling out as thunder; someone was in full control of misery and death—he called out if anyone was listening; until in a rhythmic momentum of hope and bewilderment, perhaps inherited from his father, he rushed from the church and threw into the river the large wooden statue of Christ.

  Later the same day the great river seemed to move. The following day it was flowing strongly. Within a week nothing was stopping it: the river broadened, broke its banks. Frail animals and the few crops were carried away; old people and children weakened by famine too; makeshift huts along the banks swept away; even Brown’s church, which was supposed to occupy the higher ground, was flooded.

  To these story-telling people the Reverend had brought nothing but trouble. Since his arrival their miseries had multiplied. Behind his back was a flood of abuse. Brown couldn’t understand why his weekly sermons were ignored. Reports reached London of his difficulties and the shocking action of throwing Christ into the water—aside from anything else, the statue was church property—and he was recalled, never to set foot again in Africa.

  In Adelaide, which is the city of eucalypts, Clarence Brown and his wife settled in a bungalow with a red verandah in the suburb of Norwood. The placid suburb of faded grey paling fences produced a calming effect, at least in her. With his surplus of energies he became busy as a lay preacher and a furniture removalist during the week.

  They had a daughter. At eighteen she was forced to marry an older man. For a while her father tried to keep her condition hidden inside the house; but when that was no longer possible he sent her, against her mother’s pleadings, away.

  The man she married was an insurance executive, always on the road. His name was Cave. Their child born was a son, who grew up strong and close to his mother. Due to the circumstances she became extremely dependent on him. Avoiding church she took him instead to concerts, always in the same two seats. And he never failed to be concerned at how music encouraged a violent imagination in his mother, parting her mouth, ruffling the normal tranquillity of her face, sometimes producing a tear. He still sat with her in concerts; but Mr Cave remained wary of music, which is written to the glory of God.

  For a while he tried standing back to picture himself. Although solid in his socks he saw himsel
f as a light and sketchy presence. Very easily did Mr Cave feel accidental.

  At least the world of trees offered a solid base. After all, here was an entire world, psychology-free, a world both open and closed. The task of classification and description was complexity enough. Eucalypts, for example, were an intricate subject he could almost contain with his own shape, as if it was a single, endlessly reproducing person.

  More than once Mr Cave had been on the point of telling Holland some of this—as if the telling would make any difference; but he decided instead it was Ellen who would show more sympathy. It was about time he opened up a conversation with her.

  It was simpler with Holland to meander in and out of the subject of eucalypts. Exchange of information was easy—easier—for both of them. Mr Cave could do this as he went on naming the trees. On his many field trips along the Murray and the Darling, and Cooper Creek and beyond, Mr Cave heard stories about floods, almost as many as about bushfires or inexperienced people getting lost and dying of thirst. Walking with Holland across his property Mr Cave felt compelled to tell some of these stories, and Holland mentioned one in passing to Ellen, because it included a woman in town they both knew.

  Not so many years ago during the shortage of schoolteachers, the story went, the government advertised in Great Britain. A science teacher with a pale wife and two daughters arrived and was sent to Grafton—one of those northern river towns.

  They moved into a wooden house, not far from the river. They’d hardly got used to this vast land, let alone the ways of the small country town, Grafton—they’d been there barely a week—when the river rose and overflowed its banks. Still more water came down—brown, unstoppable, and everywhere. The teacher and his family were taken from their house by boat.

  After the flood there was mud. It stained the walls. The teacher had to use his shoulder to open the door to the bedroom, and when it opened his wife and daughters shrieked and stepped back. The flood had deposited in their bedroom a dead cow, where it lay rotting and bloated on the double bed.

  What a country! It was enough to make anyone catch the first boat back to the postcard greenery of England.

  But they stayed on. He became a headmaster.

  And their daughters, they eventually married in country towns. One of them is the gasbag at the post office, Holland told Ellen; the one with the brown hair set like headphones. Traces of a Midlands accent remain, the way a flood deposits a trail above a window.

  From the day Ellen stepped off the train this woman in town had followed her progress. The child was without a mother! Often she asked Ellen questions about her father, at least early on. Noting the suitors who made their way out to the property the postmistress found herself almost every day handing a letter to Mr Cave, or selling him a maroon stamp. Although he was somewhat older than Ellen, she fancied his chances; he was a solid, dependable type.

  • 23 •

  Racemosa

  A FINE example of the Flooded Gum (E. rudis) can be seen at the Botanic Gardens in Sydney, thirty paces back from the bookshop. It certainly has a towering grandeur. Magnificent comes to mind. Of course it does. Magnificent is to be avoided at all costs, above all in describing a work of art, such as a Cézanne (the painter of pines), or the vulgarities of an opera house, or even the physique of a brown boxer (‘magnificent specimen’), let alone the natural majesty of a gum tree. It really is a puffed-up term, a sign of impotence in the person poised with the pen, striving to convey…better for all concerned if it was returned for use alongside magnify, and left at that.

  In girth and habitat the Flooded Gum is similar to the River Red Gum, preferring watercourses and swampy ground; and yet it has been successfully cultivated in sandy Algeria. Rudis apparently refers to the rough bark; either that or its timber—good for nothing but firewood.

  Its upper branches are smooth and grey. Buds are larger with a bluntly conic operculum; adult leaves are petiolate.

  Holland’s example was at right angles to the bridge, and next in line stood a pale Scribbly Gum, this one called E. racemosa.

  So absorbed had Ellen become in the slowly told stories of the stranger, so much a part of her day now, she took little notice of the eucalypts behind the stories; she allowed the world, which was his and far beyond, to come to her. 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.

  Eucalypts are notorious for giving off an inhospitable, unsympathetic air.

  On this Friday morning she put on a dress faded to butter colour and felt loose and free; so much so she ruffled her beauty with a look of determined impatience. And she felt so aware of her own self within the sleeveless dress she flowed forward in a kind of bonelessness, so it felt.

  Out in the open there was precious little focus. At least the stranger could be relied upon to make one of his appearances; he was a shape to anticipate, separate from the trees.

  The voice was familiar—searching, faint gravel. If he read to her, she would fall asleep.

  This time he was unexpectedly personal.

  ‘They’re interesting,’ he eyed her below the throat, ‘they suit you very well.’

  They were large white buttons below the V, only two. She’d taken them from an old coat and sewn them on herself.

  ‘My father went that way,’ she said, ‘so I came this way. I feel I’m deceiving him.’

  ‘I don’t see why.’ Frowning, he gave the cable of the rickety bridge a firm rattle.

  Ellen was aware she had stepped away from what he originally said, leaving before him nothing but fresh air, when he had actually shown an interest in her. She turned to the formation of evenly spaced trunks between them and the house.

  ‘It’s my favourite lot of trees. What is yours?’ Before he could answer she said softly, ‘Have you been in there? I saw once a photo of a rubber plantation in Malaya…’

  He held a finger up. Eagles floating down from the great Mountain Ash veered away, and other dark birds joined the sky.

  Now Ellen heard too: men’s voices, boots crunching on strips of bark.

  He pulled her into a space under the bridge, where they squatted, still holding her wrist, which she allowed.

  She felt the smile in his voice, ‘Now you really are deceiving your father. What if he finds you here now?’

  ‘Shhhh,’ she said.

  Through a gap in the floor of the bridge she watched her father and Mr Cave coming into view, disappearing, reappearing, voices rising and falling too.

  Ellen had been taking little notice of Mr Cave’s progress; somehow she managed to put it at the back of her mind. But now seeing it at close quarters she was shocked. As she watched he moved steadily through the trees and named the entire plantation in about forty minutes. Evidently her father had become resigned. As Mr Cave identified a tree he ticked it off like a tally clerk in some sort of homemade catalogue raisonné, with a black cover. Already they resembled a father trudging with son-in-law.

  ‘He’s like a machine,’ she said faintly.

  She wanted to rest her head. It was the hopelessness—almost a spreading stain—she had forgotten about; it now filled her throat again, churning her stomach. She didn’t know what to do. She went limp the way a woman is said to go limp on the verge of rape. Yet Mr Cave was not at all a bad man! Squashed under the bridge she became aware her wrist was still being held, a severe way of taking her pulse. At least he, this man, seemed to be neutral.

  ‘This is terrible…’ was all she could say.

  The stranger let go of her wrist, and looked at the two men standing on the river bank to the right. It allowed Ellen to study the side of his face, his ear, and neck all very close.


  ‘My father,’ Ellen whispered more to herself, ‘in the old coat. My father has…’ Everybody for miles around knew about her father’s marriage arrangement, though this man beside her had shown no sign of it.

  At that stage Mr Cave had named over three-quarters of all the eucalypts; there could be only a few more days left. Fewer than a hundred trees remained, if that. Everybody else had fallen by the wayside. If Mr Cave wanted to he could have gone on and finished that very afternoon, except he seemed to enjoy walking around the paddocks with her father, talking and exchanging information, and not always about trees. Ellen saw all this before her; and now her father had become subdued.

  To think that another man existed who also knew all there was to know about this vast and complex subject.

  And Ellen suddenly wanted to march straight up and scream at her father, as if that would help. If only she was in Sydney. There she could disappear.

  Just then his cigarette smoke reached them under the bridge. It contained the essence of him, her father; crumpled, warm, a stubborn presence, even to the silver furrows ploughed in his hair.

  As for the stranger, he could hardly be relied upon. He took an interest, then appeared not to. He drew attention to the squat tree facing them, E. racemosa.

  ‘Something’s bound to turn up,’ he said.

  Meanwhile, a prosaic photographer of trees (as other photographers aim for the nude, third-world walls, waifs in the melodramatic darkened drawing-rooms, the aesthetics of famine and/or war, high fashion, mountains from various angles) on assignment for an international publisher had passed through Holland’s property, after gaining his permission, and in a highly efficient process which had all the oblivious casualness of nature itself, had identified each and every eucalypt and taken a photograph of each of them. Working to a deadline it had taken several weeks. Wherever he happened to be setting up his camera the others were on the opposite side of the property. Then lugging his tripod like a theodolite he simply loaded up and drove out the front gate, not having a clue about the prize—there for the taking if only he knew about it—or if he had known was not interested, and was never seen again. Not even Ellen who had taken an instant dislike to his dark knotted beard and the boots and the khaki shorts knew what he had achieved.