Eucalyptus (11 page)

On impulse she felt like taking a broom and cleaning up the usual mess on the ground, sweeping the earth around the tree. Of all the eucalypts on the property this one belonged to her. And she wanted it to stand out, swept clean—the way a small-town war memorial is washed with soap and water.

At that moment, Ellen noticed a large rusty nail hammered into the trunk. It could only have been her father—who else? It gave a strange feeling. Not so much as if a nail had been driven into her; rather, vague surprise at seeing a steel object embedded in the softness of Nature. On the surrounding ground were no other human signs, no coil of fencing wire, or perforated beer can, or fading cigarette pack, shotgun cartridge near the rabbit holes.

The nail, at that moment, remained without a purpose.

It was a day humming with heat. Facing the tree, the way she faced a long mirror, she took her breasts, and lifted them gently from the pull of the earth. Vaguely she wanted to kiss herself. If the reddish earth, the dead leaves, dry twigs and grass, the ants and the remote and prickly eucalypts had not been uninviting, so unsympathetic, she would have undressed; taken everything off and faced the general warmth and wide-openness. She was that age.

E. maidenii
is related to Tasmania and the Southern Blue Gums (
E. globulus
); very vigorous trees.

The trunk has a short stocking of greyish bark at the base, the upper bark smooth, spotted. Its juvenile foliage is conspicuous and attractive in the undergrowth.

• 10 •
Torquata

STILL THE
landscape intrudes (not for much longer). An unpainted shearing shed floating on its shadow in a paddock, moored to the homestead by the slack line of a fence. It almost goes without saying the land is laced with wire. The straight line is immediately sharply human.

Oceans of swaying grasses—golden in summer, as mentioned before. It's often written that our crops and grasses sway and slap about like great oceans over the rounded earth; other times, a light breeze can curve the more sparsely planted stems to resemble golden hairs on a sailor's arm. Across a paddock in the afternoon: eucalypts repeated here and there on the ground by folding out at right angles, compressed as ink stains or thumb prints on a blotter. And always the scattered apparently random arrangements in Nature. It is this casual inevitability—the slant of the fallen tree breaking the verticals of others—that allows the eye to rest.

Ellen preferred the area around the old bridge, where the serene geometry of the eucalypts faintly raised the possibility she too was elegant—it was something like elegance; and the rustle of the nearby river in curve was a comfort, an alternative, as well.

Now that she had located her own tree she would occasionally visit it, around the other side of the hill.

Early one afternoon there she heard voices, men's, when none were expected. According to the rules laid down by Holland, a suitor could begin and end his test at any point on the property, and Mr Cave had suggested they switch to the bottom end for a change. Birds in advance began exploding from branches, some calling out warning, a rabbit, another, did their zigzag which attracts the gun, and a wallaby, rising, falling, close to Ellen.

She remained behind the pale tree when it would have been better to step out.

From halfway across the continent this man called Mr Cave was now advancing steadily towards her, to take her away. He was the one. The eucalypts here were congested. That didn't stop him. Without altering his voice he identified each and every species in passing, Holland murmuring assent, until they were standing quite close.

On this day Mr Cave wore a collar and tie, and a sweat patch had spread on his back into the shape of Papua New Guinea, while Holland's face was pale red, a coralfish passing through trees. They were talking about snakes, sizes of, where seen, how almost stepped on, etc. Snake stories vary only in length from man to man.

‘They get into your sleeping bag for warmth,' said Cave. ‘That's been known to happen.'

‘As well as all the eucalypts, we've got the most venomous snakes!'

‘So I'm told.'

They were around the other side of the tree. It was too late for Ellen to step out and surprise them.

‘Sea snakes, I hope I never come across one of them. Soap Mallee, and the tall one is
kirtoni
. Now that's what I call a eucalypt. That could go on a postcard tomorrow.
Maidenii
, am I right? Always a favourite of mine.'

Her father's shadow nodded.

‘And you'd have to travel a long way to see a better specimen, if I do say so myself.'

At this moment, almost forgetting her position, Ellen looked on at the casual surface-manner of men. These two were now searching around inside their trousers, and Mr Cave's hand, the nearest, came out in full view with a soft thing, its lidded eye surveying Ellen; they began pissing, Mr Cave, her father, against the trunk.

All she could decide and so remain puzzled by was how their behaviour was indifferently at odds to hers. Side by side they remained looking down at themselves, and up at the trees. To Ellen it somehow followed on from the way Mr Cave fanned out across the landscape like a cone or searchlight, consuming all before him; and before long he would be consuming her.

Hiding behind the trunk Ellen felt weakened. She also felt irritated. As they finished, she could hear one of them breathing.

Now awaiting discovery Ellen shut her eyes; though it was not to be, not yet.

• 11 •
Nubilis

ANOTHER SUITOR
with impressive credentials stepped forward only to be told to stand aside until Mr Cave was finished.

He had a ginger beard, and his name was Swingle. Working behind a desk at the Botanic Gardens in Melbourne he had been dismissed for taking unauthorized field trips; for his ambition was to discover an unknown eucalypt species, even a subspecies, in order to have it named after him, the way others have left a trace of themselves in the names of butterflies, roses, ferns—and of course eucalypts. If Miss Mary Merrick of the Royal Botanic Gardens in Sydney was rewarded for her long years in the library with
E. merrickiae
, better known as the Goblet Mallee, why couldn't he? A certain Mr H. S. Bloxsome had a species named after him because it happened to be found on his property in south-eastern Queensland….

Swingle's simple quest for immortality had taken him into remote and difficult terrain. On one of these solitary trips he had broken an arm. Recently on a ledge in the Grampians he had trodden on and destroyed the only remaining plant of an unknown dwarf eucalypt with extremely narrow leaves. He did it, and he didn't know it.

Curiously he was a modest man. And as his life dream became less and less likely Swingle became, as they say,
merely philosophical
—that is rueful, not embittered.

The scientific naming of trees doesn't follow a pattern. In some respects it has an attractive, amateur randomness just like the distribution of the trees themselves. Some names are descriptive of bark, leaves and so on; towns and mountain ranges close to a eucalypt's habitat become lengthened and
latinised
; explorers and a few tree-interested politicians have left their mark; many professional and amateur plant collectors, and a few water colour artists, are honoured. The Rev. E. N. McKie, a Presbyterian minister at Guyra, was one enthusiast, specialising in stringy barks—McKie's Stringybark (
E. mckieand
).

Very often it is the common name that is instantly evocative: Leather Jacket, Weeping Gum, Ghost Gum, Coolibah to name some.

How did
E. nubilis
get its name? A curious one.
Nubilis
means ‘marriageable'.

• 12 •
Baxteri

THE STORY
is not at all uncommon or unusual.

It was told to Ellen by a man she met only days before (so, a virtual stranger), who had a circuitous story-telling manner, as if he was making it up, and what is more he told it under a tree where the crows were making their din; he also added bits of factual information she had no way of verifying, which seemed to have little bearing on the main thing being said. For all these distractions Ellen found the story powerful for what it may have represented, in other words, for what it didn't say exactly.

A young man, he said, travelled from Great Britain to Bombay where he booked into the most famous hotel in India, the Taj Mahal, which had been designed by his great-grandfather at the end of the last century. He wanted to see with his own eyes whether it had been tragically positioned in relation to the sea. It faces, or appears to, the Gateway of India, and the sea there is as brown every day of the year as the people who stand gazing at it. In his family the story was told how their great-grandfather designed the hotel down to the door knobs and the depth of the skirting boards, and defended each and every detail of the design as if his life depended on it. Somehow he managed to retain the incredibly extravagant staircase and the domineering dome that seemed to have no other function than to make this hotel look like an opera house or the stock exchange. A large part of an architect's genius is in the winning of the argument. Satisfied, the architect left by boat on home leave.

No one knows what happened to him in London. Something happened. Inevitably, there was talk of a woman.

Instead of four months he stayed away eighteen months. When he returned to Bombay his great project was almost completed. He took one look at it and found the local builders had positioned the huge building back to front: it was not facing the sea! The story then, as handed down, was that he literally tore his hair out and, in an act of protest and unimaginable disappointment, threw himself from the top of the semi-circular staircase, and died.

The architect's great-grandson introduced himself to the hotel's management. Although they would neither confirm nor deny the rumour surrounding the architect's death he was given a room overlooking the sea, at a generous discount. He ventured out onto the streets. About his own career he was undecided. For a few days he was ill. Otherwise his visit was…inconclusive.

We now pick up the trail on our own doorstep. Instead of returning to Great Britain the young man flew to Sydney, and after spending a few days on the beach made his way to Bathurst.

Bathurst? The coldest country town in New South Wales? He was however an historically minded person; he personified Englishness. And Bathurst was the westernmost point reached by Charles Darwin in eighteen-hundred-something. There's a plaque that says this in the municipal gardens.

So there he is in Bathurst, our traveller from Britain.

It is at Bathurst or, rather, on the outskirts, that the story develops a sudden twist. On the second day he was wandering along the river when he came across two brown snakes—one shedding its skin. He killed the wrong one, and was turned into a woman. That's apparently what happened.

When last heard of he was living in Seattle—or was it San Francisco?—as a woman.

The court building in Bathurst is so extravagant it looks out of place. In the early days, designs for the colony's civic buildings came from Whitehall. It is said that Bathurst was sent by mistake plans for a court building in an Indian city, while the Indian city received the more modest court building which would have done for Bathurst.

But that's another story.

• 13 •
Microtheca

ELLEN WATCHED
as Mr Cave stumbled. For a moment he looked finished; but as befitting a monarch he remained calm. Idly he looked away from the tree in question, a maddeningly nondescript mallee, obstinately modest, one barely surviving—the shrubby
E. fruticosa
, it's easily confused with
E. foecunda
.

He began talking about something altogether different, namely how to fix the problem in this driest of continents of the rivers that flow as quickly as they possibly can into the sea, an oversight in nature that has produced a vast dead centre, an area of absurd emptiness, useless for just about everything, except to encourage millions of poor quality photographs and to exercise the imaginations of politicians, journalists and other lateral thinkers. Ellen, who had just delivered a thermos of tea, noticed his sentences were trailing, and that he was stealing glances at the foliage.

Then he stopped talking. For Mr Cave—and for Ellen waiting—it extended into a crucial minute or more.

It was Ellen who began to fret. She wanted to close her eyes, anything to encourage the possibility of release.

He pulled off a leaf.

‘A eucalypt with no common name,' his back still turned. And in a voice of suppressed eagerness, which has its source in the national quiz shows, he gave the correct name, in Latin.

After that Ellen couldn't watch any more, and without a word went down to the river. In and out ran her thoughts, as if she was actually running through the trees: marriage by arrangement; more her father's than hers; marriage at arm's length; without-her-consent marriage, without her participation; her entire self given to him, from Adelaide; a blank marriage; nothing more. And her father, it seemed, always spoke to her in a deliberately light, often bantering way.