Eucalyptus (13 page)

Curiously, for all its wide distribution in Australia, the River Red Gum was first described in the literature from a cultivated tree in the walled garden of the Camalduli religious order in Naples. How did this happen?

Ellen was given a few parts of the story (almost like the keel of an unfinished ship); enough for her to inhabit, to give voices and faces. In her journal she scribbled possible explanations.

Late in the nineteenth century a paddle-steamer captain—Irish, a widower, based in Wentworth—vowed to kill his own daughter!

This man was much sought after in the river trade. He had an uncanny knack of navigating the Darling River, long into the summer months. He was a familiar sight at the wheel, unsmiling, his daughter alongside, smiling and waving. One day it was noticed she was no longer there. Almost immediately his times slowed, and he began running aground, once loaded with wool bales. As he continued piloting the river it wasn't the loss of business that troubled him, but suspicions of his daughter's behaviour, suspicions which were always aggravated by the sight at Wentworth of the Darling River flowing into and becoming one with the stronger Murray River. Unless he was mistaken his daughter's appearance had subtly altered.

As it happened his suspicions were justified. Not yet twenty his daughter was seeing a local grazier's son. The whole town knew. She had become pregnant. The couple fled the day before he returned from his weekly river trip. He set out to follow. He was not even interested in bringing her back.

Years later and now with a large ginger moustache he traced her to the Camaldulensians in Naples, a contemplative order that practises silence, fasting and manual labour.

He was directed to a broad woman scratching with a hoe. After travelling across the world the poor man stood rubbing his eyes. It was her coarse garment, and placid expression; she seemed to be in a dream. The child had been taken away.

He began questioning her.

What happened then is almost too fleeting to record. Either in anger or relief or to get a word out of her—nobody knows—he took her by the shoulders. They struggled in the garden, kicking up dust; swaying and locked together, Ellen heard it told.

It was then,
the story goes
, a Red Gum seed dormant in the river man's trouser cuff spilled onto the ground.

It could even be in fact, it would appear to be the only explanation—that the ceremonial struggle between the father and daughter on that particular spot on the earth foot-scuffed and kicked the seed into the barren soil. For soon after he left, shaking and exhausted, a green shoot appeared.

The daughter tended it until it grew into a healthy sapling, and she lived with the Camalduli order long enough to see the sapling become a tree, then a full-grown River Red Gum, a tree of great girth, dominating the garden, its water-seeking roots cracking walls and sucking dry the vegetable plots, the same tree that lined for hour after hour the Darling River, which she would never again see.

• 15 •
Planchoniana

ELLEN REMAINED
indoors. At about nine-thirty she made tea for her father and Mr Cave, one with dirty fingernails, the other clean, and after they set off and their voices, littered with latinised names, placenames and occasional surnames remained in the air before dying, a vast stillness descended on the land and the homestead; it filled the hollows and every part of a room; certainly not only water finds it own level.

Then returning to her room Ellen had plenty of things to record or discuss in her journal. It was there she returned to her encounter with the man asleep. These were hot days as she studied her nakedness in the mirror. And she drifted off east to Sydney, to its city edge—crowds, glare of white, the blue-green. In Sydney she could simply be amongst many others, other women, taking part in a constant overlapping sliding motion, joining them (without necessarily knowing any of them). Later in the morning there was housework; moving about, busying herself, she let her thoughts drift. That in slow combination was how she spent her days.

In the front room, as she darned her father's socks, the needle pierced her little finger. Her head flew back like an irritated horse.

She tasted the blood, then wrapped the finger in a handkerchief. She soon changed handkerchiefs. The finger wouldn't stop bleeding.

Mr Cave stood before her—those pleats, his body heat. So he'd notched up another successful day in the field.

He held out a gumnut.

‘For you,' he said, ‘I picked it up on the way down. It makes an ideal thimble.'

Ellen smiled. For the first time he'd decided to look at her. Head bowed she tried the gumnut. It fitted. ‘I thought it would,' he said. Fat men make the finest dancers, she had been told. Very gently he was undoing the handkerchief.

‘Do you have any molasses in the kitchen? Stick your finger in it. It'll sting like blazes, but it will stop the bleeding. It was a trick my mother picked up. She was from the country.'

From the other room her father was yelling out to him.

‘Your father wants to show me something.'

Absently slipping the gumnut on the pricked finger Ellen saw that Mr Cave's sudden approach to her was a sign of his practical side. He knew he would be winning her; any day now. He could hardly take her away cold, as it were. Meanwhile, the bleeding had stopped. It was the gumnut. Ellen wanted to point this out to Mr Cave. At that time she was all too ready to assign meanings to casual events.

‘Anyway,' he virtually smiled, ‘ask your father for the short common name of
planchoniana
.'

• 16 •
Approximans

AND THERE
are stories (it was explained) that consist of such slender means it's a wonder they can be called stories at all. These are the ones tossed off in a line or two: fragments, with no ending—too factual. They are approximately stories, or possibly stories. They are more like sums. Such brevity goes against the iron law offered by the celebrated German colossus: ‘All good stories are slow stories.'

Still it cannot be denied that the briefest anecdote (there, we won't say ‘story') can produce an echo of really curious, indelible power. For the same reason, let us not forget, artists give high value to drawings and thumbnail sketches.

In Rangoon after the war a once-grand hotel, which is still operating to this day, had a Beale piano in the dining room. The Beale is an Australian-made piano. It has a
eucalyptus lid
. And in the clatter and murmur of the dining room, under the whirring of ceiling fans, or probably because it was the cabaret custom anyway, the piano lid was always raised. It hardly mattered that the Beale, made in Sydney, was usually out of tune.

Planters' wives, traders, government officers liked to dress up and, in the tremendous humidity, dance to waltzes and foxtrots played on the Beale, one or two violins accompanying. Piano, violins and humidity: infinite melancholy.

The flow of sound released via the raised eucalyptus lid of the Beale would have produced a secondary, more lasting echo between more than a few couples—the complications, the distinct possibilities; so many different stories would have grown around chosen people, and hovered like musical notes, thanks to the Beale with its raised lid. The solitary piano in Rangoon or even the lid itself would have become the source or the core of a story or many stories. ‘If you see what I mean,' he said.

• 17 •
Imlayensis

POSSIBLY THE
rarest of all eucalypts, the Mount Imlay Mallee has been seen by—rough estimate—a few dozen lucky people. Only about seventy plants are supposed to be in existence, all in the one small area among rocks near the summit of Mount Imlay, on the far south coast of New South Wales. Young trunks are green, the colour of dragonflies or parrots, until they weather to orange-brown or grey.

How Holland managed to obtain a seedling remains a mystery. The world of eucalypts can be viciously protective; stories of ignorance and betrayal spread like bushfires, and are just as difficult to stamp out. People in the field never quite knew what to make of Holland. He wasn't really one of them. It was hard though not to respect his tenacity.

Still more impressive was how he managed to cultivate on his property so far inland, a Mount Imlay Mallee.

From the tower Ellen watched the two distant figures toiling across a paddock as if against a headwind. At intervals they were blotted out by a cultivated tree. They were heading as the crow flies for the outcrop of quartzite at the southern end where the rarest of eucalypts had taken root; she knew because her father had winked and nodded at her over breakfast. But the very rarity of the Mount Imlay Mallee gave it such a distinctive appearance it would make identification easy at least for someone of Mr Cave's calibre.

Ellen lowered her head when they disappeared. She couldn't have kept looking anyway. Every tree Mr Cave went towards was another step towards her. In this way her father appeared as some sort of usher. He was driving her away. In the tower it was warm. Ellen turned her attention to her toes and as she examined her knee recalled the other suitors, their voices, hopeful faces. For an hour or more she seemed to gaze at her knee. It was several days since she had come across the sleeping man. It wasn't his hair Ellen thought about now, but his manner which was perplexing. The suddenness of it all was almost irritating, she scribbled in her journal.

When she looked up again and across the tree-dotted paddock—the direction opposite to Mr Cave and her father—she could just make out near a denser clump of trees a single figure, moving.

Such a sight was rare on their place. It looked like him, the man of medium build she'd found asleep on the ground. She hurried down the narrow steps into the wide-open light, and strolling, but with firmness, reached the approximate spot.

No sign of him, just eucalypts here and there, which in her restlessness looked all the same. To Ellen, her life was like this. As supplied by her father it had casual abundance, shown by the trees, and an unresolved puzzle at its centre.

As for the green blouse she normally wore only on special occasions it somehow added impatience to her speckled beauty.

• 18 •
Foecunda

AFTER MANY
adventures along many roads—many cities, towns and forests—he had arrived at Holland's property tired, at the beginning of summer. He was alert, and a hard one to pin down; he was indifferent to a lot of things. Illness had made him thoughtful. Otherwise he might have seemed irresponsible.

And instead of returning early in the morning to the far long paddock Ellen went among the darker trunks by the river, in view of the road.

It was a form of drifting; almost like fishing.

She'd only paused for a minute near the still water by the bridge when someone whistled at her. Instead of hostile dismissal, as in town, she turned.

‘Oh, you're still here…I thought you'd left our district.'

‘District,' he repeated. He stood more or less facing her. ‘Apart from that, what have you been doing?'

‘I look after my father.'

‘He needs looking after?'

‘Probably not.'

‘I imagine it's sometimes hard to know.' He had his arms folded, but not harshly.

‘He is my father,' she wanted to say. ‘And you don't know him.'

‘A bite of apple?'

The lure of sharing food, and of clean spherical dimensions which show the amount taken, is irresistible. And as Ellen reached out, her sleeve slid back and laid bare her arm.

‘I saw someone like you yesterday from the house.'

But he had taken a male bite from the apple and only appeared to nod. The way his jaws worked reminded her of a horse. They were heading through the different trees to the end of the long paddock anyway.

‘How many eucalypts do you suppose are here?'

‘I think even my father's lost count. He's got them all written down.'

‘Obviously we're talking about hundreds.'

They came to the outburst of imprecise bushes normally found in a sandy band along the bottom of Australia.

About here,' Ellen turned and faced the house. ‘I think it was you…about there.'

‘Of all the eucalypts, the mallees leave me cold. They can never make up their minds which direction to take.'

He gave a sly look of complicity which she couldn't, at that stage, accept.

‘Don't the mallees leave you cold? Don't you prefer a good old solid gum tree, the kind,' he said hopefully, ‘you see on calendars?'

‘I'm not interested in any of them!'

The subject was the least interesting she could think of. The only people who came to the property were men hoping to please her father, all wearing their ridiculous detailed knowledge of trees. The very word
eucalyptus
, which many would swear is the loveliest of all words, was for Ellen an unbearable word, a bearer of troubles. Anyone who entered the world of eucalypts came out narrowed and reduced, was her opinion. And now this one standing beside her pulling off a leaf, he was surely another one. Although he didn't exactly come out with the species' name, the Narrow-leafed Mallee (
E. foecunda
), he seemed to know, for he glanced at it and cleared his throat.