Eucalyptus
PRAISE FOR MURRAY BAIL
AND
EUCALYPTUS
WINNER OF THE MILES FRANKLIN AWARD, 1999
WINNER OF THE COMMONWEALTH WRITERS' PRIZE, 1999
A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW NOTABLE BOOK OF 1998
âA most unusual, enchanting workâ¦full of stories within storiesâ¦a novel of most beguiling originality.'
Daily Telegraph
âA wonderful story brilliantly told. like the great stories in the hands of the accomplished tellers, its essence is simple but, also like them, it is deceptive.'
Australian
âA glorious affirmation of romantic love, and of the imagination as it manifests itself in storytelling and invention.'
Canberra Times
âLovingly honed and polishedâ¦
Eucalyptus
stands out for its elegance, its structural harmony and above all its self-suffciencyâ¦Bail is one of the very few highly accomplished stylists among contemporary writers.'
Sydney Morning Herald
âDreamily cleverâ¦brilliant in its vigorous inventiveness.'
Courier-Mail
âBail produces a touch of magic.'
London Magazine
âA magnificent novel, beautifully constructed, with a quirky, sideways sliding humourâ¦A multi-layered love storyâ¦full of deep echoes that resonate with myth, with ideas about beauty and life and language, about stories themselves.'
Adelaide Advertiser
âA strange, beautiful, compelling novelâ¦a true originalâ¦a dry humour that somehow echoes the tree-spiked lonely landscape.'
The Times
âA brilliant evocation of both the beauty and madness of the bush.'
marie claire
âA wonderfully written, melodic novel: Bail takes a simple idea and lifts it above the trees and beyond the horizon.'
Kirkus Reviews
âDelightfulâ¦it seems to float before our eyes, mesmerisinglyâ¦as finally we close its pages, nothing has changed, yet everything feels transformed.'
Australian's Review of Books
âTall trees inspire tall tales.
eucalyptus
makes most other novels seem weedy by comparison. it is a towering achievement.'
Time Out
PRAISE FOR MURRAY BAIL
AND
THE PAGES
âBail's novel crackles with ideas. it is witty and touching, and also graceful and stylised.'
Sydney Morning Herald
âA captivating novelâ¦A romance that is as enchanting as it is unexpected. this is a book you can read over and over, gleaning each time new revelations, new and deeper insights.'
Canberra Times
âDelicate, cagey, amusing.'
Don Watson
âBail demonstrates his ability to write with a luminous, elemental aura surrounding everything.'
Australian
âA wonderfully entertaining novel.'
Telegraph
(UK)
âThis is a book handling modern cultures, a lively romance, and also, like Bail's previous novels, a jigsaw of refections on Australia.'
Sunday Age
Other books by Murray Bail
FICTION
The Drover's Wife and Other Stories
Homesickness
Holden's Performance
Camouflage
The Pages
The Faber Book of Contemporary Australian Short Stories
(ed .)
NON-FICTION
Fairweather
Notebooks 1970â2003
Murray Bail was born in Adelaide in 1941. his first novel,
Homesickness
, won the National Book Council Award for Australian Literature and the
Age
Book of the Year Award.
Holden's Performance
won the Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction. His most recent novel,
The Pages
, was published to great acclaim in 2008.
Eucalyptus
Murray Bail
The paper in this book is manufactured only from wood grown in sustainable regrowth forests.
The Text Publishing Company
Swann House
22 William street
Melbourne Victoria 3000
Australia
www.textpublishing.com.au
Copyright © Murray Bail 1998
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
First published 1998 by The Text Publishing Company
This edition published 2009
Design by WH Chong
Typeset by Midland Typesetters
Printed and bound by Griffin Press
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
Bail, Murray, 1941-
Eucalyptus / author, Murray Bail.
Melbourne : text Publishing, 2009.
ISBN 9781921351693 (pbk.)
A823.4
Ebook ISBN 9781921776991
Eucalyptus
Contents
WE COULD
begin with
desertorum
, common name Hooked Mallee. Its leaf tapers into a slender hook, and is normally found in semi-arid parts of the interior.
But
desertorum
(to begin with) is only one of several hundred eucalypts; there is no precise number. And anyway the very word,
desert-or-um
, harks back to a stale version of the national landscape and from there in a more or less straight line onto the national character, all those linings of the soul and the larynx, which have their origins in the
bush
, so it is said, the poetic virtues (can you believe it?) of being belted about by droughts, bushfires, smelly sheep and so on; and let's not forget the isolation, the exhausted shapeless women, the crude language, the always wide horizon, and the flies.
It is these circumstances which have been responsible for all those extremely dry (dun-colouredâcan we say that?) hard-luck stories which have been told around fires and on the page. All that was once upon a time, interesting for a while, but largely irrelevant here.
Besides, there is something unattractive, unhealthy even, about
Eucalyptus desertorum
. It's more like a bush than a tree; has hardly a trunk at all: just several stems sprouting at ground level, stunted and
itchy
-looking.
We might as well turn to the rarely sighted
Eucalyptus pulverulenta
, which has an energetic name and curious heart-shaped leaves, and is found only on two narrow ledges of the Blue Mountains. What about
diversifolia
or
transcontinentalis
? At least they imply breadth and richness of purpose. Same too with
E. globulus
, normally employed as a windbreak. A solitary specimen could be seen from Holland's front verandah at two o'clock, a filigree pin greyish-green stuck stylishly in a woman's felt hat, giving stability to the bleached and swaying vista.
Each and every eucalypt is interesting for its own reasons. Some eucalypts imply a distinctly feminine world (Yellow Jacket, Rose-of-the-West, Weeping Gum).
E. maidenii
has given photogenic shade to the Hollywood stars. Jarrah is the timber everyone professes to love.
Eucalyptus camaldulensis
? We call it River Red Gum. Too masculine, too overbearingly masculine; covered in grandfatherly warts and carbuncles, as well. As for the Ghost Gum (
E. papuana
), there are those who maintain with a lump in their throats it is the most beautiful tree on earth, which would explain why it's been done to death on our nation's calendars, postage stamps and tea towels. Holland had one marking the north-eastern corner, towards town, waving its white arms in the dark, a surveyor's peg gone mad.
We could go on forever holding up favourites or returning to botanical names which possess almost the right resonance or offer some sort of summary, if such a thing were possible, or which are hopelessly wide of the mark but catch the eye for their sheer linguistic strangenessâ
platypodos
; whereas all that's needed, aside from a beginning itself, is a eucalypt independent of, yet one which⦠it doesn't really matter.
Once upon a time there was a manâwhat's wrong with that? Not the most original way to begin, but certainly tried and proven over time, which suggests something of value, some deep impulse beginning to be answered, a range of possibilities about to be set down.
There was once a man on a property outside a one-horse town, in New South Wales, who couldn't come to a decision about his daughter. He then made an unexpected decision. Incredible! For a while people talked and dreamed about little else until they realised it was entirely in keeping with him; they shouldn't have been surprised. To this day it's still talked about, its effects still felt in the town and surrounding districts.
His name was Holland. With his one and only daughter Holland lived on a property bordered along one side by a khaki river.
It was west of Sydney, over the ranges and into the sunâabout four hours in a Japanese car.
All around, the earth had a geological camel-look: slowly rearing brown, calloused and blotched with shadows, which appeared to sway in the heat, and an overwhelming air of patience.
Some people say they remember the day he arrived.
It was stinking hot, a scorcher. He stepped off the train alone, not accompanied by a woman, not then. Without pausing in the town, not even for a glass of water, he went out to his newly acquired property, a deceased estate, and began going over it on foot.
With each step the landscape unfolded and named itself. The man's voice could be heard singing out-of-tune songs. It all belonged to him.
There were dams the colour of milky tea, corrugated sheds at the trapezoid tilt, yards of split timber, rust. And solitary fat eucalypts lorded it over hot paddocks, trunks glowing like aluminium at dusk.