(Australian edition)                            (Canadian edition)

Eucalyptus by Murray Bail 
Text Publishing 1998


I never truly appreciated my native country until I started studying some of our literature at uni. I did two courses focusing on Australian literature, and by the time I graduated (for the second time, as these things are done there) at the end of 2001, I was in hopelessly, helplessly, head-over-heels in gut-clenching love with the land. 

When, the following year, I left and went to Japan to teach English for nearly three years, I would suddenly smell the shearing shed on my parents' farm, in the middle of the supermarket. (My boss tells me, whenever I mention smelling something that "isn't there" that I probably have a brain tumour - I call him an alarmist.) I missed the smell of Australia so much, the smell of the land, where all the trees, the plants, the grass, the soil, has such a distinct smell. In Japan, nothing smelt, which means you can smell 3-day-old exhaust fumes, the grime coating the walls of buildings, the smell of ramen and yakiniku and, strangely, snow - but never the trees or plants, because they didn't smell. My first cherry blossom time, I went up to a tree and sniffed the blossoms, expecting the same sweet scent as my mother's specimen in her big, beautiful garden. Nothing. I was supremely disappointed.

I recommended Eucalyptus to my book club and, almost unanimously, they agreed on it for December. I hadn't read it in several years, but it all came back as I delved in once more. The trees are my favourite characters. Skimming through the reviews on Amazon, written by Americans mostly, I noticed they all said "yes it uses trees as a tool to construct the stories, but that's not important" and "trees don't interest me, but that's not what this is about." (I'm paraphrasing there, don't hit me.)

I beg to differ. The trees are everything in Eucalyptus. You could almost say it's a book about trees disguised as a fairy tale, but I don't think that's the case either. The trees figure prominently, as characters not as background. All the different species, described not just visually but with personality too. The gum trees are described as selfish, offering little shade, and unsympathetic. After reading that the first time, I saw eucalypts in a whole new way. 

In the midlands of Tasmania, which you drive through to get to Hobart from the north where my parents' farm is, you can see a quite unique, oddly disturbing but very memorable scene: round, hilly, very yellow, dry farmland, bare but for the grey skeletons of eucalypts, their silvery arms reaching out like a scarecrow, completely leafless. As a child, this view disturbed me, and I still don't know if the Midlands has always been like that or if it is the resutl of excessive farming, as in so many other places. I suspect the latter. In it's own way, it is stunning, beautiful, the stark colours, the dead trees still standing like grave markers, their branches lined with large crows and magpies. The dusty yellow grass, like a dry carpet, cropped short by sheep.

Eucalyptus, if you haven't read it, is about a man called Holland who, after getting a hefty insurance cheque because he wagered his wife would have twins (one is still born), buys an almost treeless property in western New South Wales. His wife has passed away, he has only his little girl, Ellen. 

He starts planting eucalyptus trees on the farm and it soon turns into a hobby, then an obsession. Holland, son of a baker and a boiled-lolly-maker, becomes a "leading expert in the field", and has managed to get a specimen of all the species, and got them to grow. 

As Ellen grows up, she becomes stunningly beautiful, her face "speckled" with freckles, moles, so that the eye wanders all over. She gets more and more attention from the lads in town, until Holland makes a decision. The man who can name every tree on the property will win his daughter's hand in marriage.

So begins an amusing charade of suitors failing to get past the first few trees, up until Mr Cave, who names them all.  Meanwhile, an unnamed man courts Ellen amongst the trees with stories woven in and inspired by the names of the different trees, and in doing so names them all before Mr Cave.

This is a book of stories within stories, as well as snippets of information, facts, history, cultural conundrums. One of my favourite stroies is about the green grocer in Carlton who makes pictures out of fruit to attract the attention of a pretty but vain woman. 

A lot of the stories have connections to people in the town - some made up, some maybe not - and it's almost like a puzzle to figure them out.

Ellen is a slightly disappointing character, almost as if Bail doesn't know how to write female characters, or doens't understand them enough to really flesh them out. The men were so neatly, perfectly described with some simple brush strokes, the short-comings in Ellen were made noticeable by comparison. The ending, too, was not quite as satisfying as it could have been, though it works and fits with the rest of the book.

It is set some time after the Second World War, I think in the 40s or 50s though it doesn't actually say, and so can get away with the main concept, plus some others. I don't think this story could be transferred so well into our current time. 

One of the more provoking scenes is where Ellen, coming upon her only tree, E. Maidenii, she finds a nail driven into the trunk. You can guess her feelings there. Then she hears Mr Cave and her father approaching, and hides, only to see them start pissing against the trunk of her tree. Great imagery and symbolism there!

The book is full of beautiful imagery, using words to tell multiple layers of a story, like bark on a tree.
I'm looking forward to hearing what the others in the bookclub think, though I doubt they'll treasure it as much as I do. I doubt any of them have so much as seen a eucalyptus tree, and so can have no idea of how all-encompassing they can be, how richly they can smell, how dominating they can be on a given landscape, how poetic, how lonely, how stately, how forlorn, they can look.
I wish I could share how I feel about the land that is Australia.