Eucalyptus (7 page)

‘Beware,' Holland told his daughter, ‘beware of any man who deliberately tells a story. You're going to come across men like that. Know what I'm saying?' He wanted to take her hands until they hurt. ‘I want you to listen to me. There's no real reason for you to be going into town. But leaving that aside: it's worth asking, when a man starts concocting a story in front of you. Why is he telling it? What does he want?'

The idea that Holland's daughter was like the princess locked in the tower of a damp castle was of course false. After all, she was living on a property in western New South Wales. There was plenty of space to move about in. Yet it did seem she had been removed from view—unless she had decided herself to step back. Even if this was partly true—imaginations had taken off running—the slightest suggestion of trapped beauty produces a deeper resonance than plain beauty. It could only add to her desirability; and was Holland's blindspot.

Fellow arborists, politicians, soil-erosion specialists, farmers' delegations, even the occasional tourist who had once been welcomed, were now discouraged. Holland could no longer be sure whether their interest was in the trees or his daughter. A friendly neighbour and son arriving unannounced as they do in the country districts would be received politely; that was about all. If the lanky son was lucky he'd glimpse Ellen's face at a window, as if under water.

Sometimes Ellen was seen across the river among the trees, sliced into verticals: that is, fragments of coloured cloth. Whenever she did step out in her dainty shoes and appear on the main street her beauty was startling—flesh, contoured and speckled.

Holland was conscious of people waiting for him. Each day he woke to a sparkling morning, knowing his trees were arranged outside in their remarkable variety, only to find his daughter-question in all its imprecision still there before him. He was being forced to think about something he hadn't wanted to think about; he wanted to return to thinking about the usual other things. The subject, or rather the situation, wouldn't go away.

The butcher's wife wasn't much help. It became awkward having his cup of tea with her, now joined by her friend next door, the rhythmically nodding postmistress.

‘Let the poor girl make up her own mind. How old is she? She knows more about these things than you do. What do you know? A few facts and figures about gum trees. And what use are all your trees now, tell me that? You'll just have to close your eyes with Ellen and hope for the best.'

Time and landscape were forever porous; prescribing a narrow radius for a daughter over undulating ground could never last, not exactly.

Holland decided to take Ellen to Sydney; she was nineteen.

In the big city he imagined she would blend in amongst the criss-crossing movements, the congested numbers.

In fact, everything about her was even more noticeable in Sydney, her beauty given greater contrast by the healthy downright ordinariness of the crowd-majority. As well, he soon realised there was a greater concentration of men; so many formidable men with experienced manners; he was constantly noticing a man or groups of city men running their eyes over his daughter, who appeared completely oblivious.

They stayed in Bondi. Ellen's idea was to go to the beach every day. She wanted to be alone. To his surprise she moved about with ease in other parts of the city, as if the dream-like distances that existed between things on their property meant nothing to her. She got him to buy her a pair of fancy sunglasses. He had always bought all Ellen's clothes, including underclothes. There was always something he felt she should be wearing. When she raced out in the morning and returned in the evening she appeared, to her father, tall and shining.

Although he said very little he was irritable. When he sat in the foyer or out on the footpath his nose felt too big. There was nothing much to do. He kept looking at his hands. A golden age when men stained their fingers tribally with nicotine. What these red-brown hands had produced—eucalypts, demonstrating diversity—did not seem necessary in the city. And so on and on he fretted; waiting for his daughter. This happened to be their last trip together.

He had always been a poor sleeper. She remembered as a child he had told her about special ways of getting to sleep, ways which relied entirely on a numbing visual sameness, which he exaggerated while he was shaving, to make her laugh. Now the light showed under his door, and she could hear her father creaking about at all hours.

Finally, he emerged from the office and entered her bedroom.

They spoke for some time; Ellen wept.

The same day Holland's decision became known. It was simple enough. The man who correctly named every eucalypt on the property would win the hand of his daughter, Ellen.

At first there was a kind of milky silence; people couldn't believe their ears. By the time it appeared as a story in the papers, young hopefuls and others not so young were already preparing themselves.

• 5 •
Marginata

A BRIEF
word about the town; we'll keep it short, in homage to the main street.

It was small and yellowish. Anywhere else it would be called a ‘village'. It could even be a ‘hamlet': there was no church.

Otherwise it was a town that had
only one of everything
: hotel, bank, post office, picture theatre, a few shops displaying buckets, bolts of cloth, agricultural products and canvas awnings reaching down to the gutters in summer. It had one blonde, one man with one arm (El Alamein), one thief, one woman who could have been a witch. There was one person who wanted to be liked by everyone, one who always had the last word, one who felt trapped by marriage.

Tibooburra, further west, is known for the pile of hot boulders at the end of its one and only main street. Other towns achieve distinction with unavoidable monuments, such as merino rams or pineapples forty times their normal height, or the hand-lettered boast on the outskirts that this town has recorded the hottest temperature in Australia, or is the tidiest in the state—therefore, to be avoided; Mossman, in northern Queensland, has a sugar train most days hissing and pissing along its main street. This one—the yellowish town—has a dogleg throwing out the line of the street, so unexpected and yet in harmony with the outstretched verandahs it endowed the otherwise ordinary town with mass-reproduction qualities.

Most of Ellen's suitors lived in the town or the nearby countryside, and the town became a staging-post for the second wave, quietly determined optimists from other parts, including distant cities, the way Zanzibar in the last century was used by perspiring, single-minded British explorers setting forth into the interior.

The town filtered the suitors. Some didn't get beyond the hotel. Men made their way to the town out of sexual curiosity, casual plunderers who fancied their chances: after all, they could spot at a glance a Blue Gum, a Yellow Box, even the stunted
calycogona
, and quote its ridiculous nickname, Gooseberry Mallee. But they received a shock when actually confronted with the bewildering fact of so many eucalypts in the one spot, so many obscure species, and the stories of early failure of those who had gone before them, including well-qualified timber-cutters and the despondent local schoolteacher.

After a while these men drifted away without even seeing the speckled prize. One chap in a wool suit stepped off the train from Yass, made his way out to Holland's property, patting all the dogs on the way, took one look at the expanse of trees from the gate, turned around and went straight back home. More calculating ones who had not underestimated the test began by swotting up on the vast subject, their noses in inadequate botanical books.

Take Jarrah (
E. marginata
). Is there anyone not
baffled
by Jarrah—its hardness, its degree of difficulty? There is civil disobedience in its nature. Still, it should be admitted material difficulties can deepen the beauty of timber. The impulse is always to pick up and admire a piece of Jarrah—stroke it like a cat. Is it possible to say a piece of timber is ‘proud'? Unlike those that split at the slightest blow: that is, the skinny shivering pine, the spineless acacia? Jarrah had quite a name for endurance under the ground and under water. Streets were paved with it in Mediterranean Sydney and Marvellous Melbourne, the wood long outlasting the men who cut it into lengths, not to mention the loyal floorboards in ballrooms and grand hotels.

Handsome tree, straight and tall, it won't cultivate in plantations. (Cussedness, again.) Holland once had a stepfather called Jarraby, known to be proud, stubborn.

Away from Western Australia few people would know a Jarrah tree, even if they bumped into one.

Now it happened that the local schoolteacher was the early favourite to win Ellen's hand because he possessed the double qualification of an education and a real affinity for wood; carving heavy bowls for sensitive fruits such as peaches and grapes had become his solitary pastime. Sure enough, by lunchtime on the first day he had correctly named eighty-seven eucalypts, and was doing it well when he went blank at the fatly handsome Jarrah up against the fence behind the house.

‘Take your time,' Holland said, and cleared his throat. ‘No use going like a rat up a drainpipe,' he wanted to say.

He liked the young teacher. And there was no need to rush. As always it is fatal to panic. From the densities of Sydney the young teacher had been transferred to the country, a difficult lesson in drabness. Several times he had seen Ellen on the main street. Late afternoons and Sundays he walked along the dirt road, past the Salmon Gum, hoping she might emerge. And the property itself, all those broad acres of river frontage, big old homestead, barely came into the teacher's equation at all.

On the point of saying ‘Jarrah!' one eye became entangled in the foliage of the Karri (
E. diversicolor
) nearby.

‘That's too bad,' Holland stubbed his cigarette. ‘That's a shame. I had you down as a real chance.'

Before setting out, each suitor was invited into the house—into the parlour, no less—for a cup of tea. Holland could sit back and examine them. In a real sense the test began there and then. Coming forward to serve them was the prize herself, more speckled, certainly more beautiful than they remembered or had ever imagined, allowing a glimpse of cleavage and a shadow of what appeared to be faint consternation.

From the day her father made his decision on the marriage question she hardly knew what to say to him, or anyone. No ancient grandmother, wise mother or interested sisters were at hand to help. It hardly mattered that the eucalyptus test would sort out the contestants, wheat from the chaff and all that, a process simultaneously healthy and unhealthy, as her father put it. ‘Only a man with golden hair, a golden-haired boy out of the ordinary, is going to name all these trees—someone like your old father here,' he had said to her.

The early suitors were all locals. At the sight of some she couldn't help laughing, until her father said, ‘That'll do now!'

One was a retired shearer, old enough to be her grandfather—no teeth. The town's one and only part-time plumber put on a virtuoso display of relaxation on the floral sofa, stretching out his legs and calling for another cup of tea, only to step out the front door and fail to identify the very first tree he pointed to, the Black Peppermint, which is as common as rain. Even Holland gave a small laugh. Many who managed to reach eighty or more without a stumble were knocked out by a common roadside gum; lack of concentration, according to Holland. Another one who knew timber but not trees was young Kevin who had lost his arm working for a sawmill. Surprising how many failed to spot the single Ironbark intruder in the windbreak.

Needless to say there were men who tried to bluff, or laugh their way through, or devise delaying tactics. Such ruses which can be seen as extensions of character had served them in the past. The sore loser became angry when he lost! Others offered money. Why not? It was the full world on display, in miniature. One or two tried to enter via the side door, as it were: ‘Isn't there some other way we could arrange this? Can't we sit down and discuss it? What I know about gum trees would fit on the head of a pin, but I do know I'd be a good man for your daughter.' The bank manager sent his short-sighted son. A dark stranger from another town claimed a photographic memory: accordingly the first eucalypt he had never seen before finished him. Silence was generally ingrained; only a few never stopped talking. Now and then Ellen in her room could hear a loud voice from a sloping paddock. Performers from a passing circus had heard the story of the beautiful daughter and argued for too long about drawing lots. One of the nattiest of the dangerous commercial travellers put his name forward; Holland went into town and talked him out of it.

Evidently the very idea of a test to win a man's daughter was either nerve-racking or else altogether too strange: suitors were known to have drunk seven schooners an hour before. A country jockey fronted up accompanied by his strapper who mentioned to Ellen the jockey was already married. ‘I'll have to take a squiz at a leaf,' said another one. For that I'll need a ladder.' At the sight of these men dolled up for the occasion in a new shirt and haircut Ellen felt a faint shift into sadness, the flutter of a white bird in a cage; others came as they were; some stank. A procession; all sizes.

Ellen didn't really like the look of any of them.