Eucalyptus (6 page)

Every other week Holland was seen on the railway platform collecting seedlings wrapped in damp hessian, and one of the Sprunt sisters complained to anyone who'd listen that the dusty trucks delivering still more specimens were keeping her awake at night. The postmistress too reported a steady flow of seeds rustling around in manila envelopes, as well as monthly journals, and invoices decorated with sprigs.

On days when Holland secured an especially rare specimen he felt like a pearl-diver who has burst to the surface, holding up a treasure. Certain eucalypts were rare because they rarely took root beyond a narrow radius. They were sensitive to drainage, lime in the soil, degrees of frost, elevation, rainfall and God knows what. Some stubbornly refused to grow in the month of March, others the week after Christmas. One tree would thrive in the shade of another; another would not. They were hypochondriacs, demanding esoteric manures and watering by hand.

How he managed to cultivate to healthy size a Darwin Woollybutt (
E. miniata
), or those born in sandy deserts, is a mystery. The Silvertop Stringybark (
E. laevopinea
) requires 1000mm rainfall every year, and the Snow Gum, its name proclaims, thrives on altitude, sleet and ice. Somehow he had eucalypts coming forth on ordinary ground when normally they demanded clay, flat marsh or granite. After many false starts he encouraged the little Yellowtop Ash, so called, to poke out of some rocks. And so on.

This vast labour with axe, crowbar and bucket, and the hatless traversing of paddocks gave him coarse hands and split fingernails, lined his face and made it brown; though as he came forward on the main street there was no doubt he still had trace elements of delicacy, of pastry, the only son of a disappointed baker.

Did he eventually manage to have growing on his property every known eucalypt? What was he going to do next? With his daughter, Ellen, he'd always encouraged questions; but she didn't seem interested. He was always waiting. The father is always waiting for the daughter. If only she had asked he would have told her everything he knew. He was a world authority in a narrow field. It was not that he wanted to give out bits and pieces of knowledge, he wanted to share his interest. Early on she'd been his helper. Together they planted well over a hundred trees, until she seemed to lose interest.

It was virtually an outdoor museum of trees. A person could wander amongst the many different species and pick up all kinds of information, at the same time be enthralled, in some cases rendered speechless, by the clear examples of beauty. The diversity of the eucalypts itself was an education. At the slightest movement of the head there was always another eucalypt of different height, foliage and pattern of bark, and there was the weird-looking homestead as well, impressive in its dark imbalance, and glimpsed at a window or in a cotton dress at the middle distance, with an elbow welded to a tree, his daughter.

Holland had toyed with the idea of fitting labels to the trees.

Eventually he had them made up by the same firm that supplied the Royal Botanic Gardens in Sydney, the common and specific names neatly engraved on rectangles of weatherproof aluminium, about hand-size. A bright young chap had delivered them personally—a partner in the firm. Together they checked them over on the verandah, while talking about this and that. It took them hours. When Ellen came out with tea on a tray they were so engrossed all she could see was the stranger's neck, and Holland didn't introduce her. Later Holland would leave the names piled in the corner of his office which doubled as his bedroom. After all, by then he could identify each and every eucalypt, almost without looking.

A few notes, nothing definite, on
feminine beauty
. Briefly, and in a timid, earnest voice. Of course; why not? The idea of Ellen's beauty had travelled long distances (was said to have crossed two oceans) and in the process inscribed a small legend.

Here it's worth noting that beauty composed of porcelain niceness produces a weaker response in men than a ‘beauty' that appears more aware of itself. Smoothness, niceness—they're the kiss of death. In the male they activate obscure notions of the Mother! And—sexually speaking—who wants that? Whereas if the main component in beauty is a certain dissatisfaction or bad temper, it banishes in men all associations with the mother and so allows an immediate, unencumbered attraction across a broad front.

All this was multiplied in Ellen by another factor.

In the brief time when women wore little hats with veils screening their faces, like delicately crumpled graph paper, the little squares filled in here and there gave the face a random distribution of oriental birthmarks and moles. And Ellen's speckled beauty resembled this veiled effect—protected, veiled, even in close-up; a kind of provocative, insincere modesty.

In order to survive she grew aloof, avoiding the eyes of men in town.

The first man who saw Ellen naked was the only son of a local tractor dealer, Molloy. He was popular, a strong footballer. His father had recently given him a motorbike with an iridescent petrol tank.

There was that dirt road alongside Holland's property: it had no other function but to go on towards town, while its twin, the similar-coloured river, took a sluggish lunge away from the road, establishing on the distant curve a density of River Red Gums which never failed to attract the eye of sportsmen, even if to reach it meant crawling on all fours through the undergrowth. There was a sandy pool on the curve, concealed by overhanging branches which mottled and browned the water to tortoiseshell.

On a very hot day Ellen splashed in…came up with both hands sweeping hair back from her eyes. For a while she lay on her back, eyes closed; and in the pale combination of flesh and water, which can both be taken to the lips or penetrated by a hand, three dark areas beckoned.

When she stood in the shallows her breasts swung a little.

On both sides the fat gums appeared as an entourage of sturdy older women, raising their skirts above their knees, about to wade into the water.

Squatting, Ellen began pissing.

Young Molloy was behind a tree. To see better he took the squatting position too. A fly began crawling towards his nose. Eventually he lowered his eyes—to contemplate the future?

Accelerating away with legs splayed around the engine, increasingly slit-eyed, watery, he began yelling out at what had been granted to him. Without much warning he felt it all slip on the dirt from under him, the engine spun, and he yawned as he was met in the face by the barbed wire, which tore off most of his nose.

As owner of the fence Holland was an early visitor.

‘He sure was feeling pretty sorry for himself,' Holland told Ellen. ‘Both parents were there, no hard feelings about our fence. They are just pleased to still have him. It's all they could talk about. I suppose he's still alive, but it's not going to be much of a life. Milking cows is all he'll be good for.'

He lost the sight of one eye, quickly followed by the other.

Ellen had been told about his healthy good looks. It was said in town he had a wild streak.

‘I don't want to see you ever getting on the back of a motorbike,' Holland was saying.

One morning outside the Commercial Hotel, Ellen laughed—a sound no one in town had heard before. A tall waterfall from Africa or the Andes could have been transposed onto their dusty old street.

Apparently her father had said something dry. Looking across at him as he trudged Ellen laughed, and when he gave his two-stage smile, known elsewhere as a
muddy smile
, she tilted her throat and laughed all the more.

A daughter openly mocking a father: other women saw the power of her adult beauty overflowing as gaiety.

Everybody was proud of her; to think that such a beauty in all its rarity was living in their parts.

Conventionally strong men lost their tongues. At the sight of her, some were inflicted with a sort of paralysis. All they could do when Ellen came into town was stand about grinning and gaping. To get around this the lads speeding past the property made it a practice to sound their horns, and filtered by the river and the trunks of hundreds of eucalypts it reached the house like the faint bellowing of sexually mournful steers.

Of course there were some who boldly marched up and spoke to her. First they had to get past her father. And he was more like a tennis coach than a father, never letting his girl out of his sight. If a gangly young man appeared to bump into them and opened his mouth to say something, or if Holland came out onto the street to find his daughter in the sunlight half-listening to a man, or several of them, he stood beside her with an expression of concentrated shrewdness. Among them he was the expert. After all, she was his daughter; he knew her better than anyone.

The trouble was he was not impressed with any of them. There was something wrong with each and every one, if not in the way they spoke, in the way they looked; one of them held his smile too wide, with another it was the size of thumbs. By far the worst were those who exhibited a certain truculent ease. They literally bulged with familiarity, their hair combed like paddocks for sowing.

They were just beginning, like the country itself; Holland didn't know what to say to them.

His daughter, she had no idea what men took and discarded, how they went about it. Without thinking, Holland had hired a man from town to help grub out some trees, a contentedly married man, known to be reliable—until Holland caught him leaning on his shovel, doing nothing but watching Ellen. Later, he saw him offering her a cigarette. Holland felt as if he himself was being violated. She had always been at his side, had grown alongside him—an extension of himself.

Cars and trucks slowed down approaching the gate; for you never know your luck. Suitors came from all directions. If one knocked on the front door asking for his daughter, Holland was factually polite. One of them galloped up no hands on a horse! Noticing her curious smile Holland pointed out the idiot had been drinking.

In winter she liked to spend entire mornings in the tower where it was warm and she could feed the birds. From there the scale of her father's achievement could be seen; though when she took off her clothes and felt like an orchid, the all-over warmth opening the petals of her body, she became conscious of her nakedness mocking the laborious placement into all corners of the different species of trees. Other times she sat in her blue room brushing her lovely hair, which reminded Holland of her mother. She made her own clothes. She did sewing and general tidying and could be heard humming in the kitchen. The same small books were read over again. For all her beauty she ate noisily.

In gentle replay of when he had first arrived in the district, invitations were received from the same big houses, and in these houses the tables, the walls, the English clocks and their chimes, the pattern of plates, the side of lamb and boiled potatoes had remained the same. The hesitant young women in florals from Holland's day were larger, looser figures, mothers now with altogether different concerns. And attention this time was directed not really at Holland but his daughter who sat with a straight back, alongside (for instance) a broad-shouldered son clearing his throat in a new shirt. Ellen assumed a distant expression, as if she was obeying the obligations of her father.

Afterwards the man of the house, knowing Holland's interest, would sometimes toss the keys to the son to drive everybody around the property, while Holland sat in the back and identified each eucalypt in the headlights.

‘She's a gem, that one of yours,' the grazier would concede, meaning Holland's daughter.

Loudly, as well as quietly or through emissaries, it was pointed out a marriage would deliver impressive agricultural synergies, guaranteed to leave a smile on the face of everybody at the table. Holland gave the impression of weighing up each proposition in his hands. With these men he'd look thoughtful and make sucking sounds with his teeth while nodding or offering another cigarette, which is the way they themselves would have handled it, visually.

A certain restlessness entered Ellen's beauty.

The town women and women in the surrounding homesteads looked on and waited. One of the things Holland had learnt from his many years observing trees was
don't rush, there is natural speed
. And Ellen, she seemed more comfortable with the careless faces of seasonal workers, the filthy motor mechanics, and the afternoon drinkers; at least with them she looked on, bemused.

Holland said to his daughter, ‘I want you to promise me something: keep away from the commercial travellers. You've seen them in town with their Windsor knots and their fancy cigarette-lighters. A few have come to the door here, as you well know, thinking we'd buy ribbons and strips of cloth. They carry samples of jewellery and medicines in special suitcases. That little bloke who's been here—moustache—he sells hair oils, soaps and whatnot. I'm told what they do now is spread out a printed catalogue, where you put your finger on something that takes your fancy, and it gets delivered later. I'd say that was very clever.'

These were older men who had built dusty careers out of hearing the sounds of their own voices. They worked on commission. They knew when to advance, when to draw back. Holland had seen how the sturdy town women became lovely and childlike under their words. Could they spin a story! As an example, Holland pointed to the coloured curtains he himself had bought from one of these persistent silver-tongues, which had faded after one summer. Yet these natty men had an easy generosity. Later, that same peddler of shonky curtains who specialised in puns and perpetual dirty jokes had volunteered to pick up from a faraway town and deliver to Holland a scarce sample of Silver Princess, of the vaguely musical name,
E. symphyomyrtus
, which Holland then managed after much difficulty to breed in a gully.