Eucalyptus by Murray Bail Read Free Book Online

tracks. The Salmon Gum is normally found on the other side of the continent, near the goldfields of Western Australia. Salmon refers to the pinkish bark. Transplanted, the trunk of Holland’s was powdery-smooth, more like a rubber-band; ‘the colour of a nun’s belly’, someone else would say.
    Trees have followed the great migrations of the Irish, the Italians, the Jews, the Brits, the Greeks as they put down roots in foreign soil. The superimposition of different colours, shadows and water usage, as well as droppings of leaves, attracts misunderstandings and downright hostility—in Portugal the peasants have been ripping out young eucalypts—until the trees grow as part of the scenery, in front of which all cultures go through their motions.

    On the flat ground alongside the river, species of smooth girth had been chosen to represent (so it seemed) the uniform stillness of a rubber plantation; and long rectangles of silverish light angled in through the round-trunk verticals like searchlights seeking a solitary escapee, catching only a few moths and carefree birds.
    Ellen liked to run blindly into the centre of it all, until the silence replaced her footsteps, blanketing her eyes and mind with Slow Inevitable Growth and Patience Forever and Nothing Is One ; and surrounded by the multiplications of impassive trunks of the same diameter and same grey-green smoothness she’d half-imagine herself lost, and losing all sense of direction would let out a feeble cry, little more than a squeak, which was really the thrill of knowing her father and the house were only a few minutes away. She did this the day she first menstruated; a celebration of growth and confusion. The pale red of her fingerprints she tested on a trunk was the only primary colour in the grove.
    Remaining very still she noticed all manner of insects and little reptiles shifting about on uneven surfaces, while from a far distance the clip-clopping of a horse was her father’s Kelly axe ring barking a tree surplus to his requirements.
    Stillness is beauty, always.
    In our country a harmless tradition has been for the larger properties to lead the eye from the road up to the homestead via an avenue, a green artery of plane trees, or poplars that stand up like feathers. It depended on the history of the property and associated feelings of grandiloquence in the owners; how they saw themselves in the district.
    After going through the available anthographies Holland selected eucalypts for density of foliage, each different but set to reach the same height.
    Ellen helped by holding the surveyor’s string.
    â€˜One fine day this is all going to be yours,’ Holland gave a violent twist on the post-hole digger.
    As always her father spoke in brief assertions. Now a question seemed to lengthen his jaw, ‘Do you like the house, as a place?’
    She thought of her bedroom with her things and the blue curtains, the verandahs, the warmth of the kitchen. There were many empty rooms. Some dolls she’d left in the tower she found faded when she returned months later. Now and then the idea of having a brother had an urgent appeal, though she wondered whether he’d let her follow him around. And he, this father-shape, could almost be a brother when—an example—he allowed her to laugh in his face the moment he began explaining yet again that foxes at night have mauve eyes, and spiders glitter on the earth like stars.

    After the windbreak, the ‘rubber plantation’ and the ornamental avenue, Holland turned his back on mass formations. From now on he concentrated on individual species, planted singly. Otherwise there was no plan behind his program. Gradually he filled in the landscape. He slept for long periods. Days and weeks of inactivity were spent in bed, followed by intense activity. All along he avoided planting duplicates; and soon he ran into problems of supply. The more successful his program the more