Read Online Eucalyptus by Murray Bail - Free Book Online

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