I had never taken so much note of the eucalyptus of my homeland, the Northern Tropics of Australia, as when I read Eucalyptus, a novel by Australian novelist Murray Bail.
I saw them straight and sparsely leafed. I saw them lean and sinewy with tufts of foliage. Heavy with flower and bearing painted birds, spreading their limbs for roosting flying foxes as the sun sank beneath the Coral Sea. They were always there, 700 species in all, but I had not really seen them.
It is fitting that a literary work that makes you see your world anew should win the Miles Franklin Award – and it did in 1999.
That was when I started musing and gazing at the Poplar Gum. There are great stands of them at Thala. They wind the paths and push against the rock walls. They shiver in the breeze and sprinkle their leaves. White powdery bark, stark in sunlight, is luminous when caught in the shine of a fat, full, tropical moon. The shadow of stout, ovate leaves dance across the gleam. The image is sensuous, secret and alluring.
It is easy to see what could have inspired Murray Bail to write his fairy tale novel of a man who rears his young daughter and watches her grow into a beautiful young woman on a property he has planted with hundreds of different gum trees. When she is nineteen, he announces she can only marry a man who can name all the species of eucalyptus he has planted – down to the last tree.
In soft morning light I watch the white bark peel to show the soft salmon of it’s under skin. It rains. The bark is a sheen of pale pastels painted by a master. This is how you come to know the name of a Eucalyptus.