Free Eucalyptus by Murray Bail

the air, striding up the drive to present himself. He had an intense moustache. His hair too was as dark as Dunedin. Before each eucalypt he stroked the moustache, and began to annoy Holland by laughing to himself as he struggled to name one of the more obscure species.
    â€˜By God, though, he knows his eucalypts,’ Holland said with respect. ‘And he doesn’t even live here. He’s a funny one. I caught him yesterday praying by the gate, just before he was about to start.’
    By the third day the New Zealander had passed the halfway stage.
    It was enough for Holland to chew thoughtfully on his toast, while Ellen could hardly swallow, imagining what it would be like living every day with such a man. And she felt strange knowing word of her plight had reached people in another country. Her father couldn’t stop shaking his head at how a man on the South Island had managed to become an expert on eucalypts; a real mystery to him. Eucalypts were native to Australia and nowhere else. He would have been amazed if more than fifty different eucalypts had been transplanted in the whole of New Zealand. On the morning of the fourth day Holland was on the point of asking a few questions when the man came up against, and was defeated by, one of the many Stringybarks, a scraggy looking E. youmanii , which could easily fool a professional botanist, and he left with a relieved nod, for the first time looking into Ellen’s face.
    The story of Holland and his beautiful daughter had crossed the Tasman; it travelled too up the centre of Australia, along the Stuart Highway, filling up with petrol on the way. It spread out from the highway, left and right, like the trunk and branches on a tree. As a consequence, a smiling Chinaman knocked on the door, all the way from Darwin. To Holland he gave a slight bow and said he was a merchant of fruit and vegetables.
    Everything he touched made him happy. He had what are called ‘eyes as sweet as sugar’. When Ellen poured him tea he smiled, ‘Nice hand you have.’ Ellen decided he would live to a great age. (A vague feeling, rather than a physiological fact: that an energetic brain can drag the body along for a few extra yards. Long are the lives of the philosophers.)
    At the same time, Ellen wondered if this happy man had experienced envy or jealousy, the confusions of loneliness—the usual mess—not to mention anything more serious, such as sudden gusts of despair.
    There he was now under the guise of oriental cheerfulness sifting through his taxonomy of botanical names and fitting them to a general appearance of a tree. Naturally he was stronger on the subtropical species from the Darwin area. Taking things more cautiously than the Kiwi, now and then standing back to say, ‘Ahhhh…’ at an especially graceful specimen, such as the Flooded Gum which formed an accidental triangle with the Silver Gimlet and the double-trunked Red Mallee ( E. socialis ), and constantly blowing on a red handkerchief for good luck, he hardly faltered, but smiled a little longer at difficult-to-recognise foliage.
    Nine days later he was still smiling. And his mouth began to remind Holland of his own father.
    â€˜Who’d want someone grinning like that around the house all day?’ he said to Ellen. ‘Don’t worry, he’s going to come a gutser, I can feel it. I don’t know how he’s got this far. How old would you say he was? I can’t make him out.’
    It finally took a eucalypt from the southern tip of Tasmania that doesn’t look like a eucalypt at all.
    The Chinaman actually tripped over it.
    The Varnished Gum ( E. vernicosa ) is more like a shrub or a creeper. It barely comes up to a man’s knees. Buds and fruits are in threes; the varnished leaves.

    The suitors were reduced to those with a professional knowledge of the subject. The idea of winning the hand of a man’s daughter by naming all his trees, and the