Department of English
Writing the Journey: June 1999
Intimate Borders: Drifting Families and Traveling Trees in Murray Bailís Eucalyptus
Allice Brittan
University of Pennsylvania
abrittan@english.upenn.edu
In The Road to Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and History, Paul Carter contests that the tree, "throughout the early [Australian] travel literature, serves to symbolize most profoundly for the newcomers the idea of place": specifically, gum trees emerge ìin the literature of traveling and settling as fundamental expressions of the newcomers " desire to inhabit" (264). Also evident in early settler/travel writing is the suggestion that eucalypts harbour "spatial fantasies," both in their capacity to be transformed into essential items-- homes, furniture-- and in "their possibilities of darkness and light, height and depth" (271). Moreover, Carter argues that settler writing reveals that "gum trees...inspired the thought of other places," allowed the imagination of departure and return (266). The tree is an "imaginative window, a site of reverie" (267). For Carter, as for Murray Bail, the eucalypt represents place, Australia, but is also a portal to other places: the tree becomes a marker of home and an imaginative vessel for leaving home, for creating the stories (and the diaspora of trees) which situate Australia in an international context.
This paper will explore Bail's depiction of traveling trees, eucalypts gathered together from all corners of Australia to flourish on Holland's property in New South Wales, and exported to all corners of the globe. These are trees which harbour "spatial fantasies" not only because they are emigrants, connecting Australia with "Italy, Portugal, Northern India, California," and parts of Africa, but because they are sites of stories, narratives of desire and geography (23). For Ellen's nameless suitor, eucalypts inspire tales of travel: lovers separated by national borders; daughters fleeing enraged fathers; immigrant desert explorers. However, these eucalypt-stories of uncertain genus are also narratives of family: the tree in the family tree. While the novel both celebrates and undercuts the taxonomic impulse to accurately name different species of eucalyptus, it also questions the possibility of classifying or containing familial relationships. As Ellen asks herself repeatedly, "What exactly is a father to a daughter?" (18). Holland, that "father-shape," is at some points like a brother, at other points indistinguishable from herself: when men approach his daughter Holland feels that "he himself [is] being violated" (50).
My purpose is to bring together the complexities of Bail's representation of migrant trees and the traveling narratives they inspire and his conception of drifting families: several mothers who die or disappear; a husband carried off by a fast river swollen with rain; mysterious pregnancies, and surrogate parents. Bail suggests that travel may involve crossing and re-imagining intimate borders-- between parents and children, husbands and wives-- as well as national ones.
Allice Brittan
University of Pennsylvania
abrittan@english.upenn.edu
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