E. Fabulae
Name and Story in Murry Bail's Eucalyptus
Eucalyptus is part modern Australian fairytale, and part botanical catalogue. At first it seems that the Eucalypts have been used simply for their Australianess. However in this essay I will argue that the trees are used as a tool to illustrate the power of naming and the importance of story telling. At its heart, Eucalyptus is a novel about the conflict between these two ancient impulses.
The book opens with the act of naming. “We could begin with desertorum, common name Hooked Mallee.” (P 1) But this turns out to be a false start, and after trying a series of names the narrator eventually switches into fairytale mode, and begins again with “Once upon a time...” (p 3). Throughout the narrative Bail draws much symbolism from traditional tales – the importance of naming, the impossible quest and the unattainable beauty, the pricking of a finger and the waking from sleep.
Eucalyptus is a story about stories, but it is also a story about naming. The premise of the book is Holland’s decision that “the man who correctly named every eucalypt on the property would win the hand of his daughter.” (p 56). Many Feminist theorists argue that naming is a male action, a way of gaining power and control over woman and nature. It is Adam who names all the creatures of the earth, and who names woman (Genesis 2:20-23). As Berman argues, “By naming other beings, objects and actions, male culture has excluded other ways of knowing through the creation of categories which serve as boundaries…” and “The distinctive feature of feminist analysis of language, thought and reality, is that women did not create these categories.” Naming is a way of dividing, binding, confining. This, Bail writes, is what draws men to the world of Eucalypts. They are diverse, chaotic, too loosely contained. They cry out for “a ‘system’ of some kind, where order could be imposed on nature’s unruly endlessness.” (p 35)
Bail writes that Holland wants to “know everything” and he begins with learning names (p 15). When Ellen is a child Holland tells her stories, but it is clear that this is not his natural inclination, and he shrugs off their significance. As Bail points out, when Holland numbers the shoes this anecdote underlines his need for classification and order (p 30). Holland seems most comfortable in the world of trees, and seems at a loss as to what to do with the daughter he has ended up with. He treats Ellen as though she is one of his rare specimens. When he moves her from the city to the country he thinks of ‘Acclimatising’ as though he is transplanting her. Although he knows her measurements (p 87) he does not know her feelings and desires. Ellen is described as having a speckled beauty (p 32), perhaps like the spotted gum which has an irregular mottled surface, she is slender, straight and pale, like E. Maidenii, but we know little else about her.
Classification and naming is also important to Mr Cave, and not being able to remember a name is the cause of distress. When conversing with Holland he forgets someone’s name, and begins “clicking his ballpoint – the frustration. ‘His name was, what’s his name? It was the name of an English town.’” Although he has forgotten the man’s name, he remembers it is related to another name.
Naming is a way of claiming, dominating and controlling, and Ellen reacts to the naming of the Eucalypts with growing panic. When she realises that Mr Cave has almost completed the task she goes limp “the way a woman is said to go limp on the verge of rape.” (p 161). And later, in her room, she feels hemmed in, “not by the painted walls, more by her father squatting over every eucalyptus name in the book, and Mr Cave, advancing with his reliable tread.” (p 208). While the two men go about naming the trees, “Ellen never wanted to hear the name of another Eucalypt again.” (p 165) But it is not the Eucalypts she is reacting against, it is the process of naming.
Holland warns Ellen against any man who “deliberately tells a story.” He advises her to ask, “Why is he telling it? What does he want?” (p 53). And when Ellen first meets the mysterious stranger, she does ask him, “‘What is it you want?’” But instead of answering, the stranger asks her “‘Who might you be?’ ‘That doesn’t matter!’” Ellen replies, refusing to let him name her (p 102). Instead of being distressed by the inability to name her, the stranger accepts this. Later, when she asks him “‘Do you know my name?’ he replies “‘Of course. But don’t ask me now.’”(p 128) He himself is never named, and so remains untamed and mysterious.
When Ellen first encounters the stranger he seems on the point of naming the tree he is sitting under, but decides against it. Instead, after some thought, he launches into a seemingly unrelated story. At first Ellen is confused by the disconnected stories, and wonders if he is making them up as he goes along. She tries “to decipher a shape to the stories... a hidden pattern.” (p 220). When, under E. exserta, common name messmate, the stranger tells a story about two soldiers who are friends, Ellen thinks his stories grow “from the names of the eucalypts, usually the less fancy common names”, and she notes that many of the stories are “based on the flimsiest foundations, or even a complete misreading of a name”, but this doesn’t matter to her (p. 146). In fact, it seems to win her over. She is enchanted by his stories, but she is also relieved that he doesn’t insist on naming everything. Later in the novel he notes that “‘we are not comfortable if a thing we have seen isn’t attached to a name” (p 251) and yet this doesn’t seem to be his own philosophy. But perhaps he is comfortable because he does in fact know the names – of Ellen, and of the eucalypts – even though he is not letting on.
Ellen never realises that the stranger is a former botanist, and knows the names of all of the eucalypts, not only their common names, but also the scientific names. The reader, also, is unaware of this, unless knowledgeable about Latin or the naming of Eucalypts. Ellen thinks that the stranger has made a flimsy connection between the name “messmate” and mates on a troopship. But the Latin name for the tree, Exserta, means protruding (Chippendale and Johnston 32) and one of the soldiers is in love with a girl with prominent teeth.
What the stranger is doing, in fact, is making a game out of the names. “Give me the name of a Eucalypt,” he seems to be saying, “and I will make you a story.” Microtheca means a small case or container (Chippendale and Johnston 61-62) and under this tree he tells a story involving a small enamelled tin (p 104-107). Foecunda means fruitful (Chippendale and Johnston 56), and under this tree he tells a story about an Italian who has a fruit shop (p 119).
As Sheehan notes, the eucalypt is dependent on fire. In drought, it “drapes incendiary streamers of tinder... the oil in its leaves is flammable... seeds rain down from the charred canopy... ash buries them in an environment of mineralised biochemicals... fire has swept competition away...” It seems strange, in a novel so focused on eucalypts, that fire does not play an important role. Holland’s Eucalypts, taken from their natural environments and contained in Holland’s property, are able to survive because he cares for them. When a species is struggling, he “…nursed the last remaining plant… forked the earth, and gave it a drink from a cup…” (p16). He has bought them as seedlings, or perhaps as treated seeds. But once Holland has gone, they won’t be able to continue growing in the controlled manner he has imposed upon them. In order to reproduce, and to survive, they will need the untamed energy of the bush fire. The only time that fire is mentioned, it is as a metaphor for stories spreading (p115). Perhaps, if Ellen is to be compared to a eucalypt, then she needs stories (fire) in order to survive. The novel is about Holland’s gradual realisation that it is not naming, order and containment that Ellen needs to survive, but freedom, spontaneity, and stories.
At the end of the book Holland seems to realise that it is stories that will win Ellen, not naming. Cave, who has won in the naming department, is defeated by the storytelling test. He tells a story, but it is in the first person, and appears to be a true story, not made up on the spot (pp 235-237). This is why, even though he tells a story, he fails to win Ellen. When the stranger sneaks into her room, Ellen realises that “The stories he had told for her over different parts of the property Ellen all along had assumed were made up on the spot for her benefit, which accounted for her curious possessive interest as she had listened. None of them relied on the usual ‘I this, I that’ which all adds up to ‘I am’, And now, when it was necessary to tell the story of all stories, a story specifically to save her... he was launching into personal reminiscence, just like everybody else.” (pp 246-247) But then the stranger seems to realise her disappointment, and quickly switches out of the first person.
The irony is, of course, that stories and names are aspects of the same impulse – language, the tool we use to understand and communicate about the world around us. Carl Linnaeus devised the system we still use for naming, ranking, and classifying organisms. His universal system gave each organism one Latin name, to indicate the genus, and another “shorthand” name for the species (UCMP). His classifications were determined by the number and arrangement of the reproductive organs of a plant; he disapproved of the use of locations, colour etc as names, but the system took on a life of its own. Some generic names describe the colours of the tree, others are simply the name of the place where the species is found, or the person who discovered it, or the aboriginal name, with a Latinised ending tacked on. E. Maidenii, for example, is named after Joseph Henry Maiden (Cole). Some names are taken at random from classical mythology.
Murray Bail has used scientific names to write a story about stories - but the origin of the scientific names is in language and language is that magic thing that humans invented to tell stories.
At the beginning of this essay I noted that it was Adam who began the process of naming the natural world. But Eve was not impressed by his names. Instead she listened to the persuasive, cunning language of the serpent, that told her a story of how the world could be different. She chose freedom, and all the joy and pain that comes with it, over the confinement and order of the garden. Like Ellen, she chose stories, over names. Perhaps it is not insignificant that, standing under E. Foecunda, the fruitful eucalypt, the nameless stranger offers Ellen an apple.
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Works Cited
Bail, Murray. Eucalyptus. Melbourne: Text Publishing, 1998.
Berman, Tzeporah. The Rape Of Mother Nature?: Women in the Language of Environmental Discourse in Trumpeter1992. Internet resource at URL:
Chippendale and Johnston, in Kelly, Stan. Eucalypts. Melbourne: Thomas Nelson (Australia) Ltd, 1969.
Cole, Dr Creagh. Forest Flora of New South Wales: The Electronic Edition in LASIE Vol 31, No 3. Internet Resource at URL:
University of California Museum of Palaeontology (UCMP). Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778). Internet Resource at URL:
Sheehan, P. A nation hostage to the gum. Internet resource at URL: