Meanwhile, Ellen's other suitor captures first her imagination and then her heart with stories of apprentice hairdressers who fall in love with plain-Jane heiresses solicitors' daughters involved with married men and lonely canary breeders who almost find happiness with spinster piano teachers. Cave continues to successfully identify every tree on the property, thus drawing ever closer to his prize. Indeed, despite her father's warning to 'beware of any man who deliberately tells a story,' Ellen's Prince Charming turns out to be a mysterious young stranger who finds her wandering among her father's trees and spins her tale after tale, each one tied to a different kind of eucalypt. Roy Cave, a man renowned in the eucalyptus world, someone who 'employed with lip-smacking relish the terms 'petiole,' 'inflorescences,' 'falacte' and 'lanceolate,' and he was also comfortable with 'sessile', 'fusiform' and 'conculorous.''Įven in so wonderfully fractured a fairy tale as Murray Bail's Eucalyptus, it's obvious that Roy Cave is hardly the stuff romantic dreams are made of. all the way from Darwin.' Not one is successful. Men try and fail: there is the gentle schoolteacher who 'had correctly named eighty-seven eucalypts and was doing it well when he went blank at the fatly handsome Jarrah up against the fence behind the house' and the New Zealander who 'came up against, and was defeated by, one of the many Stringybarks.' Old men, young men, commercial travelers, sheep-shearers-even a ' smiling Chinaman.

Once upon a time, on a property in western New South Wales, a man named Holland plants hundreds of varieties of eucalyptus trees, then decrees that only the suitor who can name each and every one of them will be worthy to marry his beautiful daughter, Ellen. After all, she was living on a property in western New South Wales.' 'The idea that Holland's daughter was like the princess locked in the tower of a damp castle was of course false.

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