Ivor Indyk and the strange allure of Eucalyptus

'The Strange Allure of Eucalyptus'

This is an excerpt of the inaugural lecture delivered by the Whitlam Chair in Writing and Society, University of Western Sydney.
29 May 2005 at Government House, Sydney
For a full transcript please contact the author

It isn't often that an Australian novel of literary quality displays its power in an obvious public manner, but for some months at the end of 2004 and the beginning of 2005, Murray Bail's novel Eucalyptus appeared frequently as a controversial item in news stories and articles in the media.

This upwelling of public interest in a novel which had been published six years before, in 1998, and which might otherwise have disappeared quietly into the annals of Australian literature, like many excellent Australian novels, was due in large part, of course, to the controversy surrounding the filming of the novel, and the improbable participation in the film version of Eucalyptus, of Russell Crowe as the shy lover and Nicole Kidman as the nineteen year-old Ellen, the girl he woos, through storytelling rather than heroic action.

At the same time, perhaps encouraged by the new-found popularity of the novel, there was also a critical interest in what the success of Eucalyptus might have to say about the current state of Australian fiction and Australian literature in general.

The response in this case was rather different to the breathless anticipation, and then sorrow, with which the process of filming, and its cancellation, was greeted in the press. In the Weekend Australian of 22 January 2005 Andrew McCann took Eucalyptus as his leading example when he accused Australian novelists of avoiding the combative role they might be expected to play in relation to the important social issues of our time, by retreating into nostalgia, melancholia, lyricism, and - as in Eucalyptus - 'the seductions of storytelling'. The result, according to McCann, 'is a literature incapable of questioning its institutional or ideological functions.'

Earlier, in an essay published in the Sydney Morning Herald book pages in December 2004, Louise Adler had also regretted the fact that Australian novelists seemed unwilling to address issues of national importance. She too blamed their 'melancholy inward gaze', then added another self-effacing quality, the tendency in our writing towards laconic understatement.

But the real problem, for Adler, was that contemporary Australian novelists seemed incapable of measuring up to 'the big picture', and of giving us novels which entertain 'big ideas'. Once again Eucalyptus is taken as the exemplary text, this time in a comparison with Philip Roth's American Pastoral.

Roth's novel takes the whole of America for its theme, while Eucalyptus 'seems to be a perfectly formed miniature, a quintessentially Australian novel hedged all around by the hesitations and qualifications of self-knowledge.' [she may mean 'self-consciousness'] And Adler goes further. America's literary culture celebrates imaginative daring, and in its competitiveness, drives its writers on to intellectual and creative boldness.

By comparison, Australian literary culture appears self-referential and reluctant to take risks, 'we cling to the ironic, the small view, the local yarn, to light comedy, to laconic and modest cynicism.'

This comparison between American and Australian literary culture, the one so grand, the other so limited in its aspirations, is made quite frequently, and I can never really understand its logic: certainly not when it is applied to Philip Roth's American Pastoral, a novel built on the minute inspection of a glove and its relation to the social economy of New Jersey, a focus so local it makes Bail's use of the eucalypt seem boldly continental by comparison. But even if we allow the comparison, as it must surely be true in some respect, that the literature of the most powerful nation on earth will itself be marked by an awareness of power and scale and ambition - why should it follow that the literature of our own country must also display the features of an imperial grandeur, and be condemned as wanting when it doesn't display them?

I would like to defend those very qualities which seem so unprepossessing and cowardly to the critics I have mentioned: the irony, the reserve, the understatement, the lyricism, the melancholy leavened by comedy, the cherishing of the small and the local. There is in all of these qualities, as they express themselves in our literature, a recognition of limitation, which is the exact opposite of the sense of power our writers are constantly being exhorted to display.

Yet there is also a strange power here, an allure if you like, in the recognition of limitation. The climax of the Eucalyptus film drama, the event which brought the tensions in the cast out into the open, and led directly to the cancellation of the film, was by all accounts, the first full read-through of the script, with all of the actors present.

As the story in the newspapers had it, as Russell Crowe began reading his part he became more and more subdued: his voice dropped away, he mumbled his words, eventually he became so quiet he could not be heard - then he stopped reading altogether. The next day he appeared with a flurry of changes to the script, 'perhaps to beef up his part' according to the report, which added, 'His recommendations were not offered gently.' Of course there could be many reasons for this behaviour, but I like to see in it the alluring qualities of Bail's own Eucalyptus, powerful even when filtered through the film script, stilling the aggressive posturing of Maximus Decimus Meridius, feared general of the mighty emperor Marcus Aurelius, and reducing him to a whisper, then to silence.

Excerpt ends