“Trees are mnemonics for more and more trees.” It isn’t a line from Murray Bail’s 1998 novel Eucalyptus – it’s from Thea Astley’s A Kindness Cup – but it easily could be. The maddening fact of trees, their ubiquity and strangeness but also their tendency to both suggest and withhold meaning, sits at the centre of the novel – and this new operatic adaptation, by composer Jonathan Mills and librettist Meredith Oakes – as if taunting us.
Certainly they taunt Ellen (Desiree Frahn), raised on a rural New South Wales property surrounded by hundreds of species of eucalypt, a result of her father’s peculiar obsession. Holland (Simon Meadows) has coped with the death of Ellen’s mother by embarking on a grand scheme to plant as many species of eucalypt as possible. And when faced with the prospect of marrying off his daughter, he concocts another scheme: only the man who can name every species will be allowed to wed her. It’s a story ostensibly set in the aftermath of the second world war, but its roots go far deeper, into the realm of fable.
In adapting the story into an opera, Mills and Oakes face a singular problem, one that seems embedded into the fabric of the work and therefore difficult to shake. As men line up, drawn either by Ellen’s acclaimed beauty or the novelty of the challenge, our heroine can do nothing but wait. She is horrified by the man who seems most likely to succeed, the plodding and priggish Mr Cave (Samuel Dundas), but she is hopelessly impotent to change her situation or choose for herself. She’s fundamentally a princess in a tower.
