Eucalypts: A Celebration

by John Wrigley, Murray Fagg

Eucalypts are a familiar part of the Australian landscape and an integral part of their identity. They have farmed them and used them to build houses, furniture, roads, and bridges since the beginning of white settlement. They have been inspired by them, painted them, made films about them, written books about them, and of course Aboriginal Australians have long made musical instruments from them. Though a small number are found as native plants in several other countries, Eucalypts are a very Australian tree. This book celebrates their diversity, their beauty, and the role they play in the history, culture, and economy of Australia. It looks at their evolution, biology, horticulture, and ecology, together with their classification and the botanists involved. Through historic and contemporary images, it examines the many ways in which they have served Aboriginal, colonial, and contemporary Australians in both practical and aesthetic ways. Eucalypts have quite literally been the building blocks of that nation and this beautiful book tells their complete story for the first time.

344 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 2010

Reviews

[Lloyd Downey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like any Australian, the smell of eucalyptus trees or the smell of the leaves burning immediately evoke the Australian bush for me. It even happens overseas where one can encounter Eucalypts in the strangest places. I remember finding some huge gums at the Monastery de Yuste in Spain. An exceedingly out of the way place where the Emperor Charles V retired to live a life of prayer..along with his retainer of about 50 people. What impressed me about these gums was that (apart from being huge...and I'd guess over 100 years old), they were unmarked by insect attack as one would expect in Australia. I guess they could grow in this remote place with no natural predators around to attack them.
Well John Wrigley and Murray Fagg have done a workman like job of putting this "celebration" of Eucalypts together. I say "workmanlike" because that is how it appears to me. It's not a great work of literature..the prose is functional but a bit like reading one of my old botanical or forestry text books. The occasional error has been allowed to creep in (eg. p219 the volume of timber in E. regnans reads as 358 square m instead of cubic m)...but on the whole it's been well edited. Some lovely photos but it's a bit formulaic somehow: A list of headings such as Classifying Eucalypts, Eucalypts in Art and Culture, Eucalypts in wartime etc. ...add some archival photos plus a bit of text ..and there you have it.
I rather liked the small vignettes on individual species that are scattered throughout ...despite the fact that they read a bit like a botanical key (and my old forestry text books). Maybe I'm being a bit harsh on them because they have actually done something that probably could have been done many years before. And they have collected a power of information about Eucalypts together in the one place. And some of it is fascinating. I did not know, for example, that a Mallett is a small tree, lacking a lignotuber and with branches angled steeply from low down on the trunk. (It's a WA term). Nor did I know that there is a Mallee tree....the Meelup Mallee (in WA) that may be 6000 years old (P210).....probably the oldest tree in Australia. And it's basically just one tree or clones of the one tree.
On the whole I enjoyed it and learned quite a lot. Oh, one thing that I did not appreciate before reading this book was that the early artists had a lot of trouble painting Eucalypts as they actually are. The best example of this in the current book is a painting by Joseph Lycett ( P 245) of a scene in Van Diemen's Land that actually shows Eucalypts more or less as they are but when the painting was turned into an engraving it was changed into e
English-type, maybe deciduous, trees. It really took quite some time before trees were being shown as they actually are in Australia and not how somebody back in England thought they should be.
Four stars from me.

[Lindy · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you've ever wanted to know more about the wondrous eucalypts of Australia, this is your book. Not only are they categorised in genus and type with a lot of information, but Wrigley also provides a cultural history of how our eucalypts have been used, and abused, since colonisation. It blew my mind.

[Chris Cousins · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful description of Australia's iconic tree. The authors have written a number of books about Australian Native plants. This is one of the best.