The tangled and proliferating roots of eucalyptus’ social and natural histories invite us to follow them: they lead to places and times both remarkably surprising and depressingly predictable. Indebted to the pioneering, interspecies conceptual tentacularity of Anthropocene scholars like Anna Tsing, Donna Haraway and Timothy Morton, I want to write this history with the many stories that eucalyptus have both figured in, and which, increasingly, they themselves have configured.
Be warned: such stories are not fairytales, so there is no guarantee of a happy ending. They are, then, much like ours: care enfirling fear; hope sprouting from the cracks in the chewing gum-blotched concrete beneath your feet. From The Dreaming of Australia’s traditional owners of the Land, post goldrush California and the First Fleet’s arrival at Botany Bay, to the firescapes of central Portugal, the corporately-occupied jungles of Thailand, and a whole retinue of other contemporary capitalist nightmares, eucalyptus is The Tree with a Thousand Faces: the selfish, sacred, bountiful, iconic, fear- and aw-inspiring tree of colonists, capitalist, fascists, communists, peasants, farmers, indigenous folk, scholars, scientists, writers and poets alike.
The Tree with a Thousand Faces 