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connection worth pondering: these days, as paddocks are becoming larger, the corresponding shift in the cities where the serious printing’s done is for paragraphs smaller. A succession of small paddocks can be as irritating as long ones wearisome. The single-idea paragraph which crowds the newspapers is a difficulty. Newspaper writers spend their lives trailing after people above the ordinary in some way or other—the human equivalents to earthquakes, train crashes, rivers in flood—and write small paragraphs about them, when everybody knows that a brief rectangular view is not enough. The people written about in newspapers have already made something visible of their lives, large or small, brief or lasting, which is surely why journalists take an interest out of all proportion in newspaper proprietors: for here is one of us, or almost, who is larger than life. Holland too would attract journalists, some with the bedraggled photographer in tow from the Sydney broadsheets. These days it’s common to trudge (as the reporters were forced to do) across a paddock that seems to go on forever and ever, amen. Other paddocks may be congested, untidy, restricting movement. It’s just as easy these days to get clogged up or tripped in the middle of a paragraph! As in a paddock it is sometimes necessary to retrace our steps. Easy to lose heart, lose your way. In these and other situations the impulse is to take the short cut. ‘A problem paddock’—there’s a common description. Words, yakety-yak, are spoken within the paddock (paragraph). The rectangle is a sign of civilisation: Europe from the air. Civilisation? A paragraph begins as a rectangle and by chance may finish up a square. Who was it said the square doesn’t exist in nature? A paddock has an alteration in the fencing for the point of entry, just as a paragraph has an indentation to encourage entry. A paddock too is littered with nouns and Latin in italics, even what appears to be a bare paddock. When Holland began planting the trees it was casually, no apparent design.
    A paragraph is supposed to fence off wandering thoughts.

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Diversifolia
    THE WORD eucalypt is from the Greek, ‘well’ and ‘covered’. It describes something peculiar to the genus. Until they open, ready for fertilisation, the eucalypt’s buds are covered by an operculum, in effect putting a lid on the reproductive organs.
    It is all very prudish. At the same time—and here we find paradox is a leading characteristic of the eucalypt—the surrounding leaves are almost promiscuous in their flaunting of different thicknesses, shapes, colours and shine: ‘fixed irregularity’ is botany’s way of putting it. One or two species even sport variegated leaves. Strangely with eucalypts, the higher on the tree the smaller the leaf. Another paradox: the largest eucalypts have the smallest flowers.
    The barks come in a bewildering range of textures and colours and so on, unusual for one genus, and often end up as final arbiters in the game of identification.
    There is still learned debate over the precise number of eucalypts. It’s well into the hundreds, but the figure keeps changing. At regular intervals there’s a career move from an institutional dark corner somewhere to reduce the total. Recently it has been suggested the Ghost Gum, which has long stood as the archetypal eucalypt, is not a eucalypt at all, but a member of the ‘Corymbia family’. The new name, if you don’t mind, would be Corymbia aparrarinja . Isn’t that a marriage of the Mafia and the Aboriginal? A good many people are trying to come to terms with this. A young nation has shallow roots and the slightest disturbance can throw out the equilibrium, patriotically speaking. Nationalism is nothing less than clutching at straws. It can only be hoped the ruling on the Ghost Gum will be revised again, or at least delayed. On the other