Parodying patriarchy : Murray Bail's Eucalyptus and the "logic" of domination

Murray Bail's small yet impressive fictional oeuvre includes the novels Homesickness, Holden's Performance and Eucalyptus, as well as a collection of short stories. His allegorical works unabashedly draw inspiration from a masculinist Australian literary tradition while simultaneously critiquing what A.A. Phillips referred to as the "self-confident Australianism" that has frequently accompanied this tradition (149). Bail's dissidence is often enacted quite explicitly in his novels via frequent self-reflexive narrative digressions. He compels readers to ponder the nature, purpose and power of language and stories and to consider recurrent national uncertainty as he articulates the tension of identity both on national and individual levels. His most recent publication Eucalyptus, winner of the 1999 Miles Franklin Award for Australian Literature, is both distinctive and defiant and cements Bail's standing as a great Australian parodist. More specifically, Bail's narrative provides a parodic expose of a decidedly misogynistic national ethos through its critique of constructions of masculinity and femininity within the Western tradition in general. This is explicated in Eucalyptus, in the main, through Bail's castigation of hierarchical dualisms which serve to perpetuate domination, exploitation and oppression. Bail's text highlights the gendered nature of these dualisms whereby the feminine is associated with the interconnected concepts of nature, disorder, the body, passivity and emotion while the masculine is aligned with the concomitant concepts of culture, order, the mind, initiative and reason.