Scents

"When nothing else subsists from the past, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered...the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls...bearing resiliently, on tiny and almost impalpable drops of their essence, the immense edifice of memory." (Proust 1913-1927)

The social behavior of most animals is controlled by smells and chemical signals. Being civilized and being human however, means that our lives are not ruled by scent. We "see" the world largely through our eyes and our ears. We neglect the sense of smell—and often suppress our awareness of what our nose tells us. We reject smell to such an extent that there are no words in our language (or in the other languages I am familiar with) to describe it properly or even adequately. It is almost impossible to explain how something smells to someone who has never smelled it. There are names for all the colours of the ocean but there are few words to describe that most distinctive smell.

No matter how hard we try to deny our sense of smell its rightful place in our lives, it remains. Smells retain an uncanny power to move us. It's a familiar phenomenon: a single smell has the power to conjure up entire scenes from the past it can feel as though you slipped back in time, if it was not for the other senses of your body, you might actually be there…

Fresh fish blood on salty denim is my childhood, spent in a small fishing on the NSW South Coast. Whilst today my childhood home does not exist as it once did, as I remember it and the people who filled my life in those times have grown and changed, when I smell fresh fish blood I can see the jetty and taste the salt in the air.

Lanolin and sheep shit are 20 summers spent on my uncle’s farm: a hundred mornings spent chasing lambs, catching yabbies and playing with my brothers and cousins in the red dust; a hundred afternoons spent making daisy chains and swimming in the dams; a hundred nights spent sitting outside covered is mosquito repellent listening to my uncle’s guitar and the eerie silence of the Australian bush.

A blown out match is the smell of birthdays, or celebrations.

Carrot, celery and beetroot being juiced is the scent of 1999 when my mother was diagnosed with cancer. Every morning she would drink this foul combination in an attempt to up her vitamin intake, soothe her chemotherapy ravaged body and calm her ulcer-covered mouth.

Lambs kidney, a smell somewhere between piss and meat, is the scent of winters spent in France. A whiff of a raw kidney is enough to take me back to Cerizay, dark and cold and wet.

Aniseed is my best friend and her inexplicable affinity for liquorices. It’s my sisters with a glass of Pastis on the terrace in September in Cerizay.

Jasmine is the scent of Sydney in summer. It’s long evenings walking home in the dark along the river drunk on cheap wine and giggling.

Fahrenhite by Christian Dior is the memory of my long gone, first boyfriend. It is nights spent beneath his low ceilings, listening to the hum of his apartment’s pre-war electrics as he picked his guitar. It is the details of his caramel coloured skin against cool liner sheets. Its freezing cold Alsatian winters huddled together around the radiator, him in a gray anorak me in an emerald green coat. It’s vin chaud and choucroute. It’s the cathedral bells across the valley. It’s intense and mournful and melancholy.

Citronella is India without anti-malarials and I protected myself from the swarms of mosquitoes as best I could.

To me, nothing is more memorable than smell.