Scents that sing us home
And so to one of the most glorious smells of the Australian year, heralding the blaze of a long, hot summer. It’s the sweet inhalation of that first, ripe mango. Deeply you inhale the speckled skin, and uncurl. Bring it on. Our season of high hurting skies and long, lovely nights.
After travels in distant lands the smell of Australia taunts you like a benediction when you step out of the terminal’s airconditioning. You hold your head high, you inhale deep; you are home, safe, at last. It’s a comforting mixture of eucalyptus and desert dirt and distant seas; a succour of a scent that sings us home. And even in the cities the land is still there strong, staining the air; it’s still pushing through. It might be the depths of winter when you return but that smell always feels like the promise of an eternal summer.
Bring on the wattle. That tough, sour smell of the Aussie bush in heat. Bring on the gentler, introduced fragrances of gardenia and jasmine and frangipani. Bring on the boronia and the lemon-scented gum, all those smells from childhood and how quickly they plunge you back to a time when your world was marinated in curiosity and nature, up close.
Freshly mown lawns. The brace of ocean baths. Sheets on a Hills Hoist, shouting their clean. Food vans at country shows, that heady brew of Dagwood Dog and Chiko Roll and popcorn and sawdust. The powder in Nana’s embrace. The dog who’d ground his bliss into something dead in the bush. The promise of the surf as you were driven to the beach amid a heady stew of sunscreen, new thongs and old towels. Water on hot cement. Chlorine. Dirty footy boots. Perkins Paste, and some kids loved that smell so much they ate it. Green Apple shampoo. Coconut oil buttered onto skin. Vegemite on toast — but it had to be proper butter, on white bread. Savlon and mercurochrome.
And as you catapulted into adulthood there were all the new smells: a freshly opened packet of Tim Tams, in London. The yeasty aroma of a brewery, perfuming or perhaps staining or perhaps saturating the surrounding neighbourhood, triumphing over the city’s buses and trucks. A garbos’ strike in high summer, a week or so in. A neighbour’s barbie. A neighbour’s Pad Thai. A neighbour’s lamb chops. A cold tinnie freshly opened. Snags on election day. Chinatown. The ubiquitous Rid in the Top End. Mosquito coils at barbies. The lure of a country bakery, all the better if its front door was wearing plastic strips. A newsagent where once there were queues for the paper. Vinnie’s clothes crammed on their racks. The sour smell of carpet in a pokie-saturated club, stale beer and loneliness and defeat.
Then the big Australian ones. The smell of dawn out bush. A southerly buster blowing in to break the back of the heat. The scent of rain and the earth opening up to receive its blessing — the definition of petrichor, my favourite word, Aussie-devised to boot. The smell of night creeping in and taking over day. A bushfire softly far away, and close. Rain on a tin roof that has you flinging open the windows to feel the sky.
So many smells, and all flavoured with the sting of homesickness when you’re an expat. In exile I yearned for the perfume of crushed eucalyptus leaf. Grew a gum tree in my London back yard expressly for this purpose and the shin bone beauty of it among all the tamed and demure English green lifts me still; that tough little bugger wasn’t going anywhere. And the smell I will miss most, now that the seasons have turned? A neighbour’s open fire on a cold winter’s night. Sometimes, late, I call the dog and head outside and uncurl, in stillness, just breathing in the scent-laden night air of Australia, in all its bliss.
Nikki Gemmell