On the Bugle

 It’s funny that even bad smells can tug nostalgic strings: the compost bin; chicken manure distilled in its most pungent commercial form as Dynamic Lifter; the slight sorrow and regret as you drive along a country road and realise, from the sharp distinctive pong, that there is a dead kangaroo nearby, and its smell has penetrated your sealed, air-conditioned car. That same smell probably attracts hungry animals who don’t mind their meat well done. Then you can’t help speculating how close the classic jugged hare might be to that kind of rot. You remember stories about how strong spices have been used to disguise a certain degree of ageing of meat in a hot climate, rumours of the bouillabaisse pot that is never quite empty, but simply has more stuff added to boil, gradually, to the baisse.

There are suggestions that women generally have a much better sense of smell than men. Broadly speaking, in women this must come into play when nurturing children, and in ensuring hygiene and fresh, untainted food for their families. It would favour a man not to have too keen a sense of smell when farming, or tending animals, or even as an unwashed soldier on bivouac, or on the battlefield. Strangely, men are much more prone to blanch at the sight of blood—not necessarily the smell—than women, who must soon become used to their menstrual discharge, and the concomitant hygiene required of them, often a matter of tradition and ritual. I sympathise with the men who are sometimes pressured into taking part in the birth of their children. Yes, they have been known to faint, and not for joy. We must be grateful for the many skilled surgeons of both sexes who have overcome a degree of revulsion to become adept at their field.

I imagine it would not be to the advantage of a forensic specialist to have too keen a sense of smell. One sees shows on television where crime scene investigators and pathologists smear a dab of Vaporub under their noses to disguise the bad smells. It is all very well to determine the time of death by body temperature, rigor mortis, blood pooling and the developing stages of insects invading the body, but I haven’t heard of diagnosis based on gas emissions. Maybe there are gadgets that help determine such factors.

I am reminded of the very sad cases of lonely elderly residents of blocks of flats whose absence is not missed until neighbours become aware of a strong smell coming from their apartment. No dignity or sorrow is accorded these poor souls, although there has been a raising of community awareness and guilt. It is also true that such bad smells often lead to the discovery of a murder.

On a smaller scale, a few years ago we put out Ratsak because we had a rat and mouse problem around our rural house. We soon became aware of a piercing smell issuing from our daggy old sofa in the living room, and soon realised that a rat had climbed inside one of the arms and died. There was nothing for it but to carry the smelly object out into the paddock, set it on a pile of logs and branches and give the vermin a Viking funeral. The pyre burned splendidly, with only a few coiled springs left when we examined the ashes later.

There has been much debate about methane emissions from livestock, with conservationists arguing that we need to reduce meat consumption to save our planet. While plants help restore our clean air, there is far more decaying vegetation—call it mulch if you will—covering far more land and giving off gases, than the animals that are farmed worldwide. As of March 2009, cattle are tallied at 1389 million, with Brazil the top producer, at 207.2 million, followed by India (179 million), China (117 million), and Australia, with its comparatively large land mass, raising a mere 28.3 million at the last count (2008). Australia has 80 million sheep. I could not find pig numbers, except for the remarkable reputed 24 million feral pigs, which are being hunted down, and for the meat of which there is a world market.

There is an increasing interest in kangaroo meat, and the argument is that they have a much smaller carbon footprint and are much easier on the environment in every respect. Kangaroo meat is also much leaner and therefore healthier than our traditional meats, and there is now also a growing export market. Kangas are wild, and healthy, and involve no farming practice. Of the four marketable species there are estimated to be at least 50 million. The only work involved is culling which, despite naive international protests, is in the best interests of the environment, and the kangaroos themselves, seeing there are no predators to keep kangaroo numbers down. Road kill is not the way. I can never forget the sorry sight and overwhelming smell of the innumerable kangaroo carcases all over the otherwise empty road on the way to Longreach some years back. Transport trucks and road trains do many of their runs at night when kangaroos are on the move, and are obviously undaunted by their numbers. It’s not quite the same for day-time tourists who are overwhelmed by the carnage.

On a completely different tack are our efforts to smell good. Before the fifties, personal hygiene amounted to changing one’s clothes, showering and Johnson’s baby powder. Paradoxically, men in suits in a closely packed peak-hour train often smelled much worse, their suits only getting dry-cleaned once in a blue moon, than the factory workers and labourers who had their change of clothes in a characteristic brown doctor’s bag and mostly managed to have a shower at their workplace before going home.

My parents often went to the pictures on Friday evening after work. On one such outing my mother thought, wrinkling her nose, that someone nearby in the Prince Edward must have taken his shoes off, having not changed his socks in a week. When she got home later, she unpacked the few deli goods she had bought in Liverpool Street before going to the movies, and realised that the strong smell had come from her own piece of Limburger cheese, and wasn’t a “bad” smell after all. Smell is a matter of context.

Most of us distinguish between food aromas and what we recognise and interpret as perfume. For a long time, but possibly not any more, the very worst smell for South-East Asians was that of cheese. They did not have fermented dairy products in their culture, and they could detect the smell of cheese on Europeans the way many of us can detect the smell of carnivores in a zoo. The smells may not be subtle, but most of us can detect a Chinese or an Indian take-away nearby, or a pizzeria or even a Subway outlet. These smells can stimulate or suppress our appetites, depending on our needs and predilections.

Good cooks know never to make any single spice or herb stand out. Some of these are not universally liked anyway. I do not like mint, except in toothpaste, or in the occasional chocolate. When it comes to food smells in cosmetics or medicines I find some conflict too. All right, manuka honey is said to be very good for skin lesions, rashes and inflammations, but I really don’t like honey-scented hand washes and skin lotions. I’m in two minds about lemon and lime, too, except in dishwashing liquid. Where the overlap between medicine and food is concerned, the Chinese have a longstanding tradition of the health benefits of specific diets. There is said to be a very low incidence of Alzheimer’s disease among Indians, so I quite approve of the quarter of a teaspoon of turmeric daily as a preventative, although I don’t really remember to take it.

As for scents and perfumes, some can bring tears to the eyes, either because of nostalgia, or because they cause an instant allergic reaction. We have some well-grown citrus trees which flower profusely and have sometimes caused me to close the windows because their scent is so strong. It was an old tradition for brides to wear or carry orange blossoms, which no doubt even nasally challenged grooms would be able to smell. In spring I am often called outside by the subtle, distinctive scent of crepe myrtle (lagerstroemia) and have to look hard to see which small tree has a few flowers opening. Their scent remains subtle, even with the whole tree in bloom.

As for actual perfumes, most women have a few favourites, and will disagree with their friends as to what is a really good perfume. Some perfumes resonate with nostalgia. My mother’s favourite was Arpège, and I still remember a bottle of the same perfume on the bedside cabinet of a friend who died much too young of cancer. Many of us think wistfully of perfumes which are no longer on the market, and despise the proliferation of movie and pop-star scents which are often based on synthetic elements which just don’t speak to us. Forget the “J-Lo” and “Britney”, where are the lovely nostalgic notes of roses, patchouli and musk? A friend spoke ruefully of missing “Jicky”, as I miss “Cassini”, a more recent concoction, which should have been reissued with the publicity generated by the space probe, Cassini, which is, at this time, examining the moons of Saturn. My “Cassini” was named by and for Oleg Cassini, Jacqueline Kennedy’s erstwhile favourite designer. Just as each individual may love certain perfumes, they can be a source of intense irritation for others. Some scents quickly become undetectable by the wearer—the nose is sort of blinded by overload—which could cause her to over-apply the stuff, much to the chagrin of those she may come in contact with.

Moths are said to be able to detect the pheromones of a potential mate up to four kilometres away. The jury is still out as to whether humans actually respond to pheromones. There was the T-shirt test of a couple of years ago, where a group of women, albeit a small sample, were asked to sniff a range of T-shirts which had been worn by a group of men, and rank them in order of desirability. While there were no clear-cut results of this test, there was some relief when one subject ranked her brother’s T-shirt as the least desirable.

There must be a subtle scent women emit at different stages of their monthly cycle, because there have been reports from various sources that women spending a proportion of time in each other’s company, in, say, a workplace, will gradually synchronise their cycles. It has never been determined whether these subtle emissions have any significant effect on the male sexual response. It was reported of Napoleon that he would send a message home to Josephine three days before his homecoming that she was not to bathe. He liked her ripe smell.

The gentler smells of hair and skin are said to have a bonding influence. Who can forget the sweet surprise of the scent of a baby’s head? That always makes up for the other smells they may produce, especially when they progress from breast to cow’s milk and solids.

We have achieved wrap-around cinema with the Imax theatre experience, which so completely engaged me that I became quite nauseous during a virtual helicopter flight over the Antarctic. Despite the enveloping sounds, the Antarctic experience did lack one thing—the chill factor—but who then would venture into the theatre in thermal underwear and fur-lined anoraks?

I am speculating about another element lacking in our cinema or computer games. Years ago, when we as children first experienced cinemascope and stereophonic sound, a couple of us came up with the idea of smellovision. All very well, when it comes to a rose garden, or a newly mown meadow, or a stroll through a gum or a pine forest. Until the age of nine I grew up in Europe, and did not realise until many years later how different a European deciduous forest smelled from an Australian gum or rain forest. Then we happened upon the Antarctic beech forest up in the Barrington Tops about thirty years ago, and I experienced a strong nostalgic kick as we wandered amongst the leaf litter. Even the ground cover was different, and included, to our great surprise, some wild but easily recognisable asparagus.

There is a potential for smellovision, at least in cinemas, but for the foreseeable future it is beyond budget and technology, and possibly even fraught with potential litigation problems. When I reflect on scenes of murder and mayhem, the mean streets of, say, Blade Runner, the pungency of Jurassic Park, or the forensic pathologist doing a y-section on a decomposing corpse, I’m glad it’s not happening. My son mentioned the Bog of Eternal Stench in the movie Labyrinth. Heaven forbid!

Perfume no doubt became popular as a necessary disguise of really unpleasant odours millennia ago. The infant Jesus was brought the precious gift of frankincense, and later in life had his feet bathed in precious unguents as a gesture of respect. Incense and fragrant oils came into use first of all to disguise bad, often necrotic odours. Even at the Palais de Versailles during the reign of Louis XIV the nobles were heavily perfumed and sported scented handkerchiefs to wave in front of their noses, because there were no bathing or toilet facilities at the palaces despite the lavish ponds and fountains out in the gardens. A servant could be summoned with a chamber pot which could be used in some out-of-the-way corner, and then emptied out in the gardens when there was no one in sight.

I’ll never forget my surprise at the condition of some very elaborate seventeenth-century clothing on display in the town of Bath. The beautifully designed and coloured hand-stitched silks showed several tide-marks of fading caused by sweat under the arms. These garments were too delicate to be washed properly, and would only have had the worst stains sponged off gently by a careful servant. Which brings me back to smell to enhance cinematic verisimilitude. The idea of experiencing truly obnoxious smells would appeal to only a very few. And forget about time travel.

There are some people who, because of trauma, infection or sinus problems lack a sense of smell, or find it considerably diminished, sometimes permanently. Some very few are even born that way. This condition, known as anosmia, can sometimes be treated through surgery or medication. Anosmia is often found in smokers, and sadly, it is a symptom of Alzheimer’s disease. People over sixty are said to become increasingly less sensitive to smells. The clownfish Nemo is said to have become disorientated and unable to find his way home because of an impaired sense of smell.

Dogs have a superior sense of smell. Those charming animals at the airport which are trained to sniff out any illegal substance in luggage had better not sit down beside your bag. On the other hand, how miraculous is it for dogs to be able to sniff out cancer, often before a person becomes aware of any symptoms. I’m sure dogs take great pleasure in the olfactory tourism they experience when travelling around in a car. They can smell anger or fear. Friends in Oregon had a dog which became a quivering wreck three weeks before Mount St Helens erupted in 1981. He barely came out from under the bed until the event was well and truly over. Dogs have been invaluable in finding people under earthquake rubble and avalanches. They can appear indifferent to the nature of a smell, but they, too, can demonstrate revulsion.

During the war when the Nazis had taken over Budapest, my father and grandfather and many other citizens were suspected of being sympathisers or supporters of the Jews, which they were. Dad had a gorgeous red setter, and Dad and Grandad resolved to teach the dog to demonstrate anti-Jewish sentiments, just in case. Dad was stopped by some Nazi soldiers when out walking the dog one day and they asked him the usual questions. No, he didn’t like Jews. No, not even his dog liked Jews. Dad produced a piece of bread out of his coat pocket, held it under the dog’s nose and said, “From a Jew.” The dog twisted his head to one side in revulsion, whereon Dad produced a piece of bread from his other pocket, saying, “From me.” The dog ate this greedily. Our menfolk had coated the first piece of bread with the nicotine slurry dug out of a pipe.

I’m not that keen on Mambo art, but I do rather like the farting (I prefer to think of it as fluting) dog which appears on Mambo T-shirts and other logo items. I still can’t determine what connection Reg Mombassa and the band 4Dog Trumpet have, but I guess someone will enlighten me.

Valerie Murray lives in northern New South Wales.