Ok, so stop 8 on the Sydney Open ‘Look Up’ audio tour is another empty smelling part of the city. Did we have a war? It’s just that all the shops are closed. The only activity on this street now is the final construction work happening on the nice new buildings.
The audio from the tour told me that when Mark Twain toured Australian he gave lectures here and packed the place full of people who were either there to hear his anti-slavery ideas or enjoy his comedy, I can’t work out which it might have been considering what Australia was at that time.
Helen Keller said that Mark Twain reeked of tobacco, and she is someone to trust on matters of olfaction. Helen said “the atmosphere is charged with odours” and she could tell by the smell what building she was passing and was also able to guess a person’s occupation by their aroma.
As someone who has worked for the trade union movement I can say that the fashion of smoking survived here much better than in other places. Seeing men smoking in the elevators like it was still 1970 is one of the only things I miss about union culture.
Instead of describing the smell of this place I offer you instead the scent Polaroid below, taken from the side wall of the building.
The nice Greek restaurant Alpha lives here now. I wonder if they serve things with mastic.
Across the road is the Fire and Rescue NSW. Talking about fire is a really interesting way to get people to understand the role the nose plays, or at least what science says about its role. The nose is basically like a fire alarm for your body, alerting you very quickly to dangers that might be life threatening. You smell fire so you know it is there and can either put it out or run from it and survive. But you don’t smell fire in your sleep, so you need a second alarm.
A lot of the odours on new clothing and furniture and carpets are from fire retardants. These chemicals are used to prevent your children from burning very quickly in their pjs but they are actually very toxic and are now considered among the biggest polluters, along with other common household and personal care synthetics like perfume. If you can smell the chemicals on the clothing you’re looking at your nose is possibly warning you of future cancer or brain function issues.
There’s a really excellent film made by a father who worried about the chemicals on his kid’s clothes so started his own investigation. You can check it out here
This Guardian article says that the idea to introduce flame retardants in furniture and clothing was first proposed by the tobacco industry in response to all the fires caused by cigarettes. So to get themselves out of trouble they pushed to mandate the use of more cancer causing chemicals.
Chemicals in flame retardants are obviously a big occupational health and safety issue for fire fighters, who commonly lose their sense of smell or suffer reduced olfactory capacity because of chemical exposure. And then there’s the cancer.