A new 16 storey building on George Street is my next stop on the Sydney Open audio tour. This is a building I really like and I have photographed before and animated it with really loud house music. It just screams party to me and maybe that’s why the building joins the State Theatre stage, to provide a seamless exit for the stars performing there to the after party. We hope this sort of thing still happens somewhere in the world.
The building is owned by the people who have always owned The State Theatre, and the new building apparently joins the two buildings but I can’t work out how this would be because the State Theatre seems so far back from George Street. I guess the theatre is bigger than I thought.
The Hilton Hotel next door to 478 is known for the scent of white tea and thyme, which it uses to scent all the hotels worldwide. Scent branding, or associating a particular aroma with a company, has been found to positively impact on brand recognition so is becoming more popular. I didn’t go into the hotel and didn’t even cross the road so didn’t smell it but that’s probably just as well because, like at least 10 percent of the population, I’m very sensitive to synthetic scents.
Standing across the road from the building gives you the best view of it and I didn’t smell it up close. It might be that they’ve just dug up George Street for the tramline and everything on that corner now looks so Melbourne neat-and-clean I didn’t think there would be anything to smell so I didn’t bother smelling. This is something to be aware of - olfactory cynicism. If you stand by a florist or plant shop all the children who pass by will stop to smell everything but the adults assume there isn’t a scent in flowers anymore so don’t waste their time. Sometimes the scent is actually there though.
For tools to help you name and classify the smells you might come across on your walk, or even prompt you to smell them, because words can be suggestive like that, click on the box above.
- Barnyard
- carbonated
- cloying
- cigar box
- fat
- herbaceous
- old world
- metallic
- toasty
- vegetal
The building on 478 George leads you both physically and in its story to the State Theatre, so I will share an olfactory memory from one of my last visits there when I saw a film at the Mardi Gras film festival. It was the middle of winter and people were wearing too many clothes for Sydney, like scarves inside, and the State Theatre was full of people so I actually had strangers sitting right next to me to the right and left. The young woman to my right had a thermos of tea which she sipped at unpredictable intervals and the fragrant steam crept right to my nostrils, distracting me from the film story to her, so much so that I had to look at her profile in the semi-dark. Intimate! If you want to pick-up at a film in winter it is a good trick to employ. In summer it would not be so noticeable and you would probably look weird carrying a thermos of tea in 40 degree heat. Her tea was liquorice and fennel but you might have other tastes.
The State Theatre was built to be a cinema, something I didn’t know before my Sydney Open tour. Many of my memories from there are film memories though. I saw a Louise Brooks film there once with a live string quartet, and when the Sydney Film Festival had the all-day animated and film shorts on the first day I would go every year and spend the day around this corner.
The info at the link in the box above says that State Theatre had an organ that played sounds for the films it screened and it made me think of George William Septimus Piesse’s theoretical scent organ.
Perhaps we need a 2021 Sydney concerto di profumi, or concert of perfumes, as in ‘L’arte degli odori’.