In my last post I introduced my plan to keep scent notes while enjoying the Sydney Open audio tours. The Sydney Living Museums app for the audio tours is quite structured, but being a psychogeographer I’m using someone else’s structure to do whatever it is I want to do. And that’s take my time to look at the places I feel like exploring or happen to be near on my way to somwhere else.
This clocktower was the Sydney Town Hall of the past, a place where gatherings or ‘processions’ would leave from. Since covid I would say that Town Hall is no longer that place for us either, nor is anywhere, so perhaps this clocktower in Martin Place can again become central in agitating for change, or for activity of any sort.
The clocktower here was once so loved that it was dismantled during the war for fear it would be attacked and destroyed. It was actually divided up and put into different locations to make sure it couldn’t be taken out in one hit. People of the past clearly understood the importance of decentralisation in matters of security, and also of clock craftsmanship. These were days long before the iPhone.
And now to the smell of the place. This intersection of George Street and Martin Place smells very badly of sewerage every time I am here so it is not a matter of time or weather. Some google research lead me to think that old drains might be the cause but I am not sure. Right across the road is a Nespresso shop and just the suggestion of coffee makes your brain expect or desire the smell of it but there is no coffee aroma in the air here, certainly none discernible over the stinky drain smell. Maybe they just sell machines and haven’t been told that the scent of coffee can increase sales.
When I visited last week there were floral arrangements on the memorial in Martin Place and the flowers were mostly native which have a beautiful crisp cool smell to them.
If you want to test your knowledge of native flower scents you could look at some Australian stamps and try to bring to mind their smell. Other countries have released scented stamps but I’m not sure we’ve done that here.
Smelling, as is very popular to say, is closely linked to memory and remembering. The much quoted passage from Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, or Remembrance of Things Past, was important because it prompted science to study the memory trigger that scent provides so it could be explained in rational terms. The short rational reason for the scent memory trigger is that the part of your brain that processes scent also processes memory, and scent molecules don’t go to the rational brain first like other sensory input does, it goes straight to the emotional brain. So that’s also an explanation of why smelling is an irrational experience, not fully being able to be explained by a dataset. A smell will, or may, trigger a response that only you can experience, because it is tied to your own memory, referred to as autobiographical memory. That’s memory about you and who you are.
Autobiographical memory is the very troubling thing you lose with Alzheimer’s and dementia. You lose the memory of yourself. Science says that a sense of the self relies on a sense of agency and ownership, both things that have been taken from us during covid restrictions. To reinforce your sense of self and your memory you can take back control - as much as is lawful - by smelling lots of things and playing music you like and seeking out new experiences and learning new things.
Remember that if your sense of smell starts to fade you are fading too.
