Some Thoughts on Olfaction

This song takes me back to my childhood, but nowhere near as much as the smell of cane country.

An extract from this excellent piece in the Harvard Gazette, reminds us of the immediacy of our reaction to odours - Odours take a direct route to the limbic system, including the amygdala and the  hippocampus, the regions related to emotion and memory. This was brought home to me last week, when we visited, after an absence of over fifty years, cane country in FNQ*. Walsh's Pyramid and Gordonvale Mill I was brought up amongst the canefields, and my earliest olfactory memories are those of the smells of burning cane and bagasse. We used to chase the burnt trash as it came off the fires, or at least I did, until I ran backwards doing just that, and opened the back of my head with the corner of a tank stand. These days, the cane isn't burnt, as mechanical harvesting are removed the necessity, and to my way of thinking, something of the romance has been lost. Cane fires were always spectacular, invariably lit at dusk, when the wind was quiet. The Harvard Gazette piece explains the neurology of this connection, but experiencing it is something else entirely. I was reminded of this back in the early nineties when we took a family holiday in a friend's shack in the rain forest at Paluma. We went on a walk along a track hacked from the jungle, and at one point encountered an odour of rotting vegetation  that I hadn't experienced since Vietnam.  This particular encounter was etched on my memory as it followed an assault on a bunker system which cost one soldier killed and four wounded on 22nd April 1970. (p 208 - 214 in Michael O'Brien's book).  We were eventually rescued by two Centurion tanks, but the incident was obviously deeply embedded in my memory and the olfactory stimulus triggered it. I had to sit down for a bit which confused my wife and kids more than somewhat. FNQ resembles South Vietnam in a number of other important characteristics. The sea is to the right as you look North, the mountains are to the left, and the soil is red. It's God's own country.... Sounds of Then - Lyrics I think I hear the sounds of then, And people talking, The scenes recalled, by minute movement, And songs they fall, from the backing tape. That certain texture, that certain smell, To lie in sweat, on familiar sheets, In brick veneer on financed beds. In a room, of silent hardiflex That certain texture, that certain smell, Brings home the heavy days, Brings home the the night time swell, Out on the patio we'd sit, And the humidity we'd breathe, We'd watch the lightning crack over canefields Laugh and think, this is Australia. The block is awkward - it faces west, With long diagonals, sloping too. And in the distance, through the heat haze, In convoys of silence the cattle graze. That certain texture, that certain beat, Brings forth the night time heat. Out on the patio we'd sit, And the humidity we'd breathe, We'd watch the lightning crack over canefields Laugh and think that this is Australia. To lie in sweat, on familiar sheets, In brick veneer on financed beds. In a room of silent hardiflex That certain texture, that certain smell, Brings forth the heavy days, Brings forth the night time sweat Out on the patio we'd sit, And the humidity we'd breathe, We'd watch the lightning crack over canefields Laugh and think, this is Australia. This is Australia etc.. Source: LyricFind Songwriters: Chris Bailey / Geoff Stapleton / Graham Bidstrup / Kay Bee / Mark Callaghan / Robert James *Far North Queensland - Acronym used North of the Tropic of Capricorn, and instantly understood by those who live there.