The Smells of a Southern Spring. Standing on the beach at Bunbury, on a blustery Sunday morning a couple of years ago, the overwhelming sensation was to breathe deep and inhale the clean, salty smell of the Southern Indian Ocean. Wind tossed and grey, foaming against the shore, the spray whipped past my closed eyes and stung my face while palm trees lashed back and forth in the bitter chill of a morning gale. With no compelling reason to hurry home, I allowed myself the luxury of an idle day “playing tourist” to go to places I had never seen and head off toward Collie. The country was green and fresh, there is little traffic, and John Denver’s soft music filled the car. A visit to the Wellington Dam took me off the main road, deep into the bush and very shortly I was parked in a great granite amphitheatre, where families were playing on the lawn and a barbeque tempted me with the delicious smell of onions and sausages. I read the story of building the Wellington Dam, which was full and I was saddened to read that its water is so salty that it hasn’t been used for drinking water since 1990. I sheltered under a small canopy in a sudden, intense downpour of rain, amidst the rattling of leaves and branches as a bleak, southern spring wind drove small waves across the surface of the Dam. On the way out, I stopped at the little café near the Dam, where the smell of fresh hot coffee mingled with the flavour of fresh marron in a sandwich – an indulgence to celebrate escaping from the rain and revel in the sudden blue sky above. The clean, crisp smell of eucalypts gushed into my lungs and threatened to hyperventilate me, I breathed it so deeply. In Collie, I walked past the smell of old rivers that now barely run – with their warm, musty memory of times when the water charged wildly across the logs and rocks, around the corner from the arboretum. There, great Sydney blue gums (Eucalyptus saligna) grow up to 65 meters high, their stark white trunks standing out against a lonely 100-year-old Murray River Gum and some old pine trees. Out at the disused sawmill, a doorway was rusted out in the great chimney and inside the fragrance of charcoal was still evident. Halfway up the ash heap was a partly burnt parcel of beer cans and marron claws, no doubt left over from some illegal fishing. Miles further down the road, smells! Coal burning at Collie Power station – not the lovely, old, warm smell of coal burning in steam engines but almost the smell of diesel. I drove away and through my air vents wafted the perfume of great fields of canola, bright yellow and lying gentle on the hills like a quilt, softly thrown. While JD sang, I pulled over to the side of the road to watch a wedge tail eagle being harassed by a group of smaller birds, and to bury my face in fronds of fragrant wattle. Christa McAuliffe, junior high school teacher, mother, space explorer. Salty tears spilled down my cheeks, as JD sings that she is the one who is flying for me and that all the other astronauts are the ones who were flying for us. I sang along to the tribute to Cousteau and Calypso and warbled about sunshine on my shoulders, as my tears dried where they fell. In the William’s Woolshed, the smell of the sheep’s fleece, spilling out of the bales, invited my fingers to rub and feel the luxurious sense of fine merino wool, before I tried on one of the fabulously coloured shirts and wondered about stretch woollen denim. Tourists and locals shared the chilly spring early afternoon and the aroma of home baked bread with hot lentil and vegetable soup in steaming bowls tempted me to stay for lunch before I explored essential oils and potpourri or sampled Emu Oil lotions, homemade soaps and wardrobe fresheners. On the road home from Williams, there were great masses of red running postman creeper, deep purple hovea, wattle with fluffy balls of yellow, cream and almost pure white, splashes of blue Leschenaultia and white woolly flower feather lining the roadside. An idle day; and I can still recall the smells. youtu.be/T4DBpW-hSns
Posted on: Thu, 30 Jan 2014 02:30:01 +0000
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