The Ashes

Newsletter #45: Bois d'Ascese

This week’s article was going to be about something different, but then the fires started.

Australia is a big country geographically - about the size of the continental United States. But we are a small country demographically - there are only about 26 million of us. We are not layered in an even spread but clustered mostly on the coastline and mostly in the cities.

I live in such a city, in New South Wales. It’s not one of the big ones but a regional city on the coast - my house is about five kilometers from the beach. My house is on a very steep hill that dips dramatically down to a popular bush walk that cuts through the city. My house is blue, and is partially held up by steel beams. The top of my house is surrounded by the treetops on every side - eucalyptus, banksia, honeysuckle. My house sits in dappled shade and no matter the time of the day you can hear the sound of wind rustling through leaves and the laughing call of kookaburras.

It’s very beautiful. It’s very flammable.

In a childhood full of near evangelical education on bushfires, sun safety, and the dangers of redbacks in the garage and funnel webs in the backyard, there is one lesson I have never forgotten. I must have been about eleven years old when our teacher explained what the ozone layer was - a protective shield over the Earth to protect us from ultraviolet light.

Sounds good, I thought. Love that.

The teacher then proceeded to explain that there was a giant hole in the ozone layer, and that that hole was pointed right over Australia.

‘That’s why the sun is so harsh here, kids,’ he said grimly. ‘And that’s why more Australians die of sun cancer than any other country. Slip slop slap.’

Since that day I have always childishly imagined a great tear in the sky over Australia through which poisonous sunlight pours down like a Lovecraftian terror. I am a religious sun avoider and sunscreen wearer with the complexion of a vampire, but there’s only so much time you can steal.

No matter what happens, on the first of December summer always comes back. My lovely, temperate, and sun avoiding house also does not have air conditioning, which means hot summer days give you two options: flee or suffer.

This week I stayed. It’s Christmas time and there are things to do, even when it’s hot. And it was hot. The hottest week in nearly two years, with temperatures over 38 degrees. Heat is one thing, but when it’s hot and it’s windy too you know in your gut that there’s going to be a fire.

There is always, always a fire.

A bonfire is, for the most part, a happy thing. Warmth on cold winter nights; marshmallows toasting; cuddling under a blanket. A happy memory and a happy smell.

A bushfire is hell on earth.

I mean the literal, Dantean hell: fire and brimstone and landscapes scrubbed clean of life. Every Australian has driven past the husk of a forest that’s been torn through with bushfire, the skeletal black things that once were trees.

When the bush is on fire for a hundred hectares and the wind is still blowing, you are going to smell the smoke. You are going to smell it everywhere.

Ashy and bitter and gritty somehow, as if you are breathing in little burned rocks. The slightly sweet and tarry phenolic bite of it that always smells a little bit like hot barbecue. The smell of destruction. The smell of flames, eating.

You cannot escape the smell once it has you. It is a possession no exorcist could break: it’s in your house, on your clothes, in your hair. The sky itself gets blotted out with a grey that you could almost hope were rainclouds, except that it bleeds down into the air around you as well. You almost imagine you can feel it behind your eyes.

In 2019, right before COVID hit, we had months and months of bushfires in an endless rolling wave. The sky was so permanently covered in smoke that the air almost turned yellow, jaundiced, like those months at Passchendaele when they first released mustard gas.

You’d call it apocalyptic if you weren’t used to it. If you weren’t Australian.

When you wake up to that thick, pungent, creosote smell of bushfire, the panic is immediate. How close? How close? Is anybody hurt? Did I clean the leaves from the gutter? Do I have to get ready to evacuate? What if my house burns down?

We have a website for this - Fires Near Me. You check the little map, you check the news for the damage. If anyone has lost their home; if anyone has died. You look around your house and think about how very flammable all your possessions are. You think, genuinely, about which ones you’d take.

Every morning the smell of the smoke begins this ritual.

But when you see that the fire is fifty kilometers away, a hundred, your shoulders relax. It’s just the smoke that makes it feel so immediate. The brutality of that smell. There’s nothing else for it but to go about your day.

So I go about my day.

I shower. I get dressed. It’s Christmas, and I’m going to brave the shops. Sunscreen last and most of all as do my skincare, because I’m not fooled by the weird grey half-light the smoke casts through my windows. I still hear the kookaburras, and the click-clicking of the brush turkeys that walk up and down my fence.

In a fire, the birds fly first.

I get the bus to the shops - and, more importantly, to the air conditioning. In my city the bus drivers have been on strike since Easter. They want a new enterprise bargain agreement, which means free transport for me if I see the driver wearing a red beret as he pulls up.

The bus always has the best people watching. Kids taking photos of the roof to send on snapchat. A man tapping his leg impatiently as he tips a vape back and forth, back and forth. A woman knitting. Two elderly men arguing, joyfully, about the Ashes.

The Ashes. The most tedious rivalry of the most tedious sport in the world. But Australia will win this year, so every father in the country is happy.

This is the best way I can think of to explain my country: the world could be blanketed in smoke from the land burning around us, and men on the bus will be talking about the Ashes.

It’s a nice walk from the bus stop to the shops. I cut through a football field that rolls down from the local school. It’s nearly summer holidays; the boys have swapped their football cleats for cricket whites. There’s a giddy freedom in the air that only comes when there’s no more schoolwork to worry about. A group of girls rush past me and I know I’ll run into them again smelling the body mists or the new Sol de Jainero.

The smoke covers all of us. Heat thickens the air until it is as sticky as tar.

From one hell to another: shopping centers at Christmastime. But I’m so relieved to be somewhere air conditioned that I can deal with the roving barbershop quartets and the fifty person Kmart queue. I’m always looking for stocking stuffers. Every year I panic and think I haven’t bought enough and end up buying too much. Too many gifts to give - this is a good problem to have.

Even somewhere temperature controlled, you can still catch traces of the smell - that smoky, ashy smell.

It’s clinging to our clothes, I think, as I inch forward in the queue. Every person in this shopping centre and every person in this city. We’re breathing violence. It’s in our hair.

I am, in general, not a patriotic person. I believe the very idea of the nation-state is partly to blame for a lot of problems we have in the world today. Why on earth would I love a country? Why would I be loyal to a country, a thing that was made up by people who stole everything they had and called it their own?

A country is too big, too full of Rashomonic layers of personal truths to every be a solid reality. Countries, like religions, are reasons people give to kill for or to die for. A country cannot give. It can only take.

But I can’t deny that I feel the most Australian when the air is thick with fire. I feel most aware of this place, of the land that is my home. When you’re forced by the smell all around you to think of it constantly, you realise that the land is the only thing that is real. The land is the only thing of value. The land speaks in voices we cannot translate.

How can you explain this feeling, this thread of connection you feel to the place where you live? It is not love. It is not patriotism. It is like… like looking your arm as if it were somehow unique or separate to yourself, even when it is so innately a part of you. You would only be able to understand how important it was to your identity if you lost it.

This feeling, invisible and ever present, can be haunting and comforting and oppressive and liberating all at once. Your identity rooted in the very ground you walk on, and the very air you breathe. It isn’t always an easy thing. Some days it is too much of a burden for anyone to bear.

I breathe in the smoke and this feeling reminds me of the poem In The Desert By Stephen Crane:

In the desert

I saw a creature, naked, bestial,

Who, squatting upon the ground,

Held his heart in his hands,

And ate of it.

I said, “Is it good, friend?”

“It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;

“But I like it

“Because it is bitter,

“And because it is my heart.”

In perfumery there are many, many bonfire perfumes. Bonfires are a happy smell. There are not very many bushfire perfumes - but there is one. It’s from the house of Naomi Goodsir, who has curated one of the most intense and unforgiving collections of fragrance in all of perfumery. Goodsir, who is Australian, has the kind of razor sharp understanding of what it takes to raise a perfume out of mediocrity and turn it into art.

Every scent from the line is worth sniffing, but the most emotional for me is Bois d’Ascèse. The perfume’s description reads thus:

Inspiration - A wooden church nestled between the hills of New South Wales, Australia with the surrounding countryside ablaze. Notes of tobacco & whisky, are supported by Somalian incense, cade wood, amber & cistus labdanum.

As a New South Welshwoman with a love of old churches, you can imagine why this might strike a chord.

It’s one thing to love the concept of a perfume but quite another to love the follow through. Goodsir’s perfumes have been made in collaboration with Julien Rasquinet, Bertrand Duchaufour and Isabelle Doyen.

Bois D’Ascese is Rasquinet’s work - perhaps his best, and certainly the closest he has ever come to a masterpiece.

The first time I smelled Bois D’Ascese I had an instant and involuntary reaction - the reaction of waking up to the smell of bushfire smoke. Will my house burn down? I need to check Fires Near Me.

It is amazing how quickly we become used to having every rough note in perfumery tempered by a sweet ethyl maltol or a cloying musk. This makes a raw material punch twice as hard when it is allowed to step even a toe out of its cage. So it is with the cade note in Bois that, frankly, kicks the shit out of you in the opening of this perfume. It’s not at the decibel of T-Rex, which also uses a cade note to great effect, but you’ll still feel the sting in your nostrils.

I love cade oil as a note because it’s got a sticky, tar-like phenolic bite that is like tearing skin from the bone. It’s utterly relentless and sets an olfactory tone of brimstone and violence. This is a promise that must either be delivered on or pushed against - shoot the gun, Chekhov, or don’t bother mentioning it at all. Bois D’Ascese uses cade as an opening flare that shifts into a burning mellow incense, flecked with tobacco and amber. It’s a warm, full perfume that is still smoky and harsh. It sits almost acridly on your palate, the way a true bushfire does.

All Naomi Goodsir perfumes are postmodern epics that deserve time and attention from the wearer. They have things to say and speak them in a voice that is low and sonorous and sinister. You will not be comforted by these perfumes. You will be a better person, and a better perfume lover, for smelling them.

I think it would take an Australian to push past the comfort of a bonfire scent to get to a harsher, and in some ways more beautiful, olfactory truth. I think Bois D’Ascese does that.

It’s hard to wear a perfume that makes you feel like you can’t breathe. I think we often forget about that very physical reaction to smoke when we smell a perfume that only imitates. The great power of Naomi Goodsir’s scents is that they all, in their own way, give a sense of texture. And the texture of this perfume is the all-encompassing grey silt of bushfire smoke.

It will stick in your throat. It is meant to.

Bois D’Ascese is not a smell of my country, a thing to die for. It’s the smell of my home, a place to live in - the heat, the floods, the laughter of kookaburras, the grass stains like paint streaks on cricket whites. My bookshelves, with all my stories of old churches; my copy of The Fatal Shore. Overfilled Christmas stockings. The moment at the end of the night when the pub plays The Horses and everybody starts to shuffle home.

The Ashes and the devouring flames.

I like Bois D’Ascese because it is bitter, and because it is my heart.

I shop until I get so tired that even the air conditioning can’t tempt me to stay. Outside, the sky is still grey. As I’m waiting for the bus home, the smoke is carried in over my face on a new breeze. I close my eyes for a moment and feel it.

Stronger.

Cooler.

And heavy with the promise of rain. ▧