7\The Proust Effect: Oral History and the Senses

Paula Hamilton

“Coming down the Spit hill you could smell the seaweed.This was the breath of home.” –Dorothy Olsen, interviewee

“And I found that of all the senses the eye was the most superficial, the ear the most haughty, smell the most voluptuous, taste the most superstitious and inconstant, touch the most profound and philosophical,”Diderot, Letter on the Blind, 1749

At least one of the five senses–sound, vision, touch, taste and smell–is essential to all human experience. Yet oral historians who are concerned with the memory of those experienceshave not yet engaged with the senses in their practice, beyond anobvious preoccupation with sound and listening in the production and communication process. The senses have been central to the literary imagination in poetry and prose over a long period, but it has taken new conceptual approaches to interpreting the natureof experience, first by anthropologists working with different cultures, then later cultural historians, before these ideas havebecome more widespread. It is time to explore some of the possibilities for oral historians to work with the “sensory revolution” in the humanities.1

It is well-known that senses can act as a mnemonic device or a trigger to remembering. The smell and taste of lime blossom tea and madeleines stimulated Proust’s recollection of his past, in one of the most famous of all literary passages about memory. (Italso reminds us along the way about the beautiful sensuousness oflanguage itself):

But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with

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more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.2

Proust called this memory which emerges suddenly “involuntary memory,” which seems to obliterate the passage of time between the original event and its re-experience in memory. This is encapsulated by the expression often used in film to signify a flash back: “I remember it as if it happened yesterday”, and at that moment, the past can seem more real than the present. Thus the senses have the capacity for bringing the past into the present at any time in a sudden serendipitous way, but they can also be consciously foregrounded in the more formal setting of anoral history interview. Called by scientists the “Proust effect”when smell associated with experience can recall the memory, it is nonetheless only socially meaningful when it is communicated to someone else.

For all the power of Proust’s memories of smell, sensory experience is regarded traditionally as a physiological sensationshaped by psychology and personal history, and therefore not the domain of analysis and abstract thought. But Proust was not the only one in his time who understood the central role of memory inrelation to the senses. The philosopher Henri Bergson also observed in 1909 that ‘there is no perception which is not full of memories. With the immediate and present data of our senses, we mingle a thousand details out of our past experience’3. However, the respective insights of these men like those before them, seem to have fallen on deaf ears until the “sensory revolution” at the end of the twentieth century claimed the senses for study as part of the Humanities. The senses have now become what Douglas Howes calls: “the most fundamental domain of cultural expression, the medium through which all the values and

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practices of society are enacted.”4 For some years now, scholarshave produced a growing body of work about both the history of individual senses, while at the same time emphasizing their integral relationships with each other.

All of those who have written as advocates for one or other of the senses refer to the hegemony of the visual sense in relation to understanding of experience. They argue that the unthinking dominance of the visual in accounts of the social limits our imagination and ignores the equally crucial role that other senses play in our experience and understanding of the world. Scholars have argued that to be aware of the senses is to see the world in a fundamentally different way. This has forced a rethinking about the nature of social experience, interpersonalas well as relationships to community, and even ideas about how we live and move through space.

Mark Smith, one of the foremost historians of sensory history began his general study with the assertion that “the senses are historical; that they are not universal but, rather, aproduct of place, and especially time, so that how people perceived and understood smell, sound, touch, taste and sight, changed historically.” Sensory history, he argued, has a very wide brief: it “takes the history of the everyday, the average, and the banal, as seriously as it takes the history of elites, the intellect, and the exceptional, in an effort to understand the full range of meanings people attributed to the sense in the past.”5 This sounds very much like the original “history from below” context in which the oral history movement first flowered to document the lives of those who had been “silenced,” but it issignificant that Smith believes it possible to use the senses in exploring the experience of those previously without sound, sightor smell, taste or smell. At its best this has proved to be the case, since there are already some fine studies of slavery and sound in the United States6.

The anthropologist Constance Classen noted that the investigationof the sensory worlds of past eras should not merely describe therange of sounds and smells that existed at a particular time, as

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evocative as that might be, but should uncover the meaning that those smells and sounds had for people7. In other words, we should be engaged in not simply a description of many past experiences through the senses , but our work should be capable of interpreting the meaning of those experiences, particular those that make little sense if only known through the visual. For Mark Smith in summary, sensory history was less a “field” of inquiry and more a habit of thinking about the past, “a way of becoming more attuned to the past.” When we think about the senses, we are exposed to “subliminal histories” that may have always been there in our oral histories but we are now choosing adifferent path for understanding their meaning

The Senses in MemoryWhile the anthropologists have focused on how cultures differ in the social value accorded to one or other of the senses, the historians have concentrated on historical periods from the 17th century to the mid-20th century and on various written texts, sothe studies tend to be constituted as a dialogue in inventive ways with evidence generated from the time under study. There may be a variety of reasons why there is very little investigation to date in periods within living memory which couldutilize oral histories. The most important is the central problem of how the sense are remembered and then articulated as memory, thereby linking the physiological phenomena with the social and cultural. If, for example, visual stimuli remained longer in the memory in a physiological basis, then we would needto take account of this in our analysis of how it worked socially.

Precisely how the senses operate in relation to memory is asyet an imperfectly understood area by both researchers in psychology and science. In 2004, British neuroscientists claim tohave found the physiological basis for why a smell or sound has the power to bring forth a flood of contextual memories. The key,they said, “is that memories relating of an event are scattered across the brain’s sensory centres but marshalled by a region called the hippocampus. If one of the senses is stimulated to

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evoke a memory, other memories featuring other senses are also triggered.”8

Smell, as Proust showed, has long been hailed as the memory sense, the one most likely to provoke reminiscence. “Odour seemsto be the most resistant to forgetting,” said Gottfried, one of the scientists, “previous research has found that memories of images begin to fade days or even hours after viewing whereas recall of smells remains unimpaired for as much as a year.”9 Nevertheless, a report from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in 2008 identified smell as still largely a “neuroscientific mystery.”10

Though all of the senses decline with age, in fact humans take far less information from our eyes than any other sighted organism. This seems odd given the overwhelming primacy we give to the visual in Western cultures in the form of technologies such as photography, film, and the circulation of mass images through television and the internet. This is complemented by technologies to enhance sound such as radio and telephony, but asyet we know little about the critical importance of these new technologies on our senses and their transformation in memory. Mirko Zardini argues that in the new sensory revolution “the senses constitute not so much a new field of study as a fundamental shift in the mode and media we employ to observe and define our own fields of study.” 11 He linked this sensory domainclosely with new digital technologies and the enhanced possibilities for utilizing mobile communications to reach broader audiences. It seems we can no longer detach the senses ofsight or sound from the technologies which amplify them.

Psychologists, too, have made important advances in our understanding of memory and perception. Kurt Danziger has discussed the historical context of psychology’s engagement with the senses and noted that “the experience of remembering itself involves not only a recall of the past, but a sense of the past in the present.” He argued for a blurring of the lines between memory and perception but crucially emphasized the way in which sensory memory is shaped by our personal past: “The way we takeup any part of our sensory experience, the way we actually

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experience it, the meaning we give to it, is always affected by the rest of our experience, some of it current as background perception, some of it past as something retained from previous encounters with the world.” 12

Other than this, we know that each sense functions in various ways when it is remembered, though again it is as yet unclear how all their characteristics can be differentiated. Since they are essentially interrelated and governed by our feelings, this is an issue of great complexity. Nonetheless, scholars dealing with each sense individually have identified some features. Jim Drobnick, for instance, noted that “smells areinherently discontinuous, fragmentary and episodic” while the visual may be more intense and sustained. ‘Environmental and immersive smells, are inhaled’ he says ‘ and thus become intimately bound with the body; they permeate the atmosphere and are inescapable’.13

Paradoxically, the work on the senses has also shown the limits of our apprehending of past experience, particularly through oral histories. While there is no longer an assumption that human thought and experience is only structured through words, senses and the embodied experience are sometimes outside language, not just something one sees and hears but something onelives. Joy Parr refers to the writer Michael Polyani who noted succinctly in his The Tacit Dimension some years ago that “we know more than we can tell,” that is that we all have embodied and situated knowledge, “which is implied, understood referentially.”These are often things we have learned over a long period that wedo habitually, ritually, without consciously thinking about it.14Nevertheless, oral histories do involve the reduction of the three dimensional embodied experience into two dimensional interviews and then are frequently transformed again into writing.

Oral histories are, by their nature, articulating experiencein speech, language and gesture (if technical means have a visualdimension). Since oral histories are essentially about agency, or individuals as a central character in their life stories, it is important to make a distinction between the interviewee as a

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“consumer of the senses” and a “producer.” As Peg Rawes noted, we all create our own landscape of the senses as we move through environments.15 We are engaged in the active construction of ourexperience but if we heard, saw, smelled, touched or tasted in the past and this is articulated as a recollection, then we are discussing a context which cannot be reproduced in the present. How people heard or smelled in the past is not the same as we hear or smell and today. It is critically important, therefore to “historicize” the senses. While recreating, and reimagining the past in many forms, such as museum exhibits, has become fashionable, we cannot possibly really recreate the conditions ofconsumption and reception at the time. Some sensory experiences become even jarringly historical. Few can imagine today for example, the smell and taste of the first cigarette of the day as“pure joy.” But, for two of the senses, the capacity for technical reproduction since the 19th century for vision and 20th for sound, has meant that we can retain them as sources of intangible heritage, frozen in time, kept in film and sound archives.

The Senses and Oral HistoriesWe would expect all kinds of references to the senses in

interviews, both as part of the communication process and as an act of remembering. Here I draw on examples from different international archives as well as two community projects located in suburban areas of Sydney, Australia with which I have been involved for several years. Though my research has thrown up a lot of material that relates to sight, sound and smell, I have uncovered very little on taste and touch. Taste seems to be a more circumscribed sense relating to food and is not much in evidence unless there are projects on that specific subject. Similarly, I have only found touch in evidence as a mnemonic reminder for one interviewee, Jean Hudson. When Jean walks around Manly, a suburb she has lived in for over fifty years, sheoften puts her hand out and touches places like stairs or fences or buildings that remind her of people she loved now gone or events of importance that happened in her life. As Mark Paterson,

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who has written on touch observed. “touch seems more intimate, reassuring and proximal” but because it is “so much a part of ourselves, and is centrally a form of non-verbal communication” we are unlikely to speak about it, except in metaphor. Yet it is through touch that we engage with the materiality of the world, and it can invoke powerful memories involving other senses, like those in Jean Hudson’ life. Often people associate things they can touch with memories of particular people like feeling the

1 The phrase “sensorial revolution” is one used by Douglas Howesin “Architecture of the Senses,” http://www.david-howes.com/DH-research-sampler-arch-senses.htm. See also on memory and experience Kurt Danziger, Marking the Mind: A History of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). On the current debates about the nature of experience, see the essay by Harold Mah, “The Predicament of Experience,” Modern Intellectual History, 5/1 (2008), 97-119.2 Proust, Marcel A La Recherche du temps Perdu. Volume 1, Swann’s Way, 1913. Trans. D J Enright, NY Vintage 1992 3 Henri Bergson Matter and Memory,1909 trans Margaret Paul & W Scott Palmer, George Allen & Unwin, 19114 Howes, “Architecture of the Senses.” op cit.5 Mark M. Smith, Sensing the Past. Seeing, hearing. Smelling, Tasting and Touching in History, University of California Press, Berkeley. 2007, p3 and 56 See Mark Smith Listening to Nineteenth Century America (2001) and Shane White & Graham White The Sounds of Slavery (2005) Smith also discusses touch in this context in his ‘Getting in Touch with Slavery and Freedom’ The Journal of American History, Vol 95, 2, September 2008, pp381-3927 Constance Classen, Worlds of sense. Exploring the Senses in History and Across Cultures. Routledge, New York, 1993, p68 BioEd Online, Biology Teacher resources from Baylor College of Medicine) May 31st 2004 http://www.bioedonline.org/news9 BioEd Online, Biology Teacher resources from Baylor College of Medicine) May 31st 2004 http://www.bioedonline.org/news10 http:www.hhmi.org/senses/d140.html

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smoothness of a father’s pipe or the texture of a mother’s taffeta dress.

There are several ways to consider the role of senses in oral histories. The first is to rethink the nature of the visual sense that has been taken for granted in so much of past practice. For example, a story told to me by Harley O’Regan aboutgrowing up in Mosman, a suburb of Sydney, took on greater significance once I thought more about his sense of the visual:

It was a most beautiful swimming pool, blue and lovely,called Cavill’s baths. The big attraction apart from the swimming was Rhoda Cavill. She was something unrealin terms of beauty. She had this beautiful figure and she used to dive like a swallow and it was fascinating just to watch her. She was a bit older than me and out of my class.16

Reading this story again, I was struck by O’Regan’s description of what he can see in his mind’s eye almost like a photograph. He also communicates a classical image of the Australian feminine modern, the sleek diving beauty which he may have seen many times since, that now forms part of his memory. Wecan understand that the narrative of what he has seen is

11 Mirko Zardini ‘Towards a sensorial Urbanism’ in Mirko Zardini (ed) Sense of the city An alternative approach to Urbanism Canadian centre forArchitecture, Montreal, 2005, p2212 Danziger, Kurt, Marking the Mind op cit pp253 and 25713 Drobnick, Jim (ed) ‘Introduction Olfactocentrism’ in The Smell Culture Reader, Berg, London 2006, p514 Michael Polanyi The Tacit Dimension (1966) cited in Parr, Joy ‘Notes for a More Sensuous History of Twentieth Century Canada: The Timely, the Tacit and the Material body’ Canadian Historical Review Forum,Vol 82, No 4, December 2001, pp 719-74515 Peg Rawes ‘Sonic Envelopes’ The Senses & Society, Vol 3w, No 1, March 2008, p6516 Interview with Harley O’Regan by Paula Hamilton, 10th December2000, SHOROC Oral History Project and Cracking Awaba, op cit, p82

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permeated with his wistful longing as a young man for the unattainable.

Secondly, the senses can be the central subject of a story told by an interviewee, or a causal factor in explanation for action. Some of these have a physiological component, and can function in a way like those of Oliver Sacks, the well-known neurologist who has explored conditions relating to perception through his published case studies.17 These stories are rare but this example from the Urban School in San Francisco Oral History Archives Project is an important case in point. Gloria Lyon was interviewed for the archive’s memory of the Jewish Holocaust project in 2002. She was born in Czechoslovakia and wasfourteen when, in May 1944, at Auschwitz, she lost her sense of smell:

In 1944, sometime in May, 1944, I was assigned to work in the Canada work detail. And I just didn't feel good,I kept throwing up, I kept throwing up because of the smell of burnt human bodies, and bone, and hair. And the air was very, very bad. And I realize that that is why. And so I couldn't eat the little food we were given.This concerned my mother very much, and me too because I was losing weight rapidly. Even if I had not thrown up I would have been losing weight. Once one loses weight in Auschwitz, one doesn't live very long. . . . One day I no longer threw up. I heard others talk aboutit, but it no longer bothered me. I didn't know why I don't smell those things. Actually I didn't realize that I lost my sense of smell totally until I was liberated 13 months later and taken to Sweden.Gloria’s is a remarkable story about traumatic experiences

and their effect on the senses, but it is even more so, when we hear how her sense of smell returned forty-seven years later. In

17 See especially Oliver W. Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (New York: Summit Books, 1985), and Sacks, An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales (New York” Knopf, 1995).

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1991,Gloria went back to revisit the site of Auschwitz with her husband:

Anyway after I went through the steps of revisiting Auschwitz–harmless touching of the electric wire fences, opened and shutting gates to make sure they were rendered harmless and talking a blue streak, oh mypoor husband.We left and on the way out away from Auschwitz, we werestill in Poland going through the serene countryside, Ibegan to notice something. I said to Karl, What's that I smelled? Is that manure? Like I had my smell all along. He was driving at the time and he said you smellthat? I said, I think so, just realizing, gee, I wasn'table to smell that before. He pulled over to the side and opened up the beauty box and pulled out his after-shave and he said, smell this. For the first time in 47years my sense of smell returned, just like that. But what I can't get over is how smoothly this went as if Ihad it along, what's the problem here? And thinking back now, it just seems very strange.18

This is clear evidence of what is known as “situated knowledge” and embodiment, that is, sensorial understanding related to a particular place and time. Gloria had to return to the place of trauma for her sense of smell to be turned back on like a switch.

In another context, a doctor’s sense of smell saved Juliet Sheen’s life. In the 1960s, living in suburban Sydney, she was very ill with a cervical abscess but no one could work out what was wrong. Old Dr Barry, a fixture in the district, came to her house when she was dying. She recounted that “He stood by the bedside and sniffed [she sniffs] like that.” He then said, “I’ve

18 The Urban School of San Francisco, Telling Their Stories Oral History Archives Project. www.tellingstories.org, Interview with Gloria Hollander Lyon, May 6, 2003. I am grateful to a member of the project who drew my attention to this wonderful archive at the OHA, in Pittsburg 2008

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smelt that smell before–in the trenches of World War I,” and he gave her a large injection of penicillin which dealt with the infection.19 This story is a reminder of how much doctors rely on their sensory knowledge and the history of their sensory experiences for diagnosis, despite the technological enhancement provided by equipment like stethoscopes for detecting illness.

Since oral histories depend for their existence on the technology of sound, it is little wonder that hearing the past features prominently in interviewing. Some oral historians feel that sound should be taken far more seriously as the central medium of communicating memory. Martin Thomas for example, commented:

too many historians still lazily mine oral histories (or preferably transcript of them) for content alone–ignoring the ambience of the tape, the theatrics of theinterview and the particularities of the medium, all ofwhich affect the evidential value. 20

For Thomas, not just interviewing but also field recording and sound production “have always been part of his research practice.” He makes an important point about the importance of sound not just for the content of interviews but also the processof oral history itself.

Another aspect of Juliet Sheen’s narrative that concerns oral historians who work with the senses is the performative nature ofsensory effects in interview. Juliet sniffs when emulating the doctor and people often act out or perform the senses on the interview tape. Without video, interviewees are limited in the use of their bodies to demonstrate or reproduce a sound, sight

19 Interview with Juliet Sheen by Rose Pickard, Leichhardt Local history Project, Transforming the Local, Balmain, 27 February 2009 ( this and subsequent tapes currently in possession of author).20 Martin Thomas, ‘The rush to record: transmitting the sound of Aboriginal Culture’ Journal of Australian Studies, No 90, January 2007, p107

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or a smell so they use speech in order to communicate either in metaphor or re-enactment. John Berry described what it was like to grow up adjacent to a suburban gasworks in Sydney, and it was important to specify the exact site of its location as well as performing the sound of it:

The gasworks featured a lot in my life because we were very close to it, it was on the point between Quarantine and little Manly...and that sound of the wooompf,woomf woomp woomp, it was part of you, you werethat close to the gasworks. . . and there was the whiffof gas. . . 21

Here Berry was trying to demonstrate the way the sound became embodied and he clutches his chest as he makes the sound, but it is relational both in terms of place and with other senses, so he speaks of the “whiff of gas” as part of a joint association in his memory.

These episodes do more than restore the sound dimension to experience of the past. They remind us how we move through the world utilizing senses in different frames, at different times. As Constance Classen asserted: “We not only think about our senses we think through them.” 22So too do various scholars remind us, that the relationship between sound and all the other senses is complex because they are always associated with emotions.23

21 John Berry interviewed by Paula Hamilton for SHOROC Council Project, February 17, 2001 (interview available at Libraries involved but see also Paula Hamilton Cracking Awaba. Stories of Mosman and Northern Beaches during the Depression, SHOROC, NSW, 2005 which is the book that resulted from the project. P4522 Constance Classen, op. cit, p1023 See for example Steven Connor, ‘Edison’s Teeth: Touching Hearing’ in Erlman, Viet (ed) Hearing Cultures. Essays on Sound. Listening and Modernity Berg, oxford, 2004. The senses often work against each other. Connor refers to the way sight ‘often acts to interpret, fix, limit and complete the evidence of sound’. P154

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Of course there are various registers of listening and sound in interviews. Some of these relate to the notion of whispering an aside, confessions or eavesdropping, secret listening. Marie Stanton referred to her childhood and the traditional Catholic confessional. The focus was on listening, not seeing:

Old Father McDonald was there for years and years, you’d go to confession and he was deaf, he’d say “I can’t hear you” so we’d all creep in and listen to him.24

For Marie and her friends “listening in” was a minor transgression of the church ritual and authority, but it is an instance of a story told about sound that was a louder volume, ‘out of place’ than the occasion warranted and could be remembered as part of the younger risk-taking self.

However some experience of the senses can be historicized in a more exacting way. As Casey O’Callaghan said: ‘time is to audition what space is to vision’.25 For example, Jean Miles went to school in Sydney when they were building the Sydney Harbour Bridge from the late 1920s to 1932. Her school was close on Observatory Hill overlooking the bridge site:

We’d grown up with stones rattling on the roof of the building that my classroom was in from the blasting, you know…and the pneumatic drills going on…I spent so many years, my school years, listening to that noise. 26

School is a place where extensive listening takes place in a formalized setting so it is no wonder that these sustained soundsacross years become central to Jean’s memory and understanding of

24 Interview with Marie Stanton by Paula Hamilton, SHOROC Project, May 15, 2001 and also Cracking Awaba op cit, p9425 Casey O’Callaghan,‘The World of Sounds’ The Philosopher’s Magazine, Issue 45, 2009, p66.26 Interview with Jean Miles by Paula Hamilton, SHOROC project, May 3, 2001 and also Cracking Awaba, op cit. p60.

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girlhood. By other accounts too, we know the completion of the Bridge was eagerly awaited by all those living on the north side of the city, as Jean was, who could not get easy access across the harbour, so this anticipation underpins her memory.

Place and the Senses/Sensory UrbanismOne of the community projects with which I have been

involved is “Transforming the Local,” in Balmain, Sydney, where Ilive. It charts the experience of gentrification since the 1960sof a former industrial working-class suburb, a phenomenon documented by urban historians in many cities of the world. Much of the research on gentrification tells the story of change through rising income levels and external visual measures such ashouse renovation and types of shops. Very little of it examines the process from the point of view of the people who lived through it. Through this oral history project I had the opportunity to ask interviewees about what they remembered in terms of sensory experiences. With these questions I was seekingto create a more intimate scale, but also a more dynamic sense ofhow change is experienced over time. Michael Bull refers to the spatial nature of sound and experience which has been buried within the ‘largely visually inspired epistemology of experience that informs much contemporary social science investigation… our urban landscapes don’t move easily.’27

At first, these questions about smell and sounds proved fruitless, but I had better success if I alerted interviewees to my purpose and gave them time to reflect. The result is a rich portrait of a place and landscape that was moving from a suburb where working people lived and worked, to one where not only the kind of labor changed significantly, but also work and home became more separated.

We associate the modern city with a cacophony of sound, muchof it defined as noise, that we screen out because it assaults

27 Michael Bull, ‘Thinking about Sound, Proximity and Distance inWestern Experience: the case of Odysseus’s Walkman’ in Erlman op cit. P173

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our ears and, eyes, and nose. By contrast, we imagine the suburbs as “sleepy” and muted, if not silent. Mid-twentieth-century inner-city suburbs had a very different resonance. Smelland sound are deeply implicated in industrialization and Balmain,a harbor peninsular, attracted heavy industry which relied on water such as dockyards, or drew on imported ingredients from overseas for chemicals or soap factories. Most of the people interviewed did not work in these industries but had moved there since the 1960s. One of the initial observations from the interviews, was how people oriented themselves in place accordingto smell. They were able to tell which way the wind was blowing by particular smells.

I can remember if the wind blew from the west, you’d smell Monsanto chemicals, a very strong smell. The one I loved the most was the one from CSR across at Piermont (Colonial Sugar Refinery), that sugary, honey smell, I think it was more like treacle. It was in the southerly from memory (Interviewer “I didn’t like it”).And in other winds you could smell the soapflakes from Palmolive, Lever & kitchen–pears and sand soap, it was a clean smell.28

The sociologist George Simmel described smell as a “dissociative sense” for there is “something radical and non-negotiable about its emotional judgements.” In this extract the interviewer also commented on the smell with a different opinion.Moreover the smells expressed a very localized sense of place, because in other parts of Balmain where there were three power stations you could, as another interviewee said, “smell coal dustfrom the coal loader, if the wind was blowing from the south west.”29

The rhythms of largely men’s work also marked out time in everyone’s lives who lived in the area. One of the islands off

28 Interview with Bronwyn Monroe by Annette Waterworth, March 2, 2009 Leichhardt Local History Project.29 Interview with John Williams by Annette Waterworth, June 4, 2008, Leichhardt Local history Project

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the Peninsular, Cockatoo island, was used for ship-building. JoanChapman remembered that you would know when work was finishing because “there was this strange haunting whistle.” The men then caught the ferry a short distance from the island back to Balmain. Soon, “hundreds of them would come streaming up the street from the wharf” and there would be “an endless row of boysselling (afternoon edition) papers and yelling in competition.”30These were the short-lived but repeated sounds of the every day. They speak of the masculine world of work intruding but also operating alongside the changing domestic suburban landscape, where Joan had moved not long previously. Fran Tonkissspoke of the senses, particularly sound as “capturing a larger urban tension between collective and subjective life” that would seem to be evident here.31

The story above also speaks of movement across landscape andour understanding of the city as a “sensorium”–a place where the senses are infused with each other, and are strongly influenced by modes and styles of movement. Even in the 1960s because of its settlement on a peninsular and narrow streets, Balmain was aplace where the everyday noises of cars did not dominate. (there was still the odd horse and cart, though no-one spoke of these more gentle habituated sounds). Many walked everywhere as well as from home to work and back. Just a few years later another interviewee remembered doors slamming and cars revving up as the auditory signal of work’s end. These evocatively reimagined soundscapes remind us of the diverse pitches, volumes, and tones in daily routines, and help us orient the physical landscape in time. Moreover, some sounds of the modern were completely unwelcome: Diana Bryant married a doctor and moved into Balmain,living not far from the cargo wharves. To her ‘industry was peripheral because none of my friends worked there’. Yet, she has

30 Interview with Joan Chapman by Annette Waterworth, June 30, 2008 Leichhardt Local History Project. 31 Fran Tonkiss, ‘Aural Postcards: Sound, memory and the City’ inMichael Bull & Les Back (eds) The Auditory Culture Reader, Berg, London, 2003, p303

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a vivid memory of the advent of containerization in the late 1960s and the ‘clanging metal noise when they used to drop the containers on the ships …people who lived around that part of Balmain were definitely affected by that noise’. 32It is probablethat there were different kinds of sound associated with loading and unloading cargo under the previous system such as the railroad shunting system and the sound of cranes and men shoutingbut people who had lived there for some time were acclimatized tothose as part of their daily soundscape. What Bryant remembers here is the discordant, the new sound intruding in the newly claimed suburban domain.

Of course, some of factory workers interviewed remember the smells and sounds in very different ways: The Colgate Palmolive factory, for example was established in 1923 on the waterside site of an old meatworks. At its peak in the 1960s, it employed 1250 local workers. Peter Waterman came to work down at the “Olive,” as it was known, being first employed there as an office boy:

Well, when I walked down there was a multitude of aromas coming from this place. You know there was tallow which wasn’t very nice and there was perfume, you could smell sweet perfumes and after about a week or so, when I used to walk down the street. . . I couldn’t smell it anymore. It just became part of the area– if you worked in a place the smell was absorbed but you couldn’t smell it.33

It may have been coincidence that sweet smelling soap came to be built at an old meatworks but continued the tradition of things having a strong odor at that site. Waterman remembered

32 Diana Bryant interviewed by Annette Waterworth, for LeichhardtTransforming the Local Project, April 29, 200933 Rosemary Block, “Everybody had a Cousin at Colgates”: The Community of the Colgate-Palmolive Factory, Balmain, Sydney. The Colgate Palmolive Oral History Project,” OHAA [Oral History in Australia Association] Journal, 18 (1996), 69-78.

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that “the tallow–the animal fat–which was used in the soap, was delivered to the factory wharf. When it stood too long in the heat and started to melt then it smelled the worst.”It is a commonplace that people speak the habituation to particular smells and sound over time at their workplace, though there is a great deal of research yet to be done on the meaning of labor and work through the senses. Another side to this storyis the smell of men’s clothes when they were taken home. Wives or children remember the smell of their husband or father’s work in their uniforms or overalls or jackets, which brought the unknown outside world into the intimacy of the domestic environment. These were not comforting but dissonant experiences of transporting senses “out of place.”

These examples provided a very different understanding of the process of gentrification, one that was experienced from a variety of viewpoints. On the one hand, they revealed the complexity of the Balmain ‘community’ and the layered histories and multiple meanings of place, despite the unity implied by the idea of the ‘local’; on the other, they gave some insight into the scale of the local and the way this is redefined across time and space in relation to extensive social change and different forms of mobility.

The senses is a field in its infancy for all those involved in writing, making or recording histories and there is still muchto be worked out in terms of interpretive frameworks. But the historian Mark Smith is right when he claims that working on the senses becomes a ‘way of thinking about the past’ or a habit of mind, since it involves a conceptual shift that brings new dimensions to the interview process and its outcome and provides evocative possibilities for the future study of memory.

For Further Reading

Kurt Danziger. Marking the Mind. A History of Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

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Oliver W. Sacks. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. New York: Summit Books, 1985.

Oliver W. Sacks. An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales. New York: Knopf, 1995.

Bandt, Ros, Duffy ,Michelle & MacKinnon, Dolly Hearing Places. Sound, Place, Time and Culture Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2007, Newcastle UK

Bull, Michael & Back, Les (eds) The Auditory Culture Reader, Berg Sensory Formation series, Oxford, UK, 2003. Constance Classen, Worlds of sense. Exploring the Senses in History and Across Cultures. Routledge, New York, 1993

Collins, Diane ‘Acoustic Journeys: Exploration and the search foran aural history of Australia’ Australian Historical Studies, Vol 37, No 128, October 2006 pp1-17

Connor, Steven ‘The menagerie of the senses’ Senses & Society, Vol 1, No 1, pp9-26

Connor, Steven ‘The modern auditory I’ in Roy Porter (ed) Rewritingthe Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present, London Routledge, 1997pp203-223

Corbin, Alain The Foul and the Fragrant Harvard University Press Cambridge 1986

Corbin, Alain Time, desire and Horror: Towards a History of the Senses Cambridge Mass Polity Press 1995

Classen et al Aroma, the Cultural history of Smell NY Routledge 1994

Cubitt, Geoffrey History and Memory. (Historical Approaches series)Manchester University Press, Manchester 2007

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Deakin, Desley & Damousi, Joy (eds) Talking and Listening in the Age of Modernity, ANU ePress, Canberra, 2007

Drobnick, J (ed.) The Smell Culture Reader, Berg. Oxford, & New York,2006

Erlmann, Veit (ed) Hearing Cultures. Essays on Sound, Listening and Modernity, Berg, Oxford, 2004

Jones, Caroline A (ed.) Sensorium. Embodied Experience, technology and contemporary art, The MIT List Visual Arts Centre, MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, 2006

Howes, David (ed) Empire of the Senses. The Sensual Culture Reader. Berg, London, 2005

Howes, David Sensual relations Engaging the senses in Culture and Social Theory, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 2003

Howes, David ‘Can These Dry Bones live? An anthropological approach to the history of the senses’ Journal of American History, Vol95, No 2, September 2008

Parr, Joy ‘Smells like? Sources of uncertainty in the history of the Great Lakes Environment’ Environmental History, Vol 11, April 2006, pp.282-312

Parr, Joy ‘Notes for a More Sensuous History of Twentieth CenturyCanada: The Timely, the Tacit and the Material body’ Canadian Historical Review Forum,Vol 82, No 4, December 2001, pp 719-745

Paterson, Mark The Senses of Touch. Haptics, Affects and Technologies, Berg, Oxford and New York, 2007

Rawes, Peg ‘Sonic Envelopes’ The Senses & Society, Vol 3w, No 1, March 2008, pp61-76

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Smith, Mark (ed.) Hearing History. A reader, University of Georgia Press, 2004

Smith, Mark M. Sensing the Past. Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting and Touching in History, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2007

Smith, Mark ‘Producing sense, consuming sense, making sense: perils and prospects for sensory history’ Journal of Social History, 2007, pp 841 – 858

Thomas, Martin ‘The rush to record: transmitting the sound of Aboriginal Culture’ Journal of Australian Studies, No 90, January 2007, p107-18

Zardini, Mirko (ed.) Sense of the city An alternative approach to Urbanism Canadian centre for Architecture, Montreal, 2005

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Notes

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