The only familiar smell for South Africans in Avery Gilbert’s pungent potpourri of pongs What The Nose Knows (Crown, 2008) is a poem from Rudyard Kipling, the “prophet of British imperialism” (pace George Orwell). His poem Lichtenberg “memorialized the transporting power of scent” for an Australian trooper fighting in the Anglo Boer War a century ago.

“That must be why the big things pass
And the little things remain
Like the smell of wattle by Lichtenberg
Riding in, in the rain.”

Rudyard Kipling

Avery assumes the wattle in question was golden wattle “the floral emblem of Australia” but it equally well have been black wattle, another alien invader species SA farmers spend fortunes to eradicate. One man’s meat etc. So how ironic that Rudyard got the spelling of the title of his pongy poem wrong. The place where the wattles grew was Lichtenburg – city of light – not Lichtenberg the suburb of Berlin. A common mistake this for tourists, confusing bergs and burgs in SA. Take Rustenberg and Rustenburg for example. One is the quintessential SA wine estate according to Anthony Hamilton Russell, the hero of Hermanus. The other is a town near Sun City where a lot of the stuff gets consumed. Can you tell the difference?

Of course wattle (both golden and black) is not the only invader plant species in SA. An even more pervasive alien is Vitis vinifera – the grape vine – which would have given a passing Aussie trooper an olfactory orgasm.

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