Published in the Wamboin Whisper, March 2014: http://wamboincommunity.asn.au/thewhisper/index.php?op=archive Finally petrichor in Wamboin!

! By David McDonald It was the evening of 13 February. We had received just 11 mm of rain so far this year, dry, dry, dry! And then it happened: light rain started to fall and the petrichor became immediately apparent. What a delightful odour, and how welcome it was. Petrichor, you ask? I have conducted a small poll and have ascertained that not very many people are familiar with this useful word. If you know it already please skip to the next article. If not, you may care to read on. In the 1960s, two scientists from the CSIRO Division of Mineral Chemistry in Melbourne, Miss I. J. Bear and R. G. Thomas, reflected on the long-standing observation of mineralogists That many natural dried clays and soils evolve a peculiar and characteristic odour when breathed upon, or moistened with water.... What is more, It is primarily in arid regions, where the comparative absence of organic matter in the soils and the frequent preponderance of various types of outcropping rocks in the terrain are characteristic features, that this odour is most widely recognized and is frequently associated with the first rains after a period of drought. That sounds a lot like Wamboin! Their examination of a wide diversity of rocks and mineral aggregatesindicated that the capacity to evolve a characteristic and significant odour on moisturising the previously dry material is by no means confined to claysIn general, materials in which silica or various metallic silicates predominated were outstanding in their capacity to yield the odour. Bear and Thomas decided to give a name to this odour, and chose petrichor. They wrote: The diverse nature of the host materials has led us to propose the name petrichor for this apparently unique odour which can be regarded as an ichor or tenuous essence derived from rock or stone [petr-]. Hence the definition of petrichor in the Oxford English Dictionary: A pleasant, distinctive smell frequently accompanying the first rain after a long period of warm, dry weather in certain regions. And picking up on the old saying that its good enough to be bottled, the authors tell us that petrichor had been the basis of a small perfumery industry near Lucknow, UP, India. The folk there had developed a technique for absorbing petrichor into sandalwood and selling the resulting product under a name that translates as earth perfume. (The source for the quotations, other than from the OED, is Bear, IJ & Thomas, RG 1964, Nature of argillaceous odour, Nature, vol. 201, no. 4923, pp. 993-5.)