But I well know such a pungent aroma – it perfectly describes an Asian snack food to which I’m addicted consisting of seaweed encrusted with fried batter and some “secret herbs and spices” of which the KFC Colonel would have never dreamed – unless he was prone to nightmares. 

You can buy it locally in tinfoil packets (an important point to which we’ll get) much like a bag of chips – and they’re delicious; grossly smelly but yummy.

The reference to a “tanner’s yard” was what caught my eye – in an olfactory sort of way.

My forebears tended to gravitate to Mascot (the Rabbitoh heartland) and my grandfather spent his whole working life at the Mascot Tannery.

Until I was about five, I happily thought that I was part Aboriginal because “Daddy Walker” was as brown as an old leather belt but I then found out that he was literally and simply “tanned” – like a cream-coloured leather belt before dyeing – due to decades of work hovering over steaming dye vats of brown “pure”.

Robey Street, Mascot is fairly long and down the other end was the tannery.

On our weekly family visits I’d break the boredom, as a young lad, by walking down to it, taking a deep breath and then running flat-chat to pass what can only be described as the “death zone”.

I often failed and can remember several times fearing (crying with tears streaming down) that asphyxiation was near: such was the hot foetid stench that passed as air near that tannery.

My father, when he was a lad, would get together with his cobbers, scour the streets and fill a sugar-bag (25 litres or so, I suppose) with as many dog-droppings (“pure”) that they could find and sell to the tannery as its main processing ingredient for a shilling a bag: but only if it was primarily composed of the more desirable white-coloured turdoids – only nine-pence a bag if too fresh.

So you now have a good idea why tanneries smell and why your favourite leather coat looks so chic and suits you so well.

This all came back to me when I was on a flight to Cairns. In my carry-on luggage was a packet of the aforementioned Asian sea-weed battered morsels, intended to be a small amusé-bouche for mine hosts.

When the plane was well aloft I peeked in my bag and was aghast to see a football sized behemoth expanding itself midst my socks, jocks and sundry items.

It was, as you’ve guessed, the gas from the smelly Asian snack engorging its tinfoil packaging towards bursting point in the pressurised cabin.

Now, there are some things that you don’t say to a Qantas hostie. “I think a small explosion in my luggage is imminent” is one of them. “My satchel might soon make a small bang followed by a pungent stench but don’t worry, it’s not sarin” is another. So I just sat and sweated, breath held like running past a tannery, for the whole flight; which I figured was preferable to sitting in the dunny wearing handcuffs and a Hannibal Lecter face-mask.

While I’ve sprinted over a “Southwark ditch” in Penang I’ve yet to experience a tallow melting-room; but, when I do, I’ll remember that flight to Cairns and think nothing of it.