The Smell Salon: Why The Smell of Rain Makes Us Feel Alive

Talks on Tuesdays is a live event series bringing big ideas, real experts, and curious minds together - at your favourite local venues. Think thought-provoking lectures, audience questions, and post-talk mingling over drinks and dinner.

This isn’t a uni lecture. It’s a social, intelligent night out.Come alone or with friends, leave with something to talk about.

Event Schedule:

6.30pm Arrival & Doors Open

7pm Lecture Starts

7.45pm Q&A

8pm Talk Concludes

8.30pm Event Closes.

*Please arrive close to 6.30pm

A La Carte menu and full bar available throughout the night - pay as you go.

Your Topic:

The Smell Salon: Why The Smell of Rain Makes Us Feel Alive.
What if one of the most powerful ways to understand the world isn't through what we see, but through what we smell? In this interactive talk, artist and researcher Dr. Catherine Sarah Young invites audiences into the invisible world of scent. Drawing from neuroscience, chemistry, ecology, and contemporary art, this talk explores smell as one of our most overlooked senses. Along the way, audiences will experience carefully selected scents and discover how molecules become memories, emotions, and stories.

Why can one smell instantly transport us back decades? Why do we have words for some smells but not others? How does scent shape culture, grief, belonging, and our relationship with the planet?

At the centre is petrichor, or the beloved smell of rain on dry earth, chemically discovered in Australia in the 1960s. More than a pleasant aroma, petrichor reveals hidden microbial worlds beneath our feet, tells stories about climate and place, and reminds us that humans are constantly in conversation with the living Earth.

More than a workshop or lecture, this is a salon— an evening of curiosity where guests are invited to smell, reflect, ask questions, and perhaps leave seeing (and smelling) the world differently.

Your Speaker:

Catherine Sarah Young is an artist, researcher, and educator exploring connections between art, science, and culture. With backgrounds in molecular biology, interaction design, and contemporary art, she creates sensory experiences that invite people to encounter big questions about climate, nature, technology, and our changing planet in unexpected ways.

Much of Young’s recent work explores smell, particularly petrichor (the scent of earth after rain), as a way of thinking about memory, place, ecology, and our relationship with the planet. Her practice brings scientific ideas out of the laboratory and into embodied, often playful experiences that anyone can engage with.

Her work has been presented internationally, most recently at the World Urban Forum in Baku, Azerbaijan, and cultural institutions across Kazakhstan. She holds a PhD in Art, Design and Media from UNSW Sydney, where she is currently an academic and mentors design students developing projects framed around the UN Sustainable Development Goals.