Undersong: Telling The Tasmanian Story Through Perfume
On Tasmania’s quiet east coast, Hilary Burden’s perfumery harnesses the power of scent to capture the history, landscape and spirit of the island she now calls home.
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Undersong Founder & Perfumer Hilary Burden (image: Melanie Kate)
Step into Undersong, a boutique perfumery on Bicheno’s modest main drag, and you’ll sense more than the aromas of founder and perfumer Hilary Burden’s range of natural fragrances. Here, every perfume is a language - each note a feeling, moment or memory, coming together to tell the Tasmanian story.
British-born Hilary’s own Tasmanian connection began in her early childhood, when her family moved to Derby in the state’s north-east for her father’s work as a locum doctor. While she returned to the United Kingdom in her twenties, later pursuing career growth in Sydney, those early years in Tasmania proved seminal.
“My roots are in the liberty and energy that came with a small rural town upbringing in Tasmania,” says Hilary. “I remember driving through paddocks in a tractor, and smelling roses with the farmer’s wife, and - later - learning to four-wheel drive and dive for abalone on the coast. That’s never left me.”
Ever curious, Hilary’s early professional life was spent in various roles across the world of broadcast and print journalism, including as a features writer, Deputy Editor and Launch Editor at some of the UK’s and Australia’s biggest newspaper and magazine houses. By her forties, though, the pull back to Tasmania had become too strong to resist.
“I had a sense that what I really wanted in life was to be more in nature,” she says. “I’d already found that in Tasmania previously, so I resolved to come back. At that stage, it wasn’t about what I’d do, but just about where I would live.”
Having sold her one-bedroom flat in London, Hilary undertook a significant sea change, moving into an early 1900s convent school building in Pipers River Valley, 20 minutes from Launceston. For the next decade, she freelanced with ABC Radio, started and ran a successful local produce distribution business, and wrote her first novel, exploring her first seven years back in Tasmania. It was the publication of that book, A Story of Seven Summers: Life at the Nuns’ House, that would ultimately inspire Hilary’s foray into perfume.
“I remember sitting out on my verandah, looking out over several acres of paddocks of European grass, and realising that, in writing that book, I hadn’t gone back to the age of the paddock itself - the history of the land before European settlement,” she reflects.
“In the UK, history is so close to the surface, and you’re really invited to be interested in all of the paths that people have walked for millennia. Here, there are spiritual barriers to getting that sense of place. I wanted to meet and spend time with Aboriginal people in the local area, and learn with them how to walk on and connect with this Country.”
Hilary’s next book, Undersong: A Tasmanian Journey into Country was the product of the many important connections that she went on to cultivate with Tasmanian Aboriginal elders, including Aunty Patsy Cameron, with whom she spent many hours walking on Country, and discovering native bush plants.
“I began to understand the environment in a very spiritual sense, and I then started exploring the plants in my own way, distilling them for their aromatic properties. Now, I’m telling a story through fragrance rather than words.”
Undersong COAST eau de parfum (image: Melanie Kate)
Launching with its first fragrance in 2021, Undersong’s brick-and-mortar perfumery opened four years later in Hilary’s now hometown of Bicheno. Open to the public Wednesday-Saturday, visitors can join a live distillation experience with Hilary, discover the on-site library and workshop area, and sample the current range of three natural perfumes. SPRING is a elegant but playful distillation of blue gum flowers, nuts and leaves, blended with steam-distilled wattle blossoms, and blue gum and mimosa natural oils. COAST invokes an invigorating dive into the Tasmanian surf, with botanicals including native rosemary, kangaroo grass, black peppermint flower, and lemon-scented tea tree, while GONDWANA gathers leatherwood, celerytop pine, sassafras and Tasmanian mountain pepper leaves to evoke Tasmania’s temperate rainforest environments.
“These three fragrances feel like a little family, each telling their own Tasmanian story,” says Hilary. “It’s important to me that each fragrance is as authentic and close to nature as possible, and I always come back to the plants that I have knowledge of and affection for.
“I’m sustained by a sense of Tasmania and its natural world being special and unique. I feel that the right energy is here for me.”
Hilary Burden (image: Melanie Kate)
