The story behind the world's first dugong fart machine

We went to Sydney Sea Life Aquarium to visit one of the gentle giants of the deep

How do you make a dugong fart? If you're a perfumer, the answer is a little more complicated than "feed it beans and tickle it".

Johnathon Midgely, perfumer at Queensland's boutique Damask Perfumery, was commissioned last year to produce realistic smells for a farting, burping fibreglass dugong to be installed at Sydney's Sea Life Aquarium .

He was tasked with mixing concentrated perfumes that mist into the air when people press a button on the statue's stomach. Most times the machine emits a seagrass-y breath odour, but one in five presses releases the stench of what the dugong's keepers call "the worst poos we've dealt with".

"They actually sent me a sample of dugong poo, so I had the real thing," Midgely told ninemsn Pickle.

"We used a one-percent tincture of an appalling chemical called skatole at 30 percent. It'd knock you dead if you smelled it pure.

"We're next door to an oyster factory as well, so we got a bunch of fresh oyster shells from the dude there and made a tincture from them at 20 percent."

Midgely said the tincture included asafoetida oil and other synthetic chemicals at lesser volumes.  

"They just smell dreadful," he said.

"On their own, none of them smell like a dugong's fart, but mixed together at the correct percentage, they begin to resemble it."

Dugongs do plenty of farting as well, but luckily not on land. Each adult dugong at Sea Life Aquarium can chew through 40kg of cos lettuce (they'll only eat cos, for some reason) in a day, and they're almost constantly feeding.

As you could imagine, this amount of roughage makes for some powerful emissions.

Damask perfumery's Gabrielle Ivers (Facebook)

One person glad to see the back of the project is Midgely's assistant Gabrielle Ivers, who was charged with actually compounding the concentrated mixture.

"It's the worst thing I've ever smelled," she told Pickle.

"After mixing it I went to Bunnings and people were actually moving away from me. I smelled worse than fertiliser."

But for all their burps and farts, the dugong are oddly charismatic creatures — at least when seen from behind the glass at the aquarium, where they graze and sail over the heads of visiting tourists.

Their lumbering grace doesn't lend itself to evasive manoeuvres, and they're threatened by increased shipping traffic off the coasts of Queensland and the Northern Territory.