Blueprint - Separate stories

For many of us, the rotary clothes hoist is as Australian as a kookaburra, even given a starring role in the Sydney Olympics closing ceremony, and so it is natural to assume that it's an Australian invention. In fact, it's difficult to pinpoint exactly who created it. Blueprint's resident architecture and design commentator Colin Bisset explores its many variations.

We take a hike through Bundian Way, an ancient Aboriginal track that runs between Mt Kosciuszko and the NSW town of Eden. Stretching 365 kilometres, it has been used by Aboriginal people for thousands of years. Chair of Eden Local Aboriginal Land Council BJ Cruse shares stories from the ancient pathway that runs from the sea to the mountains and was almost lost to history.

A change in season means it's time to explore the array of colours the cooler months have to offer. Jonathan joins Tim Entwisle, director of the Royal Botanic Gardens of Victoria, as they take a moment for reflection and appreciate the different perspectives the rainy garden has to offer. Even the sun-loving succulents thrive in the wetter months. Plus, some bird watching across the lake.

If you were paying close attention to Vivid Sydney just now you might have caught mention of something called the Blak Hand Collective. A forming idea that connects indigenous architects, interior designers, landscape designers and beyond. Award-winning architect and a man of Wailwan and Kamilaroi country Jefa Greenaway is one of the people behind the idea along with Wiradjuri architect Craig Kerslake. It's a wonderful and rich set of possibilities for connecting ideas of design, identity, and place.

The Great Bed of Ware was intended to wow. And who among us doesn't feel excited by the prospect of sleeping in any four-poster bed, even one that is half the width? Blueprint's resident design expert Colin Bisset explores their influence as symbols of romance and intimacy, majesty, and class.

One chef, one cook, one home kitchen. This week on Kitchen Rudimental, Annie gives Jonathan a puff pastry masterclass. Layers of dough and butter – butter and dough - form a gorgeous silky texture – if you can get it just right! It's a beautiful process that's perfect for a Saturday afternoon. 

Regular listeners might remember a conversation Jonathan had with Blueprint friend Annie Smithers on the controversial subject of his preference for cold toast. For him, it all goes back to the motels of the mid-sixties and little wax paper envelopes of white toast delivered through the breakfast hatch. If you're an Australian of a certain age or perhaps even a mid-century obsessed hipster, you'll love the country's motels. Author, broadcaster, and architecture nerd Tim Ross sure does. He's been working on a new exhibition at Canberra's National Archives, Reception this way: Motels – a sentimental journey.

For the dandy, looking swell is a way of life! He prides himself on wit and dress, but their influence reaches beyond fashion and intellect, as Dominic Janes discovers in his latest book British Dandies: Engendering Scandal and Fashioning a Nation. It tells a scandalous story of fashionable men and the role they played in the cultural and political life of Britain.

Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier are considered titans of the modern movement but in this week's Iconic Designs, Colin Bisset examines the contribution that women made to some of their most famous designs. It's only been recently acknowledged that Lilly Reich was behind much of Mies's furniture, and Charlotte Perriand behind all of Le Corbusier's.  

In this week's Garden Rudimental, Paul and Jonathan stroll through Stonefields, one of Victoria's most beautiful country gardens where exotics and native plants merge to create a definitive style of Australian garden..

Cookbooks aren't just a bunch of recipes. They often contain insights into the political and cultural contexts of their time. Never was there a better example of this than Australia's oldest continuous community cookbook, The Barossa Cookery Book. Initially released in 1917 as a war fundraiser it's now in its 33rd edition. Sheralee Menz and Marieka Ashmore, also known as Those Barossa Girls, have begun a companion venture with The Barossa Cookery Book Project.

Hotel designer Bill Bensley lives by the motto, if it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing. The California-born designer has studios in Bangkok and Bali, and his latest book More Escapism: Hotels, Resorts and Gardens features some of the region's most extravagant resorts. His inspiration comes from treasures around the globe, including a 1930s Vietnamese bamboo hat, covered in pink polka dots, that provided the design spark for his Hotel de la Coupole in Vietnam. It tells a story of how the local hill tribes influenced the haute couture of Paris and includes some of his more ridiculous design ideas, including the installation of a yellow submarine in a hotel pool in Singapore which was deemed unsafe and soon after removed.

One chef, one cook, one home kitchen. There's nothing that quite beats the decadent crunch and taste of a freshly deep-fried potato cake (or scallop).

How do you design a building to house a nation's cultural and social history? The new home of the Australian National Archives has been purpose built for this extremely demanding role. With enough shelving to stretch from Canberra to Cooma the purpose-built facility is environmentally controlled, environmentally friendly and energy-efficient. Jonathan Green takes a stroll through its corridors with Sean Debenham, Assistant Director Storage and Lending to check out what's in there.

Nature-based design is becoming imperative as we search for ways to reduce our carbon emissions. Claire Beale, Executive Manager at LCI Melbourne, takes us through the Three Bs of organic design; biomorphic, biomimetic and biophilic.

Toilet, loo, powder room, the toot; no matter what you call it you use it everyday. In this week's Iconic Designs Colin Bisset casts his eye over the design evolution of the public toilet.

Ever traced your family history? Now you can do the same with your home. Dr Christine Whybrew of Heritage NZ has started giving How to Research Your House seminars so folks can uncover the history of their house.

In the fashion industry and the corporate world, you'd be hard-pressed to find as influential a figure as Anna Wintour.Journalist Amy Odell discusses her biography of the fashion industry's most powerful influencer.

Via their Instagram page Design.Emergency Alice Rawsthorn and Paola Antonelli have brought designers together to tackle some of the worlds intractable problems.

Imagine the architect of your new house insisting that you build it in a style that was fashionable six hundred years ago. That's precisely what was happening in nineteenth-century Britain in what was called the Battle of the Styles. It's hard to imagine that anyone who walked past Tower House in London's Holland Park ever thought it was entirely normal, even in the 1870s when it was built. It's the work of William Burges, an architect whose output was small but significant, and it represents a high point in the Gothic Revival.

One chef, one cook, one home kitchen, and one potato. In this edition of Kitchen Rudimental, Annie and Jonathan are back on potatoes learning how to master a Potato Terrine with Gruyère. Find the full recipe on the Blueprint For Living website.

Herbariums are more than places to store old plants and seeds for posterity. They're critical to understanding how plants evolve and adapt to new conditions which will be essential in our fight to save species under threat from climate change. Denise Ora, Chief Executive of the Royal Botanic Gardens and Domain Trust, and Brett Summerell, Director Research and Chief Botanist, join Tim Entwisle for an amble through the new facility.

The world's greatest cities have a few things in common. Architecture, art, culture, night life, and .... a really good food and restaurant critic? Besha Rodell, the recently appointed Chief Restaurant Critic for The Age and Good Weekend discusses the role of a great food writer and why she prefers to remain anonymous.

The best way to buy food is undoubtedly fresh from the farm but it's hard to imagine our lives without the convenience of tinned and frozen foods. And, of course, those that come in a Tetra-pak. It's the cardboard container that's more complicated than that sounds, and which revolutionised the transport and sales of everything from milk and fruit juice to soups and even wine. It's so much part of our kitchen landscape that it's easy to forget just how ground-breaking it was when it first appeared.

Growing Farmers is a new Melbourne-based initiative is seeking to sow seeds for change by turning unused back yards into small scale urban farms. They pair trainee urban farmers with residents who want to turn their empty yards into flourishing, small-scale market gardens. Recently, Jonathan met host Sapphire McMullan-Fisher at her farm in Melbourne's outer-north, along with Growing Farmers' president Alice Crowe.

We're all familiar with the grand mansions that dot the British Isles. At their height, they hosted hundreds of staff serving their aristocratic, industrialist (and slave-owning) inhabitants. Today, these buildings are more likely to host film and tv crews or tour groups. This is a marked contrast to their teetering fate by the end of the Second World War, with many left in ruins, sold off, or simply demolished as aristocratic families fought over the scraps of empire. But many others did survive and bounced back with gusto. Adrian Tinniswood joins Blueprint to tell this tale. He's the convenor of Buckingham University's Country House Studies program, and is author of Noble Ambitions: The Fall and Rise of the Post-War Country House.

We see Indigenous art and motifs used extensively in Australian tourism marketing campaigns but do Indigenous communities and businesses benefit from this branding? Anne Poelina — a Nyikina Warrwa woman from the Mardoowarra River in Western Australia's Kimberley region — is on a mission to make sure they do.

As Australians make their way to the polls this Saturday, in-house design guru Colin Bisset leans into the election, democracy sausage in hand, and takes us through the design history of the voting booth. Surprisingly, the idea of voting in private is an Australian one, first used in Victoria in 1856, and later adopted by the British and Americans. But how has it evolved since?

It's that time of year for preserving pickles, jams and chutneys, and Kylee Newton is a master at it. She's also the author of Modern Preserves and calls herself a saint of produce, giving fruit and vegetables another life through her time capsules in jars. She shares ideas on how to use up that glut of keeps, that won't involve toast or crumpets.

It's time to dig, mulch and prune with Australia's award-winning landscape designer Paul Bangay. In this edition, Paul throws formality to the wind as he takes Jonathan through The Woodland, where geometry and grids give way to the freedom of wilding. For those of us with smaller green spaces Paul and Jonathan muse on whether you can rewild an urban courtyard.

To truly get to know a place, is to smell it, so what did the ancient cities of Rome, Athens, and Thebes smell like? Barbara Huber is an archaeologist at Germany's Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. She's on a mission to advance the science of olfactory archaeology so we can better understand how ancient peoples navigated and interpreted their world.

Master Kong, or Confucius as most of us know him, died over two and a half thousand years ago but the venerable sage's impact on Chinese life was immense and long-lasting. While we can't view the actual rooms in which he lived and worked, it's still possible to visit the home of his descendants in the pleasant town of Qufu in Shandong province.

It's 50 years since the glorious Lake Pedder in Southwest Tasmania was dammed for the Hydro-Electric Scheme. It was a glacial, alpine lake, a place of deep and obvious ecological significance. Rima Truchanas learned to swim in Lake Pedder and watched on with her family as it drowned. Her early life was shaped by her parent's involvement in the campaign to save it. Now, there are plans to restore the Lake to its former glory. Frances Green has produced a documentary for RN's History Listen about this campaign — a movement that spearheaded the Greens political movement in Australia.

It's a perfect Autumn Day to go for a walk through Melbourne's Royal Botanic Gardens with its director Tim Entwisle. Australia is a country of so many climates, but for those who have the distinction of seasons, Autumn is a glorious time of year in the garden — also known in the Kulin Nation seasons as the Wombat time of year. We ask philosophical questions about flowers; if you're a Tibetan, why do you choose now to bloom? And Jonathan discovers a new pocket of the garden: the compost yard.

One chef, one cook, one home kitchen. In this instalment of Kitchen Rudimental, chef Annie Smithers and Jonathan head into the kitchen for a meditation on spuds. Annie digs into her home-grown stash hiding in bags, tyres and barrels.

A white picket fence might seem as genteel as tea at the Ritz but actually it's a fiendish thing loaded with meaning, the Jekyll and Hyde of the streetscape. You only have to look back at the genesis of its name — from the French piquet, meaning the pointed stakes that would be erected around archers back in the middle ages to protect them as they went about their business of killing people. The plain wooden fence has been around for much longer, of course, but who decided to make something prettier?

From the floods in NSW and Queensland to the war and destruction in Ukraine, there's a lot of building and rebuilding to do. 'Build back better' was a phrase bandied about during the initial phase of the pandemic but according to humanitarian architect Esther Charlesworth, it barely scratches the surface of what is required. With each disaster we often see a similar cycle: a surge of good intentions, an initial flurry of activity… but how often does what ends up being constructed actually suit what the people want and need?

Jonathan makes the trip to Mallacoota in far-eastern Victoria, land of the Gunai Kurnai people, to visit writer, historian, and Dark Emu author Bruce Pascoe. During a wander around the farm, they discuss native crops and grasses, food sustainability and farming and ducks.

Surely no one is fooled by a posh name given to something ordinary. Like the Reliant Regal, which was certainly the last vehicle you'd connect to royalty. This was a very basic car that was cheap to buy, thanks to its lack of a fourth wheel, meaning it was taxed as a motorbike not a car. And while car buffs might be sniffy about the vehicle, it was, in its way, actually quite significant and a mark of a company that liked to defy convention.

It's an image that sticks with you. A group of five men, rugged up …beanies and gloves … to move a life-sized statue of Jesus Christ, arms outstretched in crucifixion, into an underground bunker. The photo was taken at the Armenian Cathedral in Lviv, in Ukraine's west … and it's one of many examples where people have risked their lives to protect the country's rich cultural heritage, whether it be classical statues, religious figures, or entire buildings. Freelance journalist Evan Rail recently detailed the breath of this destruction — and the complexities of discussing heritage protection amid grave human suffering — for the New York Times.

It's time to dig, mulch and prune with Australia's award-winning landscape designer Paul Bangay. He's here to take you through the basics and give you the skills to become a confident gardener. In the next edition of Garden Rudimental, Paul reveals his adoration for Vita Sackville West. While she's best known for her writing, her Bloomsbury Group membership, and her enduring partnership with Virginia Woolf, Sackville-West was also a passionate green thumb.

Is there a certain dish, a certain food that triggers your sense memory and takes you right back to a time in your childhood? Or perhaps it is a time of year, when the seasons change… the heat of summer ushered out by cooler air and the browning of leaves? For Katherine Tamiko Arguile, both these things connect her to her heritage, her sense of family and the world around her.