Author: Olivia Mattiske

This is an extract from the introduction of Arent & Pyke: Interiors Beyond the Primary Palette by Juliette Arent and Sarah-Jane Pyke.

We can still remember the feelings one particular suburban Sydney backyard stirred in us. Standing amid its myriad greens, we were transported to another place, even time. This garden could have been a fictional wonderland or the grounds of an Italian villa, such was its enchanting quality. Part of this magic stemmed from the owners’ deep connection to what they had created, and part came from the house’s connection to its surrounds. The building and landscape seemed beautifully entwined.

Our response as designers was to enrich those connections, and in a decorative sense the incorporation of green was a natural choice. But the significance of that colour extended beyond the decorative – it became woven through the built-in elements in an evocative layering of hues. The variegated greens of a checkerboard terrazzo floor brought a sense of nostalgia and an other-worldly mood to echo that of the garden. Deep green joinery ensured the very fabric of the house resonated with this tranquil yet vibrant tone. We painted the walls a misty green that blurred the division between interior and exterior, and the treatment of colour in this house became an immersive experience, as alive with feeling as the shifting canvas outside.

For us, to talk about colour is to talk about memory, but also meaning, energy and emotion. To write a book that references colour in its title is to discuss so much more than a choice of floor tile or paint finish for a wall, although these have their place here too. It is part of a larger and deeply nuanced conversation that we have been engaged in for years. And it begins with the concept of joy.

Everything we do is to create visceral joy – that inner thrum of delight where instinct speaks over intellect, heart over head. A beautifully designed space has the power to generate a sense of belonging, comfort and freedom that uplifts your spirit. We believe that power extends even further – a space that fills you with joy can transform how you live.

While it may sound very ‘big picture’, for us this belief is grounded in rigorous attention to the smallest details. The objects that tell our stories, the colours that call to our senses, the materials that evoke certain moods – all these play a vital part. But even more than that, our focus is on the day-to-day experience of people’s lives. We are constantly thinking about the reassuring rituals and intricacies of domestic life – where people make their tea and coffee, where they prepare school lunches, where they place their bags when they get home. We are also deeply interested in the places of connection – where people sit to unwind, to gather, to entertain – and the way people engage with one another in their own space.

Fifteen years ago, when we formed Arent & Pyke, no one was really talking about how design made you feel. The focus was on aesthetics and the debates were around trends – old school versus new school, minimalist versus decorative – yet there didn’t seem to be enough interest in how a design could impact your life. Or how a house could be lovingly crafted for the unique lifestyle of a family.

From the start, our approach has not been concerned with trends or generic solutions but rather the dynamic, spirited, colourful and very personal appeal of real-life spaces – the sort of spaces we would like to live in. When we met, we recognised that we shared the same energy and entrepreneurial drive, and the same passion for life – not only the life we wanted to create for ourselves, but the life we wanted to create for our clients. Our intention was to create authentic, meaningful spaces full of verve and vitality that lift the spirit and nurture the soul. It still is, and today we share that vision with our team and our extended network of collaborators.

While ‘emotional connection’ and ‘wellbeing’ have become industry buzzwords, we are proud to be leaders in the conversation that now revolves around them. For us, wellbeing and joy are intrinsically linked, and we believe there is much to be learned in terms of the impact great design can have on our lives. We’re keenly aware of how much our environment affects our sense of wellbeing, and we want to offer people the best way of living, creating healthy, low-impact homes that help them thrive.

Now, more than ever, that seems essential. Since we started our business, we have witnessed a shift in values to a more inward-looking focus that is literally closer to home – to our local community, our friends and family. Never has the safety and comfort of home been more important, or the need to create joy at home more necessary to strengthen, nurture and
replenish us before we look outwards again.

Writing this book has been a chance to reflect on the path of Arent & Pyke – not only how far we have come but also what we want to bring to the future. We are delighted to share our philosophy, our approach and our designs in these pages. For us, the building blocks of a project are not the bricks and mortar but the intangibles that make up our ethos as a business: the transportive and immersive roles of colour, the creation of joy and forging of an emotional connection, the character and spirit of a house – its heart and soul – and that special alchemy that occurs when it all comes together in a unique, magical blend. These ideas are the touchstones of our studio, and the projects we have selected here illustrate how we express those ideas and bring them to life.

We hope that viewing our projects through this lens gives them an extra dimension and prompts a different way of thinking about the spaces we live in. We have never been interested in decoration for decoration’s sake – for us, a design should go beyond beauty and function to achieve a timeless, uncontrived quality that ensures a house belongs to those who live in it.

This book explores the rich physical aspects that we know colour can bring to interiors. It ventures into a surprisingly evocative spectrum of soft and subtle shifts in tone but, further than that, it taps into the emotion of
design. When a home is brought to life through the colour, character and spirit of its different elements, everything is enriched and all the senses are engaged for a full, joyous living experience.

The experience of joy can be both immediate and far-reaching. It can be as simple as feeling inspired by the colour on a wall and as wonderfully complex as the way a well-designed space can enrich your life.

JOY

THE CONSIDERED CRAFTING OF SPACES THAT LIFT THE SPIRIT AND NOURISH THE SOUL

It sounds simple – we want people to feel happy in their home. But behind this is a deep understanding of the complex psychology of space and the lifestyle and personal journey of each client. We harness all the elements we work with – colour and pattern, material and textile, light and art, line and form – to individually shape each special space.

Home should be a place of nurturing and nourishment. It should be a sanctuary of peace, comfort and security where you feel grounded and free to be yourself. Crafting that place is about fostering an emotional connection and a sense of belonging. Your heart space. Creating visceral joy is at the heart of all our work. Our focus on how a space feels begins with an appreciation of how people experience living there. Home is the place for recharging and relaxing, and with this in mind we consider both the spaces for interaction and those for reflection. We focus on where people come together, such as the kitchen, living and dining areas. This is where all the action happens and where some of the most joyous moments occur. For us, the kitchen is far more than a functional zone and we strive to make it a warm, vibrant place to congregate, rich with colour, character and tactile pleasure. In the same way, the bedroom is more than somewhere to sleep. It is also a place for repair and recharging, so we design it as a true retreat
zone and emotional balm.

Joy and wellbeing are intertwined, and for us a happy home is a healthy home. We want to craft living spaces that soar with feeling and feed the soul. Creating a room that sings with colour sounds simple, yet the emotions it sparks are far from it.

COLOUR

THE INFINITE POSSIBILITIES FOR THE EMOTIVE AND THE IMMERSIVE

The meaningful role colour can play in bringing a space to life is a continual source of inspiration for us. We weave colour through the entire fabric of a house at every stage of the design process. Even then, the placement of one last richly hued accessory or artwork can be the element that draws the whole design together. The influence of colour is ongoing and we never stop thinking about it.

We use colour as a device to evoke particular moods and shape the experience of a space, playing with its look in different light to soothe or energise, nurture or revive. We use it to unify spaces, linking new parts of a house to old ones, or crafting a connection between interior and garden. Our approach is not to add a ‘pop’ of this or ‘block’ of that – for us, the greatest power of colour lies in its immersive effect, a painterly quality that envelops you so its presence is felt as much as seen. Adding a soft pink tint to the walls of a room can give it a rosy glow that transforms the room – and the feelings it provokes.

Our focus isn’t necessarily on the bright and bold colours, although these have their own significant impact. The softer, nuanced tones of the tertiary palette, whose language lies in delicious words like nougat, butter and olive, can unlock the door to a world of emotions. We work a lot with colour combinations, exploring the way different hues interact – room to room, piece to piece – to conjure up an entirely new sensibility. At the heart of it all is our desire to elicit a response, and whether we use colour to create harmony or contrast, it is always with the intention to lift the spirit.

CHARACTER

THE MEANINGFUL OBJECTS, ARRANGEMENTS AND ELEMENTS THAT TELL THE STORY OF A SPACE

The character of a home comes from the elements that reveal its personality and tell its story, from architectural lines and forms to cherished family pieces. Sometimes our design is responding to a story that is already there, such as with heritage buildings. Here, we try to distil the essence of the house’s character and meet that in the contemporary language of detail and joinery, subtly referencing the mood of the past while reflecting the client’s lifestyle for the future.

At other times we are helping clients to create a new story. Incorporating their own belongings – a favourite artwork, a souvenir from their travels – helps us do this. Not everyone has these to begin with, so during the design process we encourage clients to think about objects in a new way, beyond their decorative or functional role and in a more emotive realm. The story of an interior grows richer, more authentic and more interesting when personal, meaningful elements are woven into it. In this way, the design choices made today can become potent new memories in the future.

One of the most natural and pleasing ways to bring character to a space is through the process of ageing. It might be an old timber table that shows the knocks and cuts acquired over the years, or the faded upholstery of a favourite chair, or a brass doorknob that reveals the frequent attention of human hands. The nicks and patinas are tangible marks of the passage of time and the rituals of life and as such are imbued with meaning. It is one of the reasons we love working with materials like timber, terrazzo and marble – the connection they offer us to nature and its inevitable cycle
brings a strong sense of comfort. To us, a home that reflects the beauty of time passing and the ephemeral nature of things is a celebration of life well lived.

SPIRIT

THE HEARTBEAT OF A HOME, THE ESSENCE AND DYNAMIC LIFE FORCE OF A SPACE

We want to create homes that are full of spirit and hum with life to reflect the lives of their owners. Much of our work involves imbuing spaces with energy, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they have to be lively and vigorous. Different spaces call for different moods, and crafting those moods involves using a range of elements from artworks to the modulation of light. Scale can be a persuasive tool here – we might introduce smaller pieces and more of them, or opt for fewer pieces in a larger scale to make a room feel calmer.

Along with colour, we use pattern to enrich the spirit of a space. We are particularly fond of asymmetric, organic lines that take their cue from the natural world, breathing life into a design, relaxing formal layouts and promoting a sense of ease. And for us, pattern is as much about the inherent details of materials as it is about fabric. An abstract print on a bedhead can lend a playful quality, but the swirls of figured marble, the mix of colours in terrazzo and the pleasing grain of timber also bring their own dynamic and offer the comfort of their tactility. The sensory experience of a home is part of its appeal and we are constantly considering these elements for our clients – how a cushion feels to hold, how a floor feels to walk on. We literally feel our way around each project.

A spirited home is a joyful home, and we believe that central to this is a lighthearted sense of design that exists beyond the practical and purposeful. Home is not the place for the symmetrical and stitched up or the overly formal and tightly wound. We like to incorporate touches of whimsy and optimism purely for their beauty and the happiness they generate. A dreamy wallpaper print, the cheeky form of a chair, an unexpected artwork – these are the moments in a house’s life that surprise and delight.

ALCHEMY

THE ENCHANTING BLEND OF ELEMENTS AND THE IMPACT OF THE INTANGIBLE

Where you drop your bag when you get home, where you make your coffee, sit to read, hang your bathrobe – we delve into and delight in these intricate, important domestic details. We take a deeply empathetic approach in working with our clients, listening to and learning from them, and putting ourselves in their shoes so we can deliver a personal understanding of their lifestyle. The resulting design should feel familiar and intuitive, uniquely crafted to suit the people who live there. Rather like a magician’s sleight of hand, it should feel effortless in its experience without revealing all the planning and work behind it.

There is another layer to this magic. We believe there is an alchemy at play in the best of spaces, where all the elements – volume and texture, light and colour, architecture and object – combine to create something truly special that is greater than the sum of its parts. It is a holistic synergy we strive for, considering all these elements together throughout the design process. Added to this are the intangibles – the eliciting of emotions, the building of character, the injection of spirit. The evocative blend of things you can see and things you can feel – this, for us, is the alchemy of joyful design.

Arent & Pyke: Interiors Beyond the Primary Palette by Juliette Arent and Sarah-Jane Pyke is available now.

AU $80

You may have heard whispers of the healing abilities of plants. Perhaps your grandma used to prepare sage-leaf gargles for a sore throat, fresh aloe vera was applied to a knee scrape, or when a tummy ache set in, ginger tea was made and served. These traditions, likely passed down through many generations, always seem to hold a magical quality, a soothing, familiar essence. This is the spirit of traditional plant medicine.

Defender

HERBAL INGREDIENTS

2 teaspoons elderberries
2 teaspoons echinacea root/flowers/leaf
1 teaspoon rosehips1/2teaspoon ginger pieces
1/2teaspoon cinnamon chipsmanuka honey (optional)

METHOD

Pour boiling water over the dried or fresh herbs and steep for 10–20 minutes. Strain out the plant material with a fine-mesh sieve, and enjoy

The Guardian

An antiviral powerhouse, blended to create a strong defence in the face of viral presentations, whether that be a cold sore or a viral cold. Licorice, lemon balm, echinacea and St John’s wort combine to soothe tension and calm the heightened stress response that often underlies a weakened immune system.

HERBAL INGREDIENTS

1 teaspoon dried St John’s wort flowers/leaf
1 teaspoon dried echinacea leaf/root
1/2 teaspoon dried licorice root
2 teaspoons dried lemon balm leaf

METHOD

Pour boiling water over the dried or fresh herbs and steep for 10–20 minutes. Strain out the plant material with a fine-mesh sieve, and enjoy.

The Plant Portal by Erin Lovell Verinder is available now.

AU $24.99

The following is an extract from the introduction of Super Bloom by Jac Semmler.

My Heart Lives in My Garden

My heart lives in my garden. In the garden I know who I am – my family, my history, my loves and losses, and my dreams for the future. The practice of gardening and tending plants has nurtured my relationship with the landscape and helped me form a sense of place and identity. There is a wholeness I feel being with plants in the everyday. It is a source of sustenance, strength, freedom, care and calm, and boundless creative expression. Learning about plants and how to nurture them together as a meaningful community within the garden is ever fascinating

It has always been plants for me. I grew up on a farm in a rural region of south-eastern Australia. I have rich memories of being a country kid immersed in the beauty of bushland and family gardens. These tough gardens, created by my grandmothers and aunts, were wonderlands of rural beauty.

In time I pursued a career that was filled with the outdoors, panoramic landscapes and big skies, but the practice of tending plants was missing. I made a career change to train and work with plants. My passions pulled me towards it and I found a new way of working that feeds a deep hunger for beauty and belonging.

Plants have become an all-encompassing part of my intellect, life and work. Gardening is my art practice as well as my life teacher. Through plants I have found a rich community to be part of. When I garden, I can feel in my hands the generations of plantswomen that came before me.

There is an everyday, heroic quality to flowers and foliage and the immersive experience of growing something with care. The relationships we forge with plants connect us to something deeper. The act of tending flowers and absorbing their beauty provides immense satisfaction and a wonder in the ‘super bloom’.

A super bloom is a natural phenomenon in which plants flower in such profusion that they transform the landscape, bathing it in colour. When a super bloom arises, it is a miraculous sight. Plants bloom with a maximum abundance of flowers and colour, applied in giant brushstrokes across hills and plains.

Every individual flower has a ‘super’ quality. Flowers are heroic in their fine details as well as big blooming events – flowers hold layer upon layer of beauty within them. There is the wonder of the bloom but also beauty in the bud, the foliage, the fading flower and in the structural seed head, down to the unique detail of the seed.

There is wonder in the lifecycle that plants transition through, the seedlings grow to maturity, the flowers bloom and fade. Like us, plants are growing despite the prevailing conditions.

Flowers are evocative, drawing up fond memories or creating experiences as you see and share these plants. Flowers call for our attention and presence to enjoy beauty in a hectic world.

The practice of caring and tending plants also calls to something heroic within each of us. As we find ourselves within the garden, be it a single planter or a large garden bed, we experience nature and the microcosm surrounding plants. We are part of something bigger. The metaphors and human lessons that gardens and plants have for us are rich.

Time with plants can feed us. It is an honour to witness the seasons and to be part of the process of nature in a garden. When I feel overwhelmed or angered by the modern world and a society seemingly full of injustice, coming home to the garden makes me whole. It is a source of energy to meet the elements. This deep joy is available to us all.

Heartlands

This book is a guide to beauty in the garden. In this modern world, we hunger for beauty. We are beauty seekers on an endless quest to find and surround ourselves with it. We have an innate appetite for the wonder in nature, for holding flowers in our hands and tending plants. Natural beauty nourishes something deep within us. It is in our hands to tend and cultivate.

Let’s think about plants and gardening from the perspective of beauty rather than pure practicality alone. This book offers tools and techniques for cultivating a heart-felt space of your own. You do not need permission or expertise to begin – we all start somewhere. Gardening is about being part of the process and, most importantly, the pleasure you feel. This book is a call to garden in any way you can – through curious and inquisitive gardening, growth happens.

Every plant has its own beauty. Pause and let your eyes drink up the colour, texture and structure of any plant. Reach out and touch the texture of a leaf. Feel the softness of a petal against your palm. See the kinetic movement of foliage in the breeze. Listen to the sound it makes. In these moments, the world slows down around you and you feel whole. Natural beauty provides a deep source of sustenance.

To cultivate resilient beauty you just need to be open to change and the parameters of the natural world: consider what you love and think about how you can bring that to your space. It will not always be ‘perfect’, you will not always get it ‘right’, you will kill plants – I do –but it will all be alright.

There is no right way to garden. It is a personal pursuit of pleasure. All gardens are worthy and wondrous. As we garden through small heartbreaks and great wonder, watching plants thrive and decline through the seasons, we are in partnership with ourselves and nature.

Gardens are personal places. They are cultivated from something within you. Nurture your own personal heartland, a space in which to create your own expression of beauty. Your heartland allows you to bravely become the maker of the beauty, announcing what you love and what you want to see more of.

There is so much more. Do you want a garden that blooms throughout the year in your favourite colour? Do it. Do you want to grow a collection of Pelargoniums to enjoy their diversity of flower and foliage? Do it. Do you want to grow flowers whose scent reminds you of past pleasures? Do it. Growing gardens which connect you to different places and past homes? Do it. Any starting point is a creative gateway. Find your way in. Seek out the plants that will meet your desires.

The women in my family – my beautiful grandmothers and their mothers before them – grew gardens of resilient flowers in harsh climates. They grew what they loved and what flourished. Their gardens were their heartlands. It wasn’t an exercise in fashion – it was unique and heartfelt.

Maximum Plants

I am a maximalist: maximum plants and maximum beauty. I do love them so and I am always discovering more. Plants are so darn fascinating and meet the needs of my hands, heart and intellect. Happiness for me is when every corner of the garden is packed with plants and I am surrounded by foliage and flowers.

My gardening practice is plant-driven, and I gain so much joy by sharing plants with friends, family and community. With a bit of consideration and experimentation you can find brilliant plants for all parts of the garden in all climates. It is a process of bringing plants together to provide all-season delight.

I like to jam plants together in every corner of my garden. The more I add, the more opportunity there is to observe how they grow and relate to one another in an endless learning process of consideration, practice, trial and error. It is a home laboratory, a plant lab filled to the brim with flowers and foliage.

Nature has taken the reins in parts of the garden as plants happily self-seed. Sometimes it feels like I am more of a curator than a gardener, pulling and transplanting seedlings and choosing what will be allowed to rampage and what will be moved elsewhere.

What Will it Mean for You?
It could be filling pots with velvety Flannel Flowers (Actinotushelianthin) and delighting in their soft petals, before carefully collecting their seeds to share with friends.

Or you might replace your unusedlawn with a glorious explosion of Sunflowers, taking armfuls of thesehappy blooms to your loved onesand always having an abundantdisplay on the table.

It might mean growing the grasses and wildflowers of the bushland from your childhood in an abundance, or establishing a community of roses that echoes your grandma’s garden, or allowing Nasturtiums (Tropaeolum majus) to run rampant through the garden, trailing up walls and into every corner to form a verdant and lush jungle.

Wild gardens sparkle with a chaotic and loose energy that allows me to feel I am at play and that there is unlimited room for wonder and the unexpected. I find the space to be free. The generosity of gardens and gardeners knows no bounds.

Some creative ideas in the garden may not always bloom. It is no secret that, like all gardeners, I have killed many plants on my gardening journey. However, with so many plants in play there are more moments of glory than failure. Growing maximum plants creates bold beauty, and this book is a guide to big-hearted gardening.

Pleasure and Practicality

The act of gardening is the fruition of design, ideas and curiosity. It is both practical and a creative expression: planning and implementing until your space comes to life with the dynamic of the plants you have worked with. Gardening is growing and tending now what will bloom in the seasons to come. It is simply and intentionally tending a plant. Don’t let ideas on whether you are a ‘gardener’ hold you back. You can do it. Just start.

I often find myself staring at flowers in my garden. I meditate on their blooms and settle into their beauty. Pleasure abounds and time passes in these simple and precious moments in the garden.

Too often gardens are defined as a list of chores. We talk of ‘maintenance’ and ‘management’ of the garden, that gardens take a lot of work, with seasonal jobs to do. We describe them as a ‘labour of love’. But the practice of cultivating beauty goes beyond duty. In finding your heart in your garden, it may no longer be work. If it is ‘too much work’ and not enjoyable or satisfying, perhaps change how you are gardening. How can you enjoy the pleasure of gardening first and foremost? There is a deep-seated joy to be found as you tend your pleasure garden. Trends will come and go but pleasure is endless.

Super Bloom by Jac Semmler is available now.

AU $90

Landscapes are, in large part, defined by their plants. At the global scale, plants define Earth’s biomes (environments characterised by particular climates, plants and wildlife, such as grasslands, forests, deserts, etc.). At the continental scale, they define ecoregions and ecosystems. Plants are at the core of life as we know it. They fix the almost inexhaustible energy that thunders down to Earth’s surface from the Sun into a form that makes it accessible to all life on Earth. They are truly remarkable. Without plants, we would have no food or oxygen. In many ways, the success of our species depends on a successful relationship with plants. It is through plants that we humans manipulate and shape the world around us. It is through plants that our people care for Country. It is through plants that we made this continent. And it is through plants that we will rescue Country from its mishandling since the British invasion.

THE BOLIN BOLIN STORY

To begin to get a picture of the past, we need look no further than the city where I have lived most of my life: Narrm (now known as Melbourne). The Narrm of today is a radically different landscape from what it was under the custodianship and management of the Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung/Bunurong. Where today there is a concrete jungle surrounded by what feels like an interminable urban sprawl, there was once a landscape of vast wetlands and grassy plains focused around where Birrarung (now the Yarra River) met the sea. This whole region was a high-production environment where fresh water, salt water and land met. A system in which the Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung/Bunurong managed more than 150 species of grass, twenty-four species of rush and sedge wetland plants, more than 180 species of birds (including culturally important species such as magpie geese, brolgas, swans, ducks, emus and bustards), more than twenty species of fish and eels, and two species of freshwater crayfish. It is no surprise, then, that within five years of first ‘discovering’ Narrm, more than 20,000 British and other settlers had flooded to the area, along with more than 700,000 sheep.¹ Like much of this continent, the British capitalised on what was a deliberately curated and managed landscape, while giving absolutely no credit to the people who created it.

Further up Birrarung lies a series of billabongs (also known as oxbow lakes) of significant importance to Wurundjeri people to this very day. Billabongs form when sinuous rivers on broad, flat floodplains suddenly change course and leave behind an often horseshoe-shaped lake that was once part of the river. These wetlands continuously form and slowly fill up, eventually becoming part of the floodplain. One of these sites, Bolin Bolin Billabong (Figure 3.1), was the meeting place for hundreds of Wurundjeri for months at a time, where they would feast on eels, fish and other products of their careful curation of their Country. So important is Bolin Bolin Billabong that it was the site chosen by the Wurundjeri as their preferred place to settle while attempting to negotiate an agreement with the British authorities after invasion. This request was rejected, as the British desired the productive land for themselves.

Today, Bolin Bolin feels like a forgotten ruin in the inner suburb of Bulleen, a suburb which derives its name from the billabong itself. A busy thoroughfare of trucks and traffic bustles past the site continuously. The water has a bright orange tinge and the mud a deep black colour that reflects a wetland heavily polluted and starved of care. Giant branching beal, or river red gums, dot the shore, relics of a former time, when Country was more open. Now, these giant bicentenarians are crowded underneath by shrubs and young trees jostling for space and light. This new generation will grow tall and straight, not having the luxury to spread wide in open Country, free from competition. Further towards Birrarung, the sound of the passing trucks fades and kookaburra laughs can be heard, kangaroos glimpsed among the dense weed-infested shrubbery. Happy strollers frequent the paths, walking their dogs in what they no doubt think is the bush, much as it was before the city grew too big.

While Bolin Bolin is forgotten to most, it is not forgotten to the traditional custodians. To them, it is as important as ever. It is through this place that I first collaborated with the Wurundjeri. I had previously learnt how important this and other remnant wetland sites were. I had also heard of how they were working towards rewatering the billabong to improve its health, as it is currently starved of connection to Birrarung by the heavy regulation of water in the Birrarung catchment – ‘Starved from its mother’, as Wurundjeri elder Uncle Dave Wandin eloquently and accurately puts it.² I offered my tools to the Wurundjeri to see what secrets of the past were stored in the sediments of Bolin Bolin. After all, this place was a veritable supermarket. A jewel in the landscape. After talking with Wurundjeri on Country at great length, it struck me how important this place is and how the overgrown and polluted state of the site was like a wound for them.

READING HISTORY

My work lets me step back through time in any given place. Wetlands are a portal to the past. Think about all the stuff you breathe in: smoke, dust, pollen, chemicals, bugs, bacteria, and so on. They are all released into the atmosphere and mixed around until they eventually settle on the ground, on your skin, on top of your fridge, under the couch … you name it, if an object sits around long enough, it will start collecting atmospheric information. Ever been out to the garage, poked around and blown the dust off that old wooden chest, a collection of National Geographic magazines or a vinyl record? You, in effect, are removing information that has collected day after day, year after year, waiting to be read. Given the right tools, you can read that book. That natural archive.

Natural archives abound out in the world. They include the sea floor, stalactites and stalagmites, tree rings, bogs and, last but certainly not least, lakes. Lakes are ideal sources of environmental data, gathering information from the atmosphere, depositing it deep underwater and preserving it for thousands or even millions of years. This is a story waiting to be told. A story that gives us a glimpse into the past. A window through time.

So, on a boiling hot day in January 2019, and with a crowd of keenly interested Wurundjeri, I set to work extracting a sediment core from Bolin Bolin Billabong. This involved constructing a pontoon, which was then floated to the centre of the billabong. From this platform, I could carefully drill down into the bed of the billabong, taking a sample of the layers of sediment from beneath the water. I am always somewhat nervous when coring. Not only because everything I do in the laboratory after this point is dependent on getting it right at this stage, but because I know I am unearthing someone else’s story. I know, when working on this continent, that Country was cared for and that I will be, in some way, glimpsing into that care and into the lives of the people who cared for that Country. This time, it felt like I had the weight of the past and the present Wurundjeri with me.

Around six hours – and some six meters of sediment and river gravel – later and the job was done. I had in my care the entire history of Bolin Bolin Billabong, from when the river changed course to make the billabong through to that hot January day. After two years of pandemic interruptions and tedious, time consuming lab work, Bolin Bolin’s secrets were revealed. And never could I have imagined the story it would tell. The power it would provide the Wurundjeri and all Aboriginal people. The power to be believed. The data produced by the very Western scientific system that has disempowered our people for centuries. Data to back up the knowledge of our people. That this is, and always will be, Aboriginal land. True to form, Bolin Bolin is indeed a special place.

A YOUNG BILLABONG

Bolin Bolin Billabong is quite young, having formed in the mid to late 1700s. This could come as somewhat of a surprise until you realise that rivers are always evolving. The present-day Bolin Bolin Billabong is one of more than fifty billabong features still visible along this section of Birrarung and lies adjacent to a larger and more ancient billabong under what is now the playing fields of an exclusive private school. Immediately after forming, the vegetation around Bolin Bolin Billabong was a fern-rich rainforest dominated by myrtle beech (Nothofagus cunninghamii). That’s right. Rainforest. Right within the lands of the Wurundjeri, there was rainforest. The closest rainforest to Bolin Bolin today is 30 kilometres away in the mountains to the east of Narrm, whose surrounding environment is considered unsuitable for this rainforest type today. In the past, there was enough rainforest growing along Birrarung that when this billabong formed, the rainforest was able to move in and capture the site almost immediately. Another interesting feature of this period is the absence of any flooding for more than twenty years while the rainforest surrounded the site.

Rainforest in Victoria is now almost exclusively restricted to the high country, in areas protected from fire. It seems that, unlike the past 180 years under British control, the Wurundjeri were able to manage fire on Country in a way that allowed rainforest to persist near sea level in Narrm. This should not be a surprise, given the ample evidence from across the continent of Aboriginal people actively protecting fire-sensitive plants via our detailed and sophisticated manipulation of fire and its influence on the structure and connectivity of fuel. It is this fine-scale management that makes Aboriginal-managed landscapes more diverse than unmanaged landscapes. It is the detailed knowledge of plants, landscapes and fire that this continent was built with.

What happened next in the story of Bolin Bolin Billabong is, in my humble opinion, the most noteworthy and important offering from the sediments I gathered. Within twenty years the Wurundjeri had removed the rainforest surrounding the site with fire. It is clear that there was still rainforest nearby, but it was deliberately and systematically removed from around Bolin Bolin Billabong. Immediately following the removal of the rainforest, Bolin Bolin Billabong experienced regular flooding from Birrarung. The opening up of the vegetation at the site, the manipulation of what plants were growing there, allowed floodwaters into the site more readily (see Figure 3.2).

This act is a powerful one – and a powerful statement. Aboriginal people deliberately altered the landscape to suit them. Cool temperate rainforests, while containing some useful resources, are generally poor in commodities. Billabongs connected to rivers via regular flooding, however, are incredibly rich in resources. Eels and other fish need connection to rivers and waterways to complete their life cycles, while regular flooding brings nutrients and sediments that are critical for the health of the entire landscape. The speed at which the Wurundjeri acted to convert the new billabong to their preferred state indicates a system of management that was reflexive and reactive to the constant addition and removal of billabongs within the floodplains of Birrarung; a system in which people were continually working to maintain productive and predictable Country.

We have little understanding of how the arrival of our people influenced the landscape of this continent. This is in part because it was so long ago that there is very little oral or physical evidence to draw on. We don’t even know when our ancestors arrived here, only that we have been here long enough for more than 3000 generations of people to have lived and worked on Country. Long enough for ‘forever’. We do, however, know that we have worked with fire through much of our traceable history, and that humans have used fire for more than 1.5 million years. A large part of this time has been devoted to using fire deliberately to modify landscapes by inserting more grass. Today, many Indigenous and local people continue to use fire for this exact purpose.

GRASSLANDS

Grass is at the heart of the story of the country now called Australia. If one thing can be said to bind all human endeavours prior to the industrial revolution (and likely since), it is that humans depend on grass. Increasing the grassiness of landscapes is at the core of most of our landscape management. Grasses produce the grains on which the world is almost entirely reliant, and they form the food of almost all the animals we consume. And as evidenced at Bolin Bolin Billabong, a shift to a more grassy landscape can also activate and help bring renewed life to local waterways. This deliberate manipulation of Country using grass has occurred throughout human history, and for tens of thousands of years on this continent.

Thus the first impressions white people had of this land were entirely based on plants, and on grass particularly. The south-east parts of our country were so reminiscent of the manicured English countryside that almost every written account was full of superlatives describing the scene as a ‘gentleman’s park’ containing some of the ‘finest meadows in the world’.³ Boon Wurrung/Bunurong Country, surrounding what is now known as Port Phillip Bay, where I have lived most of my life, was described as ‘enchantingly beautiful’ with ‘extensive rich plains … having the appearance of an immense park’.⁴ Yet, unlike the ‘gentleman’s parks’ in England, which were intensely curated estates, our Country was deemed to be ‘natural’. In that same passage, the author concludes that Boon Wurrung/Bunurong Country was ‘a lovely picture of what is evidently intended by Nature to be one of the richest pastoral communities in the world’⁵ (emphasis added). Of course, this was no happy accident of nature. The Indigenous peoples of this continent were working the land, but in a very different way to what the British could understand.

In the (apparent) absence of evidence, humans fill in the gaps using their understanding. This understanding is wrought from our ontology or ‘worldview’. The British saw our lands, but they did not see us. Having long since lost their connection to fire on the journey towards their idiosyncratic type of agrarian system, developed on incredibly fertile soils in a remarkably stable climate, they did not have the skills required to read our Country managed in this way. They could not see past the missing fences and farmhouses, or the absence of familiar farming equipment. Worse, however, is the fact that these biases were compounded with other even more harmful and pernicious misconceptions: primarily, deep-seated and deeply flawed beliefs in European racial superiority.

References

1. In conversation with Uncle Dave Waldin.

2. Jack Banister, ‘Beneath Modern Melbourne, A Window Opens into Its Ancient History’, The Guardian, 26 December 2019, <theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/dec/26/beneath-modern-melbourne-a-window-opens-into-its-ancient-history>.

3. James Boyce, 1835: The Founding of Melbourne & the Conquest of Australia, Black Inc., Melbourne, 2011.

4. Boyce.

5. Boyce.

This is an extract from the latest title in the First Knowledges series, Plants: Past, Present and Future. The chapter this excerpt is taken from was written by Michal-Shawn Fletcher.

Plants: Past, Present and Future by Zena Cumpston, Michael-Shawn Fletcher & Lesley Head is available now.

AU $24.

Koonya on tukana/Tasman Peninsula

Koonya Glass House is a stand-alone space – in the sense both that there are few places like it, and that it is a space designed for no other purpose than the pursuit of creative endeavour. The building is an enormous glass and steel box, entirely transparent and exposed to the scenery of Koonya. Here, Jonathan Kneebone, founder and creative director of international and independent collective The Glue Society, escapes his office life in Sydney and Wellington to replenish, and develop creative art and directing projects.

Jonathan’s introduction to Tasmania was less than positive. He remembers arriving in Australia from his home in England – an industrial town, fifty kilometres north of London – and the state being presented to him as the butt of a joke, rather than a destination worthy of attention. However, as someone always attracted by the underdog, he was intrigued by this.

On that first trip, Jonathan spent Christmas in Tasmania. He visited all the usual tourist destinations, including Port Arthur, and decided to drive back to Hobart the long way, around the Tasman Peninsula. It was a dreary, rainy afternoon, but he felt an immediate affinity with the landscape. ‘I wouldn’t say I had the sense that I had been here before in a previous life – it wasn’t that strong a feeling –but I did feel a fairly intense connection.’ Many years later, when Jonathan was scrolling real estate websites and looking for somewhere to potentially spend weekends and holidays away from his Sydney office, he came across an advertisement for land at Koonya. When he visited the site, he realised it was the place he had fallen in love with on that first trip – on the road to Port Arthur, just beyond Eaglehawk Neck. He took it as a sign and made an offer immediately. When the adjacent site came up for sale, he felt it might be wise to be his own neighbour and bought both lots, amounting to 100 acres.

Koonya itself is a tiny spot on the map – a place you might pass through on the road to somewhere else, rather than a destination. And yet the locals have given it its own culture, with an annual garlic festival at the local village hall that is growing in popularity with visitors from interstate. When Jonathan first arrived at the site, he felt it was a place of which he would never tire. The landscape humbled him, which was part of its appeal: ‘I think it had a magic which is hard to express, but something that I felt I would love to share with friends and colleagues – with first-time visitors – to open their eyes to something that might bring out a quiet awe. I can honestly say, that feeling never diminishes.’

Jonathan wanted a Tasmanian architect to build a pavilion devoted to creative rejuvenation, in addition to a separate dwelling. He discovered Room 11 at the local state architecture awards. The firm had a presence at the awards, but Jonathan felt they weren’t getting the recognition their work deserved, and he approached director Thomas Bailey. In another coincidence, it emerged Bailey had had his eye on the very same plot at Koonya. It was a happy collision of creative minds and the team worked together to create three separate buildings: a house, a pavilion and a folly. The results are spectacular in every way.

All three buildings are remarkable all-encompassing sensory experiences, but the stand-alone pavilion is the centrepiece. Arresting in its minimalism, it comprises four glass walls and two parallel planes of equal area overhead and underfoot. This modern glass cuboid sits in stark juxtaposition to the undulating environment of the Tasman Peninsula. For Jonathan, the structure provides a reminder of everything that should be important: connection to nature; connection to self; and the chance to refocus, recharge and rearrange perspectives. ‘As an entity, it celebrates everything that is essential and nothing that is not.

Local merges with international in Koonya Glass House, recalling Jonathan’s own movement between global cities and regional locations. On one hand, the building references the grand visions of American modernism, recalling architectural masterpieces such as Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House and Philip Johnson’s Glass House, and the minimalist art of Donald Judd. At the same time, Thomas Bailey was influenced by the humble Tasmanian holiday shack and his personal connection to the area, where he spent time in his youth.

Tasmania’s traditional shacks were typically lightweight, with little distinction between inside and outside. Bailey’s decision to create a single glazed box, set beneath a larger roof form, was one way to recreate the open ‘elemental’ feeling of the shack and the indoor–outdoor space of the verandah. Extensive glazing with minimal detailing was used to break down the barrier between inside and out, preserving the perception of unbounded openness. The glazed walls are also openings, capable of sliding back to create a single vast verandah. This openness to the environment, and the sense of envelopment in the surrounding landscape, was purposeful: the design brief was to provide a place for channelling artistic inspiration and creative impulse. Bailey consciously avoided replicating the comforts and amenities of day-to-day home life, connecting instead with the vitality of the natural world. The building is not intended to entirely protect from exposure to the elements. It is this openness – owed to both regional and international inspiration – that Jonathan channels to open up new perceptions and possibilities.

For a creative like Jonathan, the spaces provide an extraordinary sense of calm in which to dream, invent, think and simply be. The Glue Society works with a team of collaborators across the UK, Europe, the USA, Australia and New Zealand to produce diverse creative projects, from online entertainment and commercials, to creating art exhibitions and installations, site-specific sculpture, experiential projects, writing, film directing, and publishing Creativity magazine. Jonathan divides his time between Koonya, Wellington and Sydney, where he has another, much smaller, residence. Living between places gives him a sense of balance, with each providing a different function and role. He finds that even when he is in Sydney, he benefits from having the Tasmanian dwelling: ‘I can occupy it in my mind – and visit it. And I would say I miss it when I’m not there.’

Jonathan believes the Tasmanian environment has an immediate impact. ‘There are some places you travel to that feel incredibly different the instant you set foot in them. Tasmania is one of those places. It forces you to behave and act differently. You react to the weather, the space, the air, the smells, the sounds – and it immediately impacts your priorities and rearranges them.’ He believes the landscape determines the people, the culture, what matters, and what doesn’t. It provides something that everyone needs: the permission and space to be more ourselves.

Jonathan finds Tasmania encourages creative people to express themselves, whether through food, culture, art, music, photography, or ways of living, bringing creativity and expression to the fore and opening people up to ideas, experiences and attitudes. ‘And, perhaps, this is a fairly recent thing for Tasmania to have recognised about itself,’ he says.

‘I love that sense of independence – people are able to do things for, and be, entirely themselves. Not for attention or praise or wealth – but for personal satisfaction, the ability to share and be generous, and to do justice to the opportunities they create.’

This is an extract from Tasmania Living: Quiet, conscious living in Australia’s south.

Tasmania Living by Joan-Maree Hargreaves and Marita Bullock is available now.

AU $70

LIVES: OCEAN GROVE/WADAWURRUNG COUNTRY
AGE STARTED SURFING: 5
DREAM SURFBREAK: CRESCENT HEAD
HEADBOARD: 9’4” PALE HORSE SINGLE FIN
WAVE SIZE: HEAD HIGH

Over the past ten years Jessi has been exploring her family’s history. After discovering her Wiradjuri ancestry she was overcome with a grounded feeling. ‘There was a generation of my family that were able to pass as white so they were able to leave the mission and move to Sydney to find work. So basically if they could deny being Aboriginal, they could get a job. My family didn’t identify as being Aboriginal, but my nan knew so she passed it on to my aunty and my mum. My Aunty Lisa has picked it back up, and is trying to put all the pieces back together from what was lost through that period of time. It’s been a slow journey, but one thing that I’ve learned is that it is already part of who I am, it’s part of my spirit.

Part of Jessi’s journey as a Wiradjuri woman will be returning to Country at some stage, when the timing feels right. She has travelled across her ancestral land while heading north on many surf road trips but has yet to stop and connect. She’s slowly preparing to take a trip out to Country and spend time there. Probably even take canvases and paint. Jessi’s Aunty Lisa is an artist and when she was young Jessi would ask her to paint something for her. Aunty Lisa’s response was to push Jessi gently to take up painting herself. It took a few years but Jessi eventually started to paint. The motivation to pick up the paint brushes came when she was working in residential care with high risk youth. When Jessi started working there, she was exposed to a lot of violence and trauma. So art became an outlet for her. She tries to paint based on what she’s feeling in her life at the time and to use Wiradjuri language to speak about it. Jessi has been learning to speak Wiradjuri and the immersion in her painting style and connection to Country has led her to title her paintings in that language. She paints most days, creating commissions or works for herself. ‘I think there was a part of me that was scared to do it, because I think I knew that it would almost unravel parts of me I wasn’t ready to unravel.’

Since birth Jessi has always been deeply connected to the Birpai Country where she grew up on a farm in Bonny Hills on the mid-North Coast, New South Wales. Her father was a keen surfer so she and her sister were either in the ocean or at home making jumps to fly their bikes into the dam. Her love of where she grew up prompted her to find out more about the Indigenous history of the area. ‘There’s a headland you can walk up that looks over one of the beaches called Sharky’s Beach. From there you can see Dooragan Mountain, which is also called Big Brother Mountain, which is part of the Dreaming of Birpai. I love walking out there. But when it was colonised, they massacred all the Birpai people from that area, off the cliff there. It’s called Grants Headland and the beach below is called Grants Beach, but we call it Sharky’s because at the bottom there’s grey nurse shark breeding grounds. When they massacred the Aboriginal people off the headland, there was a food source for the sharks. But no one knows the story. We don’t get taught that stuff growing up because no one wants to talk about it. Whenever I walk up there, I can feel the spirits in those black cockatoos that live up there; I got this tattoo because it reminds me of the area I feel connected to.’

Jessi’s warm nature and her love of connection and community feeds into her observations of surfing. She believes there needs to be a lot more compassion for people who are learning because everyone was learning at one point. ‘We’ve all had really kooky moments where we’ve done something stupid. I surf with a bunch of women of all levels and when we’re out in the line-up, it’s fun. There’s a heap of fun energy, even if it’s the shittiest waves, everyone’s having a good time.’ Jessi feels sorry for a lot of the guys who are learning to surf because she doesn’t think they have the same opportunity to just enjoy themselves. How refreshing would it be to see a group of male beginners in the line-up laughing and goofing around? Jessi’s advice to any beginner surfer is not to challenge yourself too early and to stay in your comfort zone. ‘You don’t have to prove yourself to anyone. Don’t feel you have to go big, or go home. I think the two most important things about surfing are having fun and being safe. Enjoy being in nature. You’re connected to something way bigger than yourself that you will never probably fully understand. But that’s the beauty of it.’

This is an extract from Surf Life: Women who Live to Surf and Create.

Surf Life by Gill Hutchison and Willem-Dirk du Toit is available now.

AU $49.99

LOCATION: Melbourne

ARCHITECT: Studio Bright

REUSED MATERIAL: Bricks

Architecture office Studio Bright used reclaimed bricks, lightly bagged and painted cream, to create a sense of history at 8-Yard House, a new build in suburban Melbourne. ‘I like it that non-architects are not sure if it’s a new or an old house,’ says architect Melissa Bright. ‘Maybe that’s connected to the material choices we made.’

Situated on a street full of single-fronted Victorian houses, the house previously on this site was poorly built, with a number of badly handled additions, and could not be adapted. The challenge for the architects was to create a new house in an old street that still felt like it was part of the neighbourhood.

The first step was to organise the volume on the large site. One priority was to catch northern sunlight, another was to not overshadow the neighbours. Rather than separating the site into only two zones – a house at the front and garden at the back– the outdoor spaces were divided into a series of courtyards and gardens that were distributed along the length of the site.

In all, there are eight outdoor spaces, or yards, of different sizes, which gives rise to the name of the house. The owners wanted a pool, but if it had been put in the backyard it would become the focal point, and more space would be taken up with pool fencing. Instead, the pool was brought forward, and it stretches along the northern side of the house.

At the front of the house, a perforated brick wall screens a small outdoor courtyard created outside the main bedroom on the northern side. Another small courtyard was created further back, towards the middle of the house, on the southern border. At the back, a partially paved garden is bookended with another structure – a two-storey studio and garage – that faces the back alley.

Reclaimed brick is an important part of the design. The front facade has a skin of solid brick on the first storey above the ground floor, which is clad in grey timber. At the top of the facade, a circular form in brick protrudes above the roofline, echoing the semicircular shape of the ornate Victorian plaster facade of the house next door. On the northern side of the facade, the brick forms a perforated screen that conceals the small front courtyard off the main bedroom.

Inside the house, reclaimed bricks are used as interior finishes alongside timber in the living room and kitchen. The kitchen island is made with brick, with curved brickwork forming recesses for knees under the stone bench. Outside, the brickwork is omnipresent. The pool and the green courtyard gardens are all set against a backdrop of cream brick. In the outdoor spaces leading from the pool to the back garden, a series of outdoor courtyards is separated by brick beams that create a material connection above head height between the exterior brick walls and the house itself.

At the front of the house is an intimate living area lined in dark timbers and brick. It looks almost like a library or an old-fashioned sitting room. ‘In some ways this is our new “old” house part,’ says Bright. The front bedroom is the same, and floor-to-ceiling curtains create a sense of cosiness and dark cocooning.

After this section, the house really opens out. A sense of connection is achieved by the distribution of space and connection to the outdoors. The kitchen space is separated from the side garden by glass, then a couple of steps lead down into a sunken living space with views to the garden on two sides.

Upstairs, the kids’ bedrooms are set out in a row. Desks are built into the corridor to draw the kids out of their bedrooms so that, while they are doing homework or on their computers, they are sitting side by side in a more social space. A large rumpus room with a TV on this floor opens to the rooftop garden, again encouraging socialising and providing a connection to the outdoors.

8-Yard House shows that, even with a new build, a sense of history can be created through the intelligent use of materials. This house could easily have been built with new brick, but it would have had a totally different feel – one that was more monolithic and less rich. The selection of reclaimed brick has given this house a coherence that meshes perfectly with the focus on nature of the eight outdoor yards, and the cream paint contrasts wonderfully with the green planting throughout.

Reclaimed: New homes from old materials is available now.

AU $65

One day in 1803, although no one knows exactly which day, the human population reached one billion. It had taken our species a few hundred thousand years to arrive at that number. From there, it took just 115 years or so to double it. By 1960 we had reached three billion. Then, in just over fifty years, we hit four billion, then five billion, six billion, seven billion. That last milestone was reached on31 October 2011.

The number of people on the planet is now fast approaching eight billion, and a recent study in the British medical journal Lancet projects we’ll peak at just shy of ten billion in the year 2064. Of course, some economists wonder if the global dip in births caused by the COVID-19 pandemic might mean that the worldwide population will max out at a slightly lower figure, bringing a population inflection forward by several years. In any case, a lot more people are coming to the global dinner table, so we’re going to need a lot more food.

According to a 2018 report by the World Resources Institute, there’s a substantial shortfall between the amount of food currently produced and the amount of food we’ll need to feed all the newcomers: 7400 trillion calories to be exact. Put another way, we’re going to need to produce around 50–60 per cent more food. And the thing is, we’re not even feeding everyone adequately now. Make no mistake, we’re doing far better than we were a few decades ago. Between 1970 and 2015, undernourishment in developing countries declined from nearly 35 per cent of the population to 12.9 per cent, according to Our World in Data. And the global prevalence of hunger fell from 13.3 per cent in the year 2000 to 8.8 per cent in 2017. These are good trends, obviously. But that still leaves a lot of people who are hungry and undernourished.

It is for this reason that, in 2015, the United Nations set among its Global Goals for Sustainable Development an ambitious target of ‘Zero Hunger by 2030’. Unfortunately, a recent analysis by the UN’s own Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) suggests this target is unlikely to be met, either by 2030 or anytime soon after. The problem, the report explains, is that although hunger incrementally decreased over decades, around 2014 this steady progress ground to a halt and since then hunger has been gradually increasing. By 2019, almost 9 per cent of the global population was undernourished, equating to around 690 million people. That was before the COVID-19 pandemic, which has only served to exacerbate food insecurity. Further analysis by the FAO has revealed that the prevalence of undernourishment reached 9.9 per cent during the first year of the pandemic, meaning that roughly one in ten people in the world were not getting adequate nutrition. The FAO projects that instead of reaching zero hunger by 2030, if current trends continue, by that time there will most likely be 840 million undernourished people in the world.

For a person facing food insecurity, it’s not just a matter of acquiring sufficient daily calories but also of getting access to adequate nutrients. Food insecurity, whether caused by crop failures or wars, has an enormous impact on diet quality. Where diets narrow to the point of undernourishment and malnourishment, health problems arise – often cruelly so. It has been estimated that over 340 million children across the world are currently deficient in micronutrients. In addition, around 22 per cent of all children under the age of five suffer stunted growth. They are not just a bit shorter than the average height for their age. Rather, stunted children are more than two standard deviations below where they should be on the World Health Organization Child Growth Standards chart. Many of these same children – around forty-five million of them – are also wasted, meaning they are profoundly underweight. The impacts on health and development are devastating. The United Nations Children’s Fund estimates that nearly half of all deaths of children under age five are due to undernourishment. Although crop failures play a role in famine, malnutrition and undernourishment, there’s certainly far more to it than that. Plenty of food is produced for human consumption every year, more than enough to feed everyone in the world. Yet one-quarter to nearly one-third of that food is wasted. This happens not only in many households but at multiple points along the global food supply chain.

To be honest, the term ‘chain’ really doesn’t provide the right visual analogy here. The global food supply is a dizzyingly complex system which is impacted at local, national and international levels by myriad  trade and distribution networks, government policies, the behaviour of corporations and regulatory bodies, the mercurial prices of imports and exports, and political unrest and military conflict, as well as epidemics and, indeed, pandemics. Among these factors, conflict stands out as a particularly egregious cause of food insecurity. The Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET), which was founded in 1985 by the United States Agency for International Development, keeps a close eye on acute food insecurity throughout the world. Currently, there are four countries on FEWS NET’s ‘highest concern’ list  – Yemen, South Sudan, Nigeria and Ethiopia  – comprising millions of people requiring humanitarian food assistance. Each of these crises largely has been either caused or exacerbated by protracted conflicts, where fighting – sometimes inadvertently, sometimes deliberately  – has disrupted food distribution or made it difficult to plant and harvest crops in the first place. Extreme weather events and other climate-related factors often serve to make matters worse, with drought in some areas or too much rain in others causing delays in planting or crop losses. When this happens, it becomes difficult for farmers to provide even small amounts of hunger relief within the greater context of war.

This brings us to the figurative and literal root of the global food supply: plants. Their diversity and availability has enormous knock-on effects that are felt throughout the world. They provide most of the food that the world consumes, trades and fights over. Moreover, plants come with some very specific conditions for growth and survival. To get an idea of the future of food security, it’s essential to understand just how much the global food supply depends on a precariously narrow range of plants.

There are around 435,000 land plant species in the world, but humans can’t eat most of them. A few years ago, scientists at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew embarked on a study to better understand the scope and scale of edible plants and found that there are just 7039 plant species that are fit for human consumption. There are a few mosses and lichen on the list, but the overwhelming majority are vascular plants, most of which are seed-bearing. Altogether, these edible plants come from 272 plant families, but the spread isn’t even, with many edible plants concentrated in a small number of plant families, such as palms and grasses. Cereals, after all, are grasses. We get cocoa, okra and many other foods from the mallow family. There’s also the mustard family, which includes broccoli, cauliflower and, of course, mustard. The daisy family gives us 251 edible plants including lettuces, sunflower seeds and artichokes. Top prize goes to the pea family, which presents us with around 625 edible species.

Of course, what humans can eat and what we actually do eat are two  very different things. According to the aforementioned researchers at Kew, of those 7039 edible plants, only 417 are food crops – that’s just 5.9 per cent. Furthermore, only around 250 plant species have been fully domesticated since agriculture became all the rage back in the Neolithic. Today, 90 per cent of humanity’s caloric intake comes from only fifteen crop plants, with just three – wheat, rice and maize – accounting for around half of our calories globally. As far as bottlenecks go, that’s a doozy.

We can see this reflected in seed production. Some projections suggest the global crop seed market could reach more than US$80 billion by 2025 and will continue to grow with demand. In line with our global caloric dependency, wheat, rice and maize account for around half of global seed production. Seed production plays a critical role in the global food supply. After all, most crops rely on seeds for propagation. Seed supply is itself complex and extensive, full of trade networks and a bewildering level of international distribution. In a recent statement from the International Seed Federation, an industry organisation of seed producers, its secretary-general, Michael Keller, explained, ‘Today there is no country that could fully supply farmers with seeds of their choice solely from their own production.’ In other words, every crop-growing country depends to some extent on seeds from somewhere else. And so, at any point in time, including as you’re reading this right now, shipments of seeds are crossing borders, oceans and continents. It is, effectively, human-mediated seed dispersal on a global scale. Producing such large amounts of seeds across many different parts of the world mitigates the risk of crop failures in any one location, but it still entails a reliance on a mere handful of plant species, and this makes us extremely vulnerable to food insecurity, especially in the face of a changing climate.

So, how did we get here?

Beginning around 12,000 years ago, humans narrowed their dietary diversity, gradually shifting from numerous wild, edible plants to a dependence on a much smaller number of domesticated species, and much of this took place during the relatively stable climate of the Neolithic. Nevertheless, even among that narrow cache of domesticated plants, there was still a reasonable amount of genetic diversity thanks to the many and varied locally adapted species.

For farmers, this came with benefits, explains Charlotte Lusty, who is the head of programs and genebank platform coordinator at Crop Trust, an international organisation that aims to preserve crop biodiversity. ‘If it was too hot, some varieties would die. If there was a fungus, only some of the individuals would be affected,’ she tells me. So, too, with drought, frost or flooding, says Lusty. ‘There would always be an individual there who would be resistant.’ Farmers recognised that diversity brought resilience, she adds. ‘They didn’t want uniformity because it was risky.’

Of course, the plants didn’t all flower and fruit at the same time, which is a problem if you want to harvest everything all at once. If that was the aim, then planting a field with a monoculture of a more bountiful variety of wheat, for example, provided some advantages, enabling both high yield and mass production – undeniably useful for feeding a lot of people at once as populations began to rise. There appeared to be a trade-off: you could mitigate the risk of crop failure with higher plant diversity and make do with lower yields, or you could reduce plant diversity for a shot at bigger harvests and wear the higher risk that came with that. Neither was ideal for a burgeoning global population, and by the middle of the 20th century it seemed agriculture would soon reach a breaking point.

Back in the 1950s, when the global population was fast approaching three billion, there were many grim projections about the capacity of agriculture to keep up with the demand for food. Those concerns were well founded. Even before the start of World War II, the global population was veering ever upwards, but it was after the war that birth rates really took off. By 1950, in addition to the famed post war ‘baby boom’ in places like the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia, the world’s most populous countries  – China and India – began experiencing an exponential population boom that would ultimately see the addition of billions more humans before the turn of the millennium. But the food supply wasn’t keeping pace. By the early 1960s, global cereal crop production was around 750 million tonnes per annum, which was not enough to feed the coming influx. At the time, it seemed there was no way to avert a global famine. Bleak predictions warned that ‘hundreds of millions’ would starve within the space of a generation. Yet, this never happened. What changed? Well, weirdly enough, our crops got shorter.

Recall that plants spend a lot of time divvying up and redirecting resources – nutrients, carbohydrates, water. Reproduction, especially seed growth, is resource-intensive, so when the time comes, the plant directs much of its resources that way. But it can only sacrifice so much because the rest of the plant still needs energy to grow and live. Plants, of course, have many different traits, and the maintenance of those traits require energy input: maybe it’s a thorny defence mechanism or a particularly showy flower, or it might be the upkeep of a hard, woody trunk or the endless molecular negotiations between root cells and soil microbes. For plants that grow tall, there’s a lot of quiet work involved in stem growth, including all the plumbing and structural support that ensures the plant doesn’t topple under its own weight. For long-stemmed cereal grasses, like wheat, rice and maize, it’s not good to be both tall and top-heavy. Yet, the top is where the grains grow, all those endosperm-filled seeds that sustain us. And so it was that humans had cultivated cereal plants that grew tall but which, in being tall, had limits on the quantity of grains they could produce without the plant buckling under its own weight. This problem, which plant breeders and farmers call ‘lodging’, makes harvesting very difficult and leads to substantial crop waste. So, even though the first half of the 20th century had seen the development of industrial processes that enabled large-scale fertiliser production, just throwing a whole bunch of fertiliser on the world’s cereal crops wasn’t helping as much as hoped. It turned out that high-fertiliser regimes cause cereals to grow too quickly, leading to weak stems, which made the lodging problem worse. In a sense, the real problem, and the source of all those fears of global famine, was gravity.

The solution began to reveal itself in Japan in 1935 when a plant breeder by the name of Gonjiro Inazuka took a short-strawed native Japanese wheat called Daruma and crossbred it with high-yielding varieties of American wheat. The result was a new wheat variety called Norin-10. Not long after World War II, Orville Vogel, a plant breeder at Washington State University, acquired samples ofNorin-10 and used them to develop a high-yielding dwarf variety of winter wheat. This was good progress, but it wasn’t of much use to farmers in warmer climates. Then, in the early 1950s, some of Vogel’s new lines were sent to Norman Borlaug, who was breeding rust-resistant wheat at what would later become the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Mexico. Intrigued by Vogel’s new wheat variety, Borlaug began crossing it with Mexican varieties that grew well in the local climate. His work led to the first high-yielding semi-dwarf wheat that grew well in tropical and subtropical climates. It had short, strong stems and produced large numbers of tillers, which are the protrusions on which the wheat heads grow. It not only produced more wheat heads, but each head also produced more individual grains than before.

Though neither Inazuka, Vogel or Borlaug knew it at the time, the  success of this venture hinged on the presence of Rht genes which had been passed down from the Japanese Daruma wheat. It’s now known these genes reduce a growing plant’s response to gibberellins, those very same hormones involved in seed development and germination. The presence of Rht genes resulted in wheat with shorter, stronger stalks yet far more grains. Importantly, this wheat didn’t ‘lodge’. Moreover, while Borlaug’s new wheat variety also grew in warm climates, because it did not require exposure to cold temperatures in order to flower and produce grains, farmers could produce two crops each year instead of one. Borlaug shared his wheat with countries in Central America, South America and South-East Asia and, as a result, crop yields went through the proverbial roof. In Mexico alone, grain production doubled within seven years.

Meanwhile, a similar story was unfolding in rice breeding. In the1960s, production of domesticated O. sativa was averaging around 4 tonnes per hectare, but this was not keeping pace with demand. Again, the key to success lay in interfering with gibberellins. In rice, it all started with a Chinese variety of dwarf indica rice, Dee-geo-woo-gen. It turns out that Dee-geo-woo-gen possessed a mutation in a gene called sd1. Normally, sd1 plays an important role in the production of gibberellins in plant cells. Mutations in sd1 can throw a spanner in the works and the plants don’t produce enough gibberellins  to grow tall. Dee-geo-woo-gen was used by plant breeders to create shorter, stronger, yet high-yielding varieties of rice, and these went on to be the basis of numerous commercial varieties grown in the tropics and subtropics, as well as in temperate areas.

Another advancement came not long after the first semi-dwarf rice varieties were bred. Chinese agricultural scientist Yuan Longping discovered that heterosis, or hybrid vigour, was possible in rice. It’s a phenomenon in which the offspring of two very different plant parents are much more robust and productive than either parent. This had been researched and exploited in other crops, such as corn, but it was not thought possible in rice until Longping’s discovery. Achieving heterosis was tricky at a large scale because, unlike those other crops, rice is self-pollinating. The tiny flowers have the male and female parts so close together that it’s essentially impossible to pollinate an entire field of rice plants with pollen from another variety. But Longping was determined  – he had seen first-hand people dying of starvation during the Great Chinese Famine in the early 1960s, and he wanted to make sure nothing like that ever happened again. He searched for years for a rare mutant that would make cross-pollination possible, and in 1970 he finally found one on an island off China’s southern coast, in a strain of wild rice. A mutation had rendered it unable to make its own pollen, but the female reproductive structures were working just fine. Without that rice’s own pollen to get in the way, large-scale hybridisation suddenly became a lot more feasible. Longping and his colleagues used this as the basis of a breeding system that led to the extensive production of new, high-yield, hybrid rice varieties that displayed hybrid vigour. The result was a 20 per cent increase in annual rice production, which has had an enormous impact on global food security.

The arrival of high-yielding dwarf cereals in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s ushered in a world of cereal crops that not only produced more grains but were also structurally more amenable to mechanised harvesting, making large-scale cultivation easier. This era in agriculture has been called the Green Revolution because it resulted in global food production that kept up with, and even exceeded, the demands of a swelling population of humans, as well as a growing population of livestock used for dairy and meat production. It irrevocably changed farming, and the surface of the planet along with it.

This is an extract from The Age of Seeds by Fiona McMillan-Webster

The Age of Seeds by Fiona McMillan-Webster is available now.

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Neeson Murcutt Neille: Setting Architecture is the second in a series of monographs that recognises the work of Australia’s most exciting architectural practices, urban designers and landscape architects.

Neeson Murcutt Neille demonstrate a deeply empathetic approach to making architecture, one that is integrally connected to landscape, history, identity, culture and place.

Read on for an edited extract from the book showcasing three of our favourite Neeson Murcutt Neille projects.

Castlecrag House

Designed by Walter Burley and Marion Mahony Griffin in the 1920s, Castlecrag is an idyllic residential suburb of native landscapes and views across Middle Harbour. The Griffins’ intention was for a model residential community that created a sympathetic relationship to the natural environment. The house is a response to this intention, to the natural beauty of the site and to the memories of the owners themselves.

The Griffins aimed for an immersive experience with nature and the project works to provide this sense of immersion. The site has three natural features of note – a sandstone outcrop that shields the house from the street, views down to Sugarloaf Bay and Castle Cove below, and an adjacent angophora-filled bush reserve. From within the house, with its raw concrete and stone materials, the surrounding landscape and views animate the interior realm.

Beyond the lovely sound of rain on a tin roof, the acoustic signature of a room is a keenly felt spatial quality that can be shaped through form, scale and material. Sound connects a family spread across multiple levels in a house, sensing each other’s presence through the peal of footsteps on a delicate steel staircase.

A sports hall is ‘tuned’, dampening the space acoustically to allow for one-to-one interactions, teaching and assembly, while maintaining the bright sound of spectators – essential to the atmosphere of competitive sport. A beachfront public room is shaped like a cone shell, which, untempered, amplifies ambient sound. The room’s inner surfaces are wrapped in a holey ply cushion to soften the acoustic for community gatherings.

The clients have had a long association with this site, as the house was built by one owner’s grandfather. As a result, particular components of that house were retained for their connection to the past, including a chimney and surrounding fireplace joinery – protected during construction – and the marrying of new and old brickwork was left exposed. The outermost side walls reflect the width of the old house and are controlled by designated setbacks, while the interior spaces follow the natural contours of the site and rotate outwards towards the rocky outcrop. The result is a pinwheel plan – room to the rock, room to the bush, room to the view – with these shifts occurring at each level.

Prince Alfred Park and Pool

Located at the edge of central Sydney, Prince Alfred Park has history as a public reserve dating back to 1865. Up until 1954 it was a venue for public events and so the intention for this project was to reinvigorate the under-utilised 7.5-hectare park and upgrade a tired public pool, as well as the park’s history as a site for recreation, social events and sporting activities. A belief in the sacred quality of green space in inner urban areas drove the design and, as a result, the experience of the landscape is rendered equally important to the built form.

The strategy was to give the park a new spatial and ecological sensibility without erasing its Victorian roots. Designed as a piece of folded terrain and through close collaboration with landscape architect Sue Barnsley, a new 1000-square-metre pool building has a green roof of native meadow grasses that connects to the parkland. The building, 6 metres deep and 120 metres long, is both intimate and monumental, scaled to the swimmer and to the city. A continuous cantilevered roof edge, ceiling and rear wall are lined with delicate white tiles reflecting the light and giving a liquid, shimmering quality. Two earthen mounds define the space of the outdoor pool enclosure and connect to the park, while blue-coloured stripes accentuate the project’s topographic quality, softening the distinction between building wall, pool concourse and bleacher. Seen as a collection, the variously transparent wire mesh fence, yellow umbrellas, toddler shade structure, oversized tree seat, coloured trigeneration chimneys, palm trees and mound slide bestow a playful character and become follies within the park.

Coastal Garden House

Bronte Beach has a palpable spatiality – a room in nature with walls of sandstone and then a leafy gully just behind. Resonating with these shapely cliffs and the greenness, this project – with its brief for a ‘large house’ – led instead to an alternative strategy for a ‘large garden’. In part determining the siting strategy, a sandstone rock ledge cuts diagonally across the sloping corner site. The main house sits in the corner of the upper portion like a cupped hand, with a cabana, terrace and pool held in the lower portion sustaining life in the garden. Archaic and cave-like, the house feels like a reoccupied ruin engulfed in a garden.

In this project, garden and house merge: one extends into the other in continual exchange.

Neeson Murcutt Neille by Anna Johnson & Richard Black is available now.

AU $59.99

Words for Lucy

My daughter Lucy died on 10 November 2004, in the morning, at the age of thirty-eight. She lay on her bed for a sleep, with her cat beside her, and her heart stopped. It was, I like to think, a death of her own manner and choosing, though I doubt she did this consciously. My business is words. I put these together, my words, hers, other people’s, in celebration of her life and of our grief for her loss of it, and ours of her. Not all the words are about her, but they are all for her.

Love is so important to us. We so much need it. We can’t do without it. What we don’t realise at the beginning is the price it comes at. When we kiss the lover, when we marry the beloved, when we nurse the child, there is such perfection, such joy, we do not know the cost that is beginning to be incurred, and the paradox that the greater the love the greater the price. Though, I do think a child often comes with fear; fear skulks through the wide open door of joy, it casts its shadow and a little shiver chills us, even if we don’t entirely recognise  it. Until the day of reckoning comes.

The price is loss. I have lost my husband, and my daughter. As I write these words in 2004 – it’s not that date any longer, this book will have been eighteen years in the writing, such things don’t come easily, you have to wait for them – I have a son, I have a new husband. I am building up further dreadful debits and may one day be asked to pay them. I say to my son, Make sure you don’t die for a long time, and he promises. But he can’t be sure. John, the husband, is several years younger than me, and very fit. But one of us will lose the other, one day.

You could choose to live without love and then there never would be loss. But who would want to do that?

Love equals loss. But it takes a while to twig.

I see my son James becoming aware of such things. He pays attention to me, I am his only close relative left. When I die there will be nobody at all of the generation before him, he will occupy that rather chilly eminence of the oldest in the family. There is an uncle by marriage, no aunts, some younger cousins who are all quite attached to one another but not in close contact because of geography, and it is much the same for his partner, she has a lot of cousins but not nearby. He is hanging on to me, and I am supposed to hang on to myself. But I sniff the air of mortality.

At the end of 2016, as we were waiting for his son to be born at seven o’clock the next morning, James informed me that I had to live another twenty years to see my grandson into adulthood. Mm. I doubt that is going to happen.

Beginnings

Memoir | 2021

This memoir isn’t very chronological. It doesn’t start at a beginning and go through to an end. As you might imagine a photo album, beginning with birth, through babyhood, being a toddler, school, growing up, and so on and on. No, time and memory seldom travel together. When I wrote my family saga novel Lovers’ Knots I was interested in getting the content of a saga without the massive proportions, and I came up with the image of a box of photographs. You pick them out at random, and so the story is told. This memoir is another such box of snapshots. You find your own way through the story, from random details. That said, it does begin with Lucy’s birth.

Tasting the air | 1966

When Lucy was born she tasted the air. She had a round little golden head – later doctors said she was jaundiced but when she was born she was golden, and very pretty, with smooth cheeks and no wrinkles or jowls. She lay in her crib on her back, put out her tongue and tasted the air. Very thoughtfully, as though she was testing this new medium that she found herself in. Quite voluptuously; she was offering herself a sensuous experience.

She seemed quite healthy then, though tired after a long labour, from early one morning to about three o’clock the next. It was another day before they decided she had a problem, and took her to the premmie nursery and put her in a thing called a Crown Street 10 box, which was a five-sided cube of a kind of perspex, a bit bigger than her head, into which oxygen was fed. That was when the doctor, who was a practising Catholic, said, If you believe in having babies christened, then christen this one. We didn’t believe in it, but we did christen her. Maybe to keep terror at bay; we knew what his words meant. It seemed important that some small ceremony should mark her short life. The archdeacon who had married us came from the church of St John’s, a church much older than Canberra, belonging to the nineteenth-century homestead of Duntroon, and baptised her. Perhaps he thought we were afraid of her getting lost in limbo.

The premmie nurses decided she wasn’t any good at breastfeeding and got her on to bottles, with my milk expressed. When James was born he did exactly the same thing, he choked and gagged and couldn’t take the milk. I was heartbroken, and suddenly back in that terrible time when we thought Lucy was going to die. I panicked, and wept, it was all happening again. But then a wise nurse looked and said, The poor little mite is being drowned. She made me lie on my back so that the milk did not flood out and make the baby choke, and we did that for a good twelve months. I organised myself so I lay on the sofa or the bed, holding a book in one hand, the same arm cradling James, the other hand holding the nipple so he could suck comfortably. We spent vast amounts of our days, and at first nights, lying around like this, having a lovely time.

And I realised that if Lucy hadn’t been in the premmie nursery, or if there had been a nurse wise in the ways of feeding babies, we would have worked out that Lucy’s problem was not that she couldn’t suck, but that she was being drowned, and so choked. She could have been breastfed. It is one of the sorrows of my life that she wasn’t. I think she needed to be, I think she might have been less anxious in her childhood and adult life if she had had that long loving comfort. It might have given her a useful bulwark against the fearsomeness of 11 hospitals and medical procedures. A suckling baby lies, and dozes, and drinks a bit, taking just as long as anybody will let her. But a bottlefed baby, there it is, drink up, all gone, that’s it. And other people want to do it. They like to think they are helping you, but it would be better if they did the dishes, and left this important task to you.

I am not a person given to regrets. I know they are pointless, what has happened is, it cannot be undone. But I cannot stop myself regretting that Lucy was not breastfed. For my sake, of course, the convenience of it. But I would not still regret that, forty years later. It is the comfort and the cosseting, the long lazy times spent in this milky haze of mutual delight, that I am so sad she missed.

At three weeks old she was flown to Melbourne, to the children’s hospital. It was thought that I shouldn’t go, that it would be too much for me. The cardiac physician did not think the breastfeeding mattered, he said that she would be better off staying with bottles. Until then I had thought that as she got older and stronger perhaps she would be able to cope with it. No, he said, you are only distressing yourselves. He was wrong, I know now, we could easily have done it. My milk drying up was one of the most agonising things ever to happen to me. I was ill for some time. And it wasn’t just the physical response, it was sorrow for the loss of something that I believed was so essential for the both of us. Physically, Lucy thrived on bottles. But I think that, psychologically, she missed out.

The specialist in Melbourne (the Canberra GP had wanted Sydney, the pediatrician Melbourne; the senior man won, which was harder work for us over the years, since Sydney is much easier to get to) looked at her and said, Well, she has got a pretty funny heart, but she’s okay, she’s managing. We’ll keep an eye on her, that’s all. He did that, for nine years, and then she needed her first open-heart surgery. These days they would have done it much earlier and it might have all worked better, but that is not something one can dwell on. The very 12 best was done, it was all quite pioneering, she was one of the oldest patients with her condition, the others hadn’t survived.

Dr Venables, the cardiac pediatric physician, was able to make a more precise diagnosis than the funny heart. She was born without a pulmonary valve. This meant that when her heart pumped blood to her lungs there was no valve to close and keep it there. Her heart compensated, pumped extra hard to make up for what gushed back. But  the result was an enlarged heart, and a very much enlarged pulmonary artery, so her lungs were compromised by this. The solution, to fix in place a tanned valve, in this case a pig’s, was considered better left until she was as big as possible, since it wouldn’t grow with her. It had to be replaced when she was twenty-one because it had calcified; apparently this is normal, teenagers produce a lot of calcium. The second time it was a tanned human valve. The valves worked well, it was the much enlarged pulmonary artery that was the problem.

When she was born, my husband had two nuns in his class. He was a lecturer at the Australian National University in Canberra at the time. Oh, Graham, one said, I see you have named your daughter for two child martyrs. Lucy Beatrice. Of course that wasn’t our intent, we liked the names for their beauty and meaning.

This is an extract from Words for Lucy by Marion Halligan.

Words for Lucy by Marion Halligan is available now.

AU $32.99

It was over a drink at a pub in West London that William Roper-Curzon and I decided to try to host residential painting holidays at Arniano. William is a painter, who trained in London at the City & Guilds and, later, the Royal Drawing School. I first met him when he was preparing for a large solo show of his drawings to be held in central London, and it was (platonic) love on first speaks.

William is a hilariously funny raconteur and masterful story-teller. He has a seemingly endless arsenal of anecdotes, which have whoever is lucky enough to be with him doubled over with laughter within minutes. Aside from his company, it was easy to fall in love with his dynamic figurative and landscape paintings, all highly expressive, with strong rhythm of line and confident mark-making.

From 2010, William was often travelling on art residencies, searching for exciting places to paint. I sometimes followed to visit, which took me to Scotland, the southernmost tip of Ireland and northern Tuscany. But he also went much further afield, to Buenos Aires, California and New York. These trips, which often lasted months, were usually preceded by a greedy farewell dinner with friends and family, which I would gladly throw for him at my mother’s house in London.

It was over our drink in early 2014 that he described Arniano from his perspective as a landscape artist, and made me immediately believe that we should try to share the place I love most in the world with other people. He described what I had never been able to articulate myself – that what makes Arniano special for a landscape painter is the two types of view: ‘You have the huge vistas, the 360-degree panorama of the Tuscan hills, which are so rich in opportunity for the painter. But you also have these very intimate scenes, of beautiful plants in the garden, and the structures of the cypress trees planted by your father. It’s a mix of formality with raw nature. There is an underlying pink colour that comes through from the earth there, as well as seemingly endless sky. You are so high up that you are soaring above the valleys, and you can look down on everything before it spreads up again towards Montalcino and the mountain.’

William also had a great love for the house, feeling that ‘its ability to make anyone feel welcome’, as well as the total peacefulness, contributed to an atmosphere conducive to painting. ‘It’s incredibly quiet, there is no noise, no interruption, and a great sense that you can wander for miles to find any little area to paint. It does take you back in time there – you could be in medieval Tuscany, you would hardly know the difference.’

The concept behind the courses was that we would marry my ability to cook and host with William’s talent for imparting his knowledge of and passion for painting. Rather than creating a painting boot camp, the idea would be to ensure that students of all levels could confidently grow into their artistic ability through his charm, sense of humour, enthusiasm and encouragement. While a five-day painting course might not impart the technical ability of Rembrandt to a beginner, it would be enough time to teach our guests to use oil paints, to really look at a landscape in a manner that would make it possible to translate what they saw to canvas. In the case of experienced painters, the course would afford them the time and space to focus on an entirely new view. Either way, we wanted to curate a week in which people could be artistic, appreciate their surroundings and crack on with painting while not having to worry about feeding themselves – hopefully, making them feel well looked after and a bit spoiled along the way.

We decided to do a test run with some of William’s family – as he is number eight out of ten siblings, there were plenty to choose from. The week was fun, but chaotic and exhausting, as we had absolutely no help. I cooked, cleaned, made the beds and even modelled for paintings, but we loved it, and it was a fantastic learning curve. From an art perspective, it was a hit, and it was wonderful to see the garden dotted with people immortalising parts of my father’s garden and the view that I had always taken for granted.

While we learned so much from our guinea-pig gang, there was still a long way to go. That group had consisted entirely of friends or relations, who knew each other well and so fitted into our house-party format easily enough. We would now have to host up to twelve strangers, who would be eating together three times a day and painting alongside one another every day for a week. Kind and curious friends, relatives and godparents came to support us, and we learned with each course how to improve. But without an established reputation, it is difficult to persuade people to spend a week in an unknown house in the middle of Tuscany, with total strangers, being taught by an as-yet untested art instructor.

We advertised in The Spectator, we put flyers up in London art schools and galleries, and we asked the Royal Drawing School to send PDFs of our flyers out with their newsletter, which they kindly did – William being an alumnus and having taught in their foundation year. Finally, by 2016, following a surprise mention in the Financial Times and later features in various other publications (including The New York Times, Tatler, Vogue, The Daily Telegraph and House & Garden), we no longer had trouble filling the house, and have since welcomed guests from all over the world: the US, Mexico, Sweden, Spain, Switzerland and the UK. Best of all, we have made an extraordinary number of truly great friends

The Landscape

A peculiar attribute of the landscape surrounding Arniano is the ever-changing light. Early in the morning, there is an extraordinary mist that sits in the valley and interweaves through the hills, allowing just the tops to show above the smoky clouds. These changes bring with them new moods and shadows, drawing our painters to different views and areas of the garden throughout the day. By the evening, everything has altered again, and there are often intense sunsets, bringing silhouettes from the trees and much darker, richer, olive colours.

William encourages our painters to work on two or three paintings at any given time – going back to each one at the same time of day, on each subsequent day, in order to capture the subject in the same light. When the wind picks up, which can happen at around midday and into the early afternoon, he encourages everyone to carry on, professing that ‘it is part of painting outside … you have to learn to be in nature, to absorb it – it will make a better picture.’ Being a committed outdoor painter, this is also William’s philosophy when it comes to painting in the rain – which, on the rare days when we have downpours, perhaps half our guests will heed, while the other half scuttle indoors to draw a still life. ‘Sometimes rain is great,’ he says. ‘Often, if it’s raining on you, you will get a fabulous light and these dramatic clouds, and somewhere else in the landscape, a whole drama unfolding in front of you. You learn to be instinctive, to get things down quicker, to try to capture the feeling of being in it and experiencing it.’

An obvious feature of the Tuscan landscape, which begs to be drawn or painted, is the olive trees, which unfortunately are also famously difficult to translate to canvas. ‘Olives are hard to paint because they are dense as well as airy,’ says William. ‘I always tell my students that it’s like trying to paint a shoal of fish. It’s incredibly difficult. It’s a commitment, but once you get into it, and realise that it isn’t one mass of leaves the same size, that perspective plays its part – the leaves which are closer to you are bigger, and the further away ones smaller – it’s very worthwhile. As with any challenge, it becomes satisfying once you’ve resolved it, but it’s definitely not easy.’ Having surmounted that first hurdle of painting at Arniano over the past six years (to the point where he could ‘paint olives in my sleep’),William finds that it is the horizon that draws him back again and again. ‘Somedays you see a ridge, and then others you think, “Oh my god! There’s a whole other town I never knew was there. It looks just like a medieval Italian painting.” There is a never-ending change of light and endless possibility.’

An important thing to remember when looking at a landscape and composing a view to paint is the foreground. ‘You may see a beautiful view and want to paint it, but the whole reason why it’s beautiful is what’s leading up towards it. People tend to forget about the thing that is right in front of you to help balance it out. Painting is all about balance. A ridge that is miles away, without the surrounding context, doesn’t have the same impact as what you are actually seeing.

Painting with Oils

Oil painting has such an illustrious history, and so many famous names are associated with it, that attempting to paint with oils as a beginner can be a much more daunting prospect than it need be. Doubtless, it is a faff. It’s messy, the paint takes a long time to dry and you need the right kit as well as space in which to set yourself up. But it also brings a huge amount of freedom and room to experiment. You can change things, work things out, and build up layers of colour and shapes. As William puts it: ‘Oils are great because you can fill a large area very quickly, but equally you can wipe or scrape them off if they’re not right. Each mark is less of a commitment than with, say, water colours. The different density of the colours with the mediums means you can make a colour almost transparent, or really thick, and certain colours are more transparent than others. Often the very dark colours, like ultramarine and some greens, are very rich colours, but also very transparent. If you add a warmer colour, they become more opaque and dense. Equally, because there is so much freedom provided by oil paints, there are a lot of things to think about. It can be daunting, but for the better, as you have more to play with and to experiment with, to find out what your style is like.’

As with cooking, painting with oils becomes less daunting every time you do it, as your confidence grows and you get used to the feel of the paints, the brushes and the medium. By the end of the week at Arniano, we always hope that everyone has done something they are proud of, at the same time as having figured out their own way of doing things. William tries to teach in such a way that everyone comes up with their individual style of painting. He disapproves of hard and fast rules, and dislikes the idea of anyone leaving Arniano and simply going on to paint like him. He wants each student to be able to do it on their own, to go home and enjoy it.

The start of the week is focused on finding something that each student is interested in painting. William will walk the students around the garden until they find a subject that captivates them. Quite often, if he sees that a student is good at doing close-ups of plants during the first morning of charcoal drawing, he’ll set them up in front of the fig tree with some nice, dark shadows behind, and ask them to paint the pleasing, interlacing fig leaves. Sometimes a student might not want to paint the landscape at all, but would rather stay indoors to paint one of my mother’s ceramics. These people are usually those whose knowledge or natural interest lies in design. Even so, this exercise often leads them back into the garden to have a go at landscape, because they feel more confident attempting to paint ‘shape’ and ‘form’ outside having had a practice run at capturing a Granada bowl in the kitchen.

Because the guests have just under a week – it is a rarity to have time and space where you can focus purely on oil painting – William’s philosophy is that everyone should just get on with it, and procrastinating is sharply discouraged. After an initial morning of charcoal drawing together, to get everyone’s eye in and to get them to think about composition, everybody is dropped in at the deep end and told to start painting. Although it’s only a week, it’s a lot to absorb in a short amount of time, and everyone is exhausted by the end, having done a lot of work.

Starting a Painting

Before you start painting, you will need the following:

• a minimum of three round-headed and three flat-headed sable brushes for oils
• non-toxic vegetable-based medium, or turpentine
• linseed oil
• a basic set of oil paints, which includes all the primary colours
• a large tube of white, zinc and/or titanium (very useful)
• any additional tubes of paint in colours that capture your imagination (we love French ultramarine blue, cerulean blue, lemon yellow, cadmium yellow, yellow ochre, Venetian red, cadmium red, crimson alizarin, burnt umber, raw umber)
• primed boards to paint on – you can prime wood boards yourself by coating them with white emulsion, or buy ready-primed from any art store (we order ours from the wonderful art suppliers Zecchi, in central Florence).

The key to enjoying the process of painting is to set yourself up fully at the beginning, to make sure you are comfortable and to have everything you need. You should also have some cloths for wiping your brushes, and two pots of medium: one pot of pure medium, for cleaning the brushes, and another pot containing half linseed, half medium, to add a little gloss to the paint. Some people prefer a drier finish and omit the linseed – this can also be beautiful. It is entirely down to preference and personal style. Regularly cleaning your brushes is imperative, in order to keep your palette clean and the colours distinct. William is strict about everyone cleaning their brush in-between changing colours – the result of not doing this can be a dreadful grey mush.

The next thing is to make sure that everything is in its proper place. For instance, if you’re right-handed, arrange your easel to your left, so that you have your right hand at the view and your palette in front of you (and vice versa if you are left-handed). If everything is in its proper place, then you won’t have to keep moving around. Simple, good habits such as these make a huge difference.

Once you are set up, look at the view and decide on a colour palette (a set of dominant colours), before mixing these up using different colours to achieve the one colour you are after. At Arniano, the landscape has a lot of pinks, rich greens, blue skies and sulphur-coloured clouds, but it isn’t necessary for the colours to be realistic. It’s how colours work next to one another that is interesting, as they can have an amazing effect on each other. If you mix your colours thoughtfully before you start, you can create a tension between them. You can also dive straight in, without having to fastidiously mix as you go along. If William sees that someone is struggling with choosing colours to commit to canvas, he will open one of our artbooks and choose a painting by, for example, Gauguin and say: ‘I want you to make those colours and apply them to this view.’ This stops people fixating on capturing the exact colours as they see them, and helps them to learn to play around with colour and to gain confidence.

The best way to get started is by squinting your eyes. You will be able to see the rough shapes within the landscape, as well as the darkness and the light, and how they interact, without being distracted by the details. Once you have determined these elements, quickly block them in. By getting rid of as much of the white on the canvas as possible, you are setting the story. A ‘blank canvas’, so full of endless possibilities, can actually be upsetting. Once you get some paint on it, it won’t freak you out so much, and you can keep building up the detail and begin tweaking. William believes that the main thing for beginners to overcome is a tendency to get too precious about a painting, which can lead to procrastination. This can be fatal, as anxiety about what to do, or what not to do, will remove the pleasure from the process. Painting is purely for oneself – a way to feed your own soul, no one else’s. When a painter dithers, or hangs back, William will appear with barks of, ‘Just slap it on, it doesn’t matter.’ The beauty is that you can always start a new one if you hate the end result.

William’s advice to anyone who is starting out with oil painting is to be brave and to keep doing it, to try to get into the habit of painting as often as you can – every day if that’s possible, or even once a week. Be as consistent as you can, and keep looking at the works of other artists, at works that you like for their composition, colour palette or technique. It’s not cheating to do that. Quite the opposite. You are doing it for inspiration, to see what clever things people come up with that you really like, and that you would like to emulate.

This is an extract from A House Party in Tuscany by Amber Guinness.

A House Party in Tuscany by Amber Guinness is available from 29 March.

AU $65