The defining book on Australian Cuisine by chef Liam Randall. Part history and part cookbook, it weaves 61 authentic, easy-to-follow food and beverage recipes through seven time lines, from the beginnings of the world’s oldest culture through to the modern day. Come on an enriching journey that will sate your curiosity, warm your heart and fill your belly in a uniquely Australian way.

365 Nature, by Anna Carlile

Published by Hardie Grant Books

The first item of clothing Rachel Burke ever made from tinsel was a jacket. It wasn't just any jacket. The garment was for Patience Hodgson, the outlandish lead singer of Brisbane band The Grates, to wear on stage at Splendour in the Grass, 2015.

“I wanted to come up with a really great costume idea,” says Burke. “I remember racking my brains then sitting down to look through some boxes in my studio for inspiration. When I came across some old Hawaiian skirts and tinsel streamers, it got me thinking. I attached the streamers to a jacket and it went from there.”

Sandar Win, a business woman in Mawlamyine township in Myanmar’s Mon State, warmly invites us into her living room where her husband, mother and a young girl sit on the floor, smiling as we enter.

It’s a sparsely decorated room but immaculately kept. The floor is quality teak, locally sourced and freshly polished, with an intricately handcrafted staircase leading to the second floor. The house could easily be one of the best-furnished homes on one of Mawlamyine’s more affluent side streets. As we take a seat, we hear the clacking outside.

As I write, I'm having my third session at Melbourne's newest co-working space, Happy Hubbub. It has all the things you might expect from a shared entrepreneurial space: large tables for hot-deskers, loads of power points, wi-fi, meeting rooms, and copious amounts of coffee. But, in a first for Australia, it also has a dedicated short daycare space attached.

Copenhagen is the capital city of Denmark. This one-time fishing village is now a major European city, and home to 1.2 million Danes.

It's the country's art, culture and food capital. It’s also home to the Copenhagen Stock Exchange, and is imbued with a well-to-do air: the locals are friendly, and the streets feel safe – probably because bikes outnumber cars, and cyclists well and truly rule the roads. That makes Copenhagen a wonderful city to follow your nose in, cobblestoned streets and all.

Vanessa Murray has always been a feminist. So why does she feel like she’s betraying the sisterhood by happily doing the dishes, vacuuming, sweeping, mopping, copious amounts of laundry, occasional ironing and even dusting?

I’ve always been a tidy person. Clean, too. The two go together – after all, it’s hard to keep a place clean if it’s untidy, and it’s hard to keep a place tidy if it’s unclean. A sparkling kitchen makes me feel happy; a newly vacuumed floor as though I’ve got everything under control. When I dust (my least favourite chore) I feel like Mother Theresa.

A Greek restaurant balances traditional family dining and personal history with the best of modern cuisine in Melbourne, Australia

Ah, Melbourne. It’s long been the go-to city for generations of immigrants seeking – either by choice or circumstance – a new place to call home, and now the city, which is Australia’s second-largest, has a reputation as its most culturally diverse.

Greeks have been gravitating towards Melbourne, nestled in the southeastern corner of Australia, ever since the gold rush of the 1850s. The Greek Orthodox Community was formally founded in 1897, and the first Greek language newspaper, Australis, was issued in 1913.

We are all naked under our clothes, yes indeed. But me oh my, I've noticed lately that whenever there is a body of water bigger than a bath tub to hand, I'm wont to rip off my clothes and make my way in, quick smart.

Combine said water with a hint of sunshine and a conducive atmosphere – an isolated beach, a crocodile free river or a champagne-filled jacuzzi (especially a champagne-filled jacuzzi) – and there's not a man, woman or chastity device that can keep my kit on. 

Panties! There, I’ve said it. Just. Fucking. Awful. I recently shared my hatred of the word on my social networks, and it turns out the majority of the women I know dislike the term, too. In combination with other words – moist, ripped or soiled all come to mind – we’re likely to throw up in our mouths.

It fits into a rising phenomenon in the world of psycholinguistics: word aversion. A concept that has garnered increasing attention over the past decade or so, the term has been defined by University of Pennsylvania linguistics professor Mark Liberman as “a feeling of intense, irrational distaste for the sound or sight of a particular word or phrase, not because its use is regarded as etymologically or logically or grammatically wrong…but simply because the word itself somehow feels unpleasant.”

The classic division between in and out of doors falls away in this tranquil north-facing dwelling, where the owners' twin love for Japanese aestheticism and 1950s modernism led the design.
 
Once a nondescript single-storey yellow brick house, today the new build that straddles this property in a quiet heritage pocket of Melbourne's vibrant inner north has both the grandeur and reclusive hush of a Japanese mountain retreat. 

At a British science conference in 1987, a palaeontologist named Dr Bev Halstead's invited a woman on stage and politely asked her to drop her skirt. 

A tense, collective breath echoed around the auditorium as the garment hit the ground. Halstead had a reputation as an eccentric, but, even for him the stunt seemed uncouth. What on earth was he up to?

The pair who built the opposite of a McMansion. Cheap, ethical and cosy - a couple embrace their 'tiny' house.

Andrew Bell was already living in a tent near Bendigo in a bid to simplify his life when his partner Alicia Crawford suggested they build a tiny together. A tiny? A tiny house; in this case, one measuring just 18 square metres, though technically speaking anything that comes in under 37 square metres qualifies as a tiny.

Fittingly, in Victoria’s High Country, the higher you go, the better the views get. Start down low and you’ve got valleys and fields flush with wildflowers, rustic old farm buildings and row upon row of grapevines. A little higher up, you can add tumbling rivers and majestic lakes. Higher again, and it’s winding roads, undulating hills, and sweeping sky-scapes making it into the mix. Oh, and mountains. Did we mention the mountains? 

The gardens of most rental properties are sorely in need of love – but not the one out the back of a red clinker brick house in Seddon, in Melbourne’s inner west.

It’s the home of Travis Blandford and Harriet Devlin of artisan tool making business Grafa, whose range includes six aesthetically pleasing and practical gardening tools made from copper, bronze and wood. Of course, the pair work the soil with tools they make themselves, and you have to wonder if this is behind the garden’s rich, loamy soil and bumper crop.

It's been clogging up our recycling bins for years, but now some architects are touting cardboard as the building material of the future.

When Tobias Horrocks was 12 years old, his parents gave him a book about how to fold paper aeroplanes. 

It made a big impression.

He spent hours trying out different designs and seeing which ones flew best. But his new interest landed him in hot water: he got kicked out of a shopping centre for perfectly landing one of his creations in somebody’s coffee – from six floors up. 

Savvy and sustainable design solutions transform a compact 1970s townhouse in Prahran, Melbourne, into an expansive, light-filled home imbued with a subtle nod to mid-century style.

The modernist makeover of Wrights Terrace is the work of Thomas Winwood McKenzie, Principal at Thomas Winwood Architecture, who ably met his clients’ vision for a calm, light-filled space with creative thinking and refined detailing. 

McKenzie took the modernist character of the existing building as his starting point, drawing this out with new features like timber batten ceilings, box frame windows and a stunning brass handrail on an exposed staircase. The refurbished interior feels uncluttered and spacious. McKenzie achieved this by implementing some savvy design solutions and creating an additional 21 square metres for the floor plan. 

It’s not every architectural practice that seeks to go above and beyond the energy efficiency-focused requirements of the Building Code of Australia (BCA)’s Section J. TechnÄ“ Architecture + Interior Design make a point of it.

“We’re always looking for additional ways to enhance the quality and internal climate of a space. It’s a key part of our overall consideration, from concept to completion,” says one of TechnÄ“’s two directors, Nick Travers.

Travers and fellow Director Justin Northrop lead a 26-strong team of architects, draftspeople and interior designers to seek longevity and robustness in design. This shows in their choice of materials – hardwearing ones like steel and timber. Only recycled or renewable timbers, mind you, and of the latter, only Australian hardwoods pass muster. 

Performer Amanda Palmer talks about life on the road, the art of asking and her penchant for clunky old bikes

Talking with Amanda Palmer, you get the feeling that she falls a little bit in love a lot – bikes included.

She learned to ride in the early eighties in ride in a suburb of Boston, Massachusetts on a “typical suburban tricycle”, then a two-wheeler with training wheels. 

But the first bike she really fell for was a white BMX. It came the toy store in the mall, and it rocked her fourth grader world.

We've noticed a diverse range of grassroots bike events springing up around Australia over the past few years, and they're going off. Vanessa Murray picks the brains of three organisers to see how they make it tick.

“Being an organiser definitely detracts from being able to get fully involved. It takes a lot of enthusiasm, time and commitment. But it’s totally worth it,“ says Andrew Blake, one of five committee members of Melbourne’s Dirty Deeds Cyclocross.

A no holds barred bike race that pits contestants as much against nature as against each other, Dirty Deeds seeds road riders take to the tundra (and the sand, pavement, trails, hills and mud) in short, intense, circuits.

Christmas is coming. I can tell, because my local council has strung twinkly lights from lampposts on the High Street. Store windows are festooned with tempting trinkets, candy canes and the occasional, vertiginous smattering of fake snow, and a selection of headache-inducing festive tunes are on rotation at the supermarket. 

When I was a kid, this sort of carry on filled me with so much excitement I could barely sleep. I fantasised about what Santa might bring me for weeks on end – and my parents made the most of my enthusiasm, reinforcing Santa’s preference for well-behaved children for all it was worth. 

DAY ONE

8.30: We take in a traditional Turkish breakfast on the rooftop balcony of the Deniz Konak Hotel. From here, we have a view out over the tumbling rooftops of the ancient, tourist-friendly heart of the old city, Sultanahmet, to the Black Sea beyond. Breakfast is hearty and delicious: a cheesy potato dish called kremali patates, hard boiled eggs sprinkled with flaked red pepper, peppermint and thyme, meats, sliced cucumber and tomato, bread and butter dripping with honey and hot, sweet tea.

9.30: The autumn sun is shining, so we head out to explore the tourist-friendly heart of this ancient city, which is perfect for follow-your-nose wandering. We head in a northerly direction up narrow, winding, cobble-stoned streets, stopping to take in the grandeur of Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque, which sit opposite each other and are the jewels in Istanbul’s historical crown. A little further on and we are in the leafy, well kept grounds of the Topkapi Palace complex, a vast compound that was once the primary residence of the Ottoman Sultans for 400 years of their 624-year reign.

Pozdrav! Jesi li gladan? "Hello! Are you hungry?" shout smiling, bald-headed men who wouldn't look out of place on the door of a nightclub. Despite the smell of spit-roasting pork in my nostrils and their no-nonsense appearance, I'm too busy getting my bearings in the small, vibrant town of Guca (pronounced goo-cha) in Serbia's Dragacevo district to think about food - yet.

It's early, and the stallholders are still setting up. They hang opanci - traditional folk shoes - and T-shirts, and arrange sajkaca (military hats) and beer mugs as bunting in the blue, white and red of the Serbian flag flutters overhead.

“Don’t stand too close!” warns Pete Chantler, looking over his troupe of dromedaries (one-hump camels) as a crisp desert dawn breaks in Marree,  685 kilometres north of Adelaide where the Outback anecdotally begins.