“There is footage of Arthur Boyd talking about how we can appreciate it, but not understand it,” says Ross. “I’ve always loved the Australian bush, but the prism of how I understood it is that I grew up in bush suburbs. But it’s a love. It’s not an understanding in the First Nations sense of connection to country. The next step, for white Australians, is learning to understand it in a much deeper way, and it takes a long time.”
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The second episode is dedicated to “Community”. Ross admires the 2019 Punchbowl Masjid (mosque) in Sydney. He takes in the 1950s military-built town of Woomera in SA. And in the Rocks in Sydney, he surveys Tao Gofers’ 1979 Sirius public housing building, amid protests against its sale to private developers.
“It was important to me to look at social housing and the failure of government to provide that, and at the stigma of social housing,” he says. “I wanted to look at the standard of our social housing and ask, ‘Why can’t we have more of it?’ And why can’t we spend a tiny bit more to have a better outcome?”
Next month, Ross will present his Man About the House live show, now in its 11th year, at the Isokon Gallery in London, which was opened as flats in 1934. The building has a neat connection with Melbourne architect Best Overend, famous for Fitzroy’s Cairo Flats, and who is featured in Designing a Legacy.
“We’ve been fascinated for a long time about the quarter-acre block, but the other Australian dream of apartment living, which found its feet in the early 20th century, is a far sexier story,” says Ross. “It was incredibly empowering for women. People could be with who they wanted to be with, and be whoever they wanted to be, so it’s a cool story.”
Designing a Legacy begins on the ABC at 7.30pm on June 4.
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