Tiffany Ho

To celebrate World Architecture Week 2025, we explore how historic buildings and places shape culture and identity. At Extent Heritage, we see architecture and heritage as partners in creating places that endure, rather than as opposing forces.

To reflect on this relationship, we spoke with Caitlin Mitropoulos, Associate – Team Coordinator at Extent, whose career spans the National Trust of Australia (Victoria), Heritage Victoria, and private consultancy. Her passion for history and architecture is interwoven by a belief that heritage should be positioned as an opportunity as opposed to a constraint.

In September, we explored how plants are woven into Aboriginal knowledge systems, highlighting Dr Philip Clarke’s reflections on the deep interconnections between biodiversity and cultural survival.

In this feature of Extent – People Centred Heritage, we turn to the applied side of Clarke’s work: how ethnobotany informs heritage practice today, how traditional knowledge can guide adaptation to climate change, and where opportunities lie for collaboration between communities, scientists, and heritage professionals.

September marks National Biodiversity Month – a time to reflect on the richness of Australia’s environments and the responsibility we share in protecting them. At Extent Heritage, we recognise that biodiversity is never just ecological. It is cultural too.

In this article, we explore how heritage and biodiversity sustain each other, guided by the insights of ethnobotanist, anthropologist, and author Dr Philip Clarke.

During National Biodiversity Month, Associate Director and Victorian Manager Leo Martin reflects on his experience at Arid Recovery - and what it taught him about leadership, stewardship, and the inseparable ties between culture and nature.

This National Biodiversity Month, Extent Heritage is highlighting the deep connections between cultural heritage and biodiversity. For Leo Martin, Associate Director and Victorian Manager, that connection came into sharp focus during a leadership program at Arid Recovery, a conservation reserve in South Australia dedicated to restoring arid lands.

In June, more than 20 Extent consultants travelled to Darwin for the 10th World Archaeological Congress (WAC-10), a major international gathering of heritage professionals, Traditional Owners, and academics. With a strong program of papers, case studies, and cultural experiences, the conference was an opportunity to share Extent’s expertise while learning from peers across Australia and overseas.

What does it mean to read a landscape, not just for what’s visible, but for what lingers beneath the surface?

At Extent, our work is grounded in this practice. We partner with Traditional Owners, archaeologists, historians, and communities to trace the complex histories that shape Country today.

Meet Extent Heritage Senior Heritage Advisor Coral Hardwick. Coral works with our dedicated Sea Country team to tell the stories beyond the shoreline.

The stories of Sea Country go beyond the tangible and the visible. Coral’s work is about the places that existed before the sea levels rose, and Dreaming and deep time stories.

Earlier this month, the Australia ICOMOS Jim Kerr Address was held in Brisbane for the first time ever. Our very own Andrew Sneddon facilitated a discussion with some of the founding parents of the Australian heritage profession: Meredith Walker, Jane Lennon, and Peter Marquis-Kyle. You can catch up on the whole conversation here:

The process of biodiversity offsetting has existed in Australia for several decades, yet it has rarely been applied to cultural heritage places. Here we consider whether and in what circumstances offsetting of cultural heritage impacts may be possible or appropriate. 

One of the concerns voiced about offsetting for cultural heritage is that no two cultural heritage places are equivalent – each is in some way unique.

Extent Heritage is proud to announce we are sponsoring the architecture category at the National Trust (NSW) Heritage Awards in Sydney. The Awards, now in their 30th year, are New South Wales’ biggest and most anticipated celebration of outstanding heritage practice.

The Heritage Architecture Award, one of nine categories, recognises projects which are sympathetic to the heritage significance of a place, or complement and utilise existing built heritage, from adaptive re-use to new work in historic contexts.