In tarndanya, the 2025 Emerging Architect Prize Tour came to Adelaide with Gabrielle Seymour of Baukultur offering a talk about the two things she said shape everything she does: parenting and mentoring. Gabrielle founded Archibubs — now a national support group run through EmAGN — at a pub event while heavily pregnant, overwhelmed and aware of how little support had historically existed for women navigating parenthood and practice simultaneously. What began as a conversation became a movement, and the audience poll she took mid-talk was striking: 90% of people in the room felt that leadership in architecture is inaccessible, and 70% felt there were inadequate leadership pathways through mentoring at work. Her argument was clear — parenting is not a distraction from practice, it is a lens that deepens empathy, sharpens values, and makes you a better architect. Becoming a parent, she said, brings stronger clarity around what matters in design, less stress about the small things, and a visceral understanding of how space can impede or enable access. That landed personally: my own experience of parenthood has deepened a sense of purpose that was already there, and the two of us found ourselves in the same place — that bringing your whole self to work doesn't compromise the architecture, it improves it.

A photograph of Adelaide town hall by Kali

The Q&A in Adelaide was particularly energetic and engaged — questions continued long after the formal session ended, one-on-one, in the kind of conversations that suggest the room wasn't ready to leave. Themes of co-design, cultural adequacy, and housing kept resurfacing, alongside a question that felt like it belonged to the whole tour: is the profession becoming more optimistic? The answer was careful — things are moving in the right direction, but good intentions are still regularly value-managed out of projects, and advice from Indigenous consultants is still too often set aside when funding gets tight. A group of third-year students in the room thought co-design was standard practice and were genuinely surprised to learn it wasn't — which felt like both a hopeful sign and a provocation. The conversation on mentoring closed something important: mentors, it turned out, don't always know they are mentors. Students teach us, colleagues teach us, family teaches us. The hierarchy of who gets to pass knowledge down is as worth questioning as any other assumption the profession has been slow to examine, like flexible working conditions and fair pay. There is much more to unpack from this great evening, but for now, I’ll leave with a quote from Gab:

"Parenting is a lens, shaping leadership, empathy and how we practice. Mentoring is a legacy and empowers the profession." — Gabrielle Seymour