It is the promised New National Seed Bank.

In the glossy Master Plan Overview the artist's conception of the promised New National Seed Bank depicts a rather swish, contemporary-looking facility, like a Norwegian gallery of modern art. Meanwhile, though, the Gardens' seed bank is housed, quaintly, in an old brick cottage.

And while on old cottages and to digress for a second, in our black and white picture today we see good people of the O'Connor of 1951 posed outside the Tocumwal cottage of 10 Quinn Street.

More of olde O'Connor and the newsworthy Tocumwals in a moment, but for now back to Thursday's launch where we nattered with the Gardens' seed conservation biologist Dr Lydia Guja.

She explained that a bank of the seeds of Australian native plants is, among other things, a protection of some species from extinction. In the event of species-threatening emergencies including the species-threatening climate change, if we have the seeds of those threatened and slain species slumbering, dried and frozen (at minus-20), in the bank, perhaps for thousands of years, we have chances of recovering those species from the brink. We may be able to grow them from seed and one day plant them back out where they belong.

No wonder then, with a national seed bank being so crucial in keeping extinction at bay, the new seed bank at the Gardens is itself going to be made virtually extinction-proof. What's in part meant by it being state-of-the-art Dr Guja enthuses is that the seed collections in the building will be kept in a kind of "bunker". Thus, in the event (heaven forbid!) of a fire razing everything else in the Gardens, including the seed bank's above-bunker offices and laboratories, the priceless seeds will survive, obliviously slumbering. Another guarantee of their survival will be back-up generators that will keep the new bank's freezers still robustly a'freezing even in the event of general power failures elsewhere.

The new seed bank, like the glamorous conservatory (a great big glasshouse enabling the Gardens to at last grow and display luxuriant tropical plants) is expected to be ready by 2020.

And speaking, as we did above, of old cottages, Norma Allen a famous and venerable Canberran, has been following with delight our discussions of the Tocumwal cottages installed in Canberra after the Second World War.

To recap, the "Tokes" are in the news because one of them turns out to be a Mr Fluffy home. It must be demolished in spite of its heritage importance. Meanwhile, here in this column on Thursday we revisited an imbroglio of 1953. ANU professor and toff Marcus Oliphant complained in the Canberra Times that the ugly "hutments" of the O'Connor Tocumwals of the working classes spoiled the view from his superior, hillside home. Jim Fraser MP rebuffed him (the way, Andrew Leigh MP, Labor men should always rebuff haughty tory toffs) with a splendid letter to the paper. He stuck up for the good, battling people in the Tocumwals, and characterised Oliphant as a tory buffoon. .

Norma Allen remembers how in the early 1950s, when the housing situation was so desperate, she and people like her on the housing waiting lists "would have killed" to be allocated one of the Tocumwal homes to rent. The dwellings may have looked ugly to Professor Oliphant (she remembers everyone hating him and urchins throwing stones at his superior home) but she remembers vividly how for those on the waiting lists they were deeply desired. She says it was because they were, by comparison with other housing stock elsewhere in Canberra, so "roomy".

By comparison with other guvvies "they [the Tocumwals] were enormous!"

"A Tocumwal meant space! They had high ceilings and built-in cupboards," she remembers with awe.

Alas, at the time a young mother with two small children, her family was never to be allocated one of these hutment mansions.

She says that as well as having three bedrooms (lots of the housing stock homes had only two) each room of a Tocumwal was spacious in its own right.

She remembers how it helped your eligibility for a three-bedroom Tocumwal if you had children of both sexes. The authorities would think it right for a girl and a boy to each have their own bedroom whereas two boys or two girls should be prepared to share.

Professor Oliphant scoffed at Tocumwal homes being of mere wood but Norma Allen remembers even their woodenness being one of their relative attractions because some rental homes were of ill-favoured monocrete.

But of course as discussed on Thursday one of atom scientist Oliphant's main objections to the "painted, wooden" cottages all clustered together was that in the event of nuclear war (the Cold War 1950s were chilling times) they'd be as combustible as anything. Those living in them would be "roasted alive".

But in our picture a, O'Connor, Tocumwal local, the cheerful Mrs Butters pushing the Hill twins' pram, does not seem to be dwelling on that nightmare.

One hundred years ago this week, with enlistments flagging, Sydney's World's News recommended the use of sex appeal, of kissing, to get young men into khaki.

"WOMEN CAN'T GO to the front and fight, but they can help at home. It is clearly very nice to be sewing shirts or knitting socks for soldiers, but there are other things even more important. Men are wanted, and no one can so effectively inform them of that as a woman. Where men would turn round and tell a man to go himself, they will listen to a woman.

"Why, women can persuade men to do anything, if they go the right way about it. Let them by all means continue to knit socks if they want to, but they will help the cause much further by getting men to join the fighting line.

"History records how a famous duchess recruited one of the finest regiments of Highlanders that the world has ever seen. She was as pretty as she was energetic, and every man who flocked to the standard she set up was rewarded with a kiss.

"Men have flung away their lives in frivolous ways at the behest of a pretty woman, but the present is a case where they would be honouring the woman who asked them, and helping their country in her hour of need. No hotter combination could ever present itself, and it is to be hoped that the women of Australia will take up the task."