Try this: picture the most Austrian song you know. If it's "Edelweiss," that's actually an American Broadway song written in 1959 — not the real, 200-year-old Austrian carol "Silent Night" that barely registers internationally by comparison. This episode uses that gap between Austria's image and its reality as a throughline: the Habsburg dynasty that ran a chunk of Europe for six centuries under rulers like Maria Theresa, the 1938 Anschluss, Austria's postwar "first victim" narrative, the 1986 Waldheim Affair that cracked that narrative open. We bring things up to the present with the country's unprecedented three-party coalition, built specifically to keep a resurgent far-right party out of government, and three straight years of recession behind a still genuinely wealthy economy. Plus Mozart, Freud, Klimt, Empress Sisi, and Arnold Schwarzenegger's improbable journey from an Austrian village to the California governor's office; Sachertorte and Vienna's UNESCO-listed coffeehouse culture; Alpine skiingistory legends from Toni Sailer to Marcel Hirscher; and why Salzburg's biggest tourist draw is a movie most Austrians shrug at.

Aboriginal Australians have been on this continent for roughly 65,000 years — the oldest continuous human culture on Earth. Then, 238 years ago, a fleet of British ships arrived and rewrote the story in about a century and a half. Australia is simultaneously one of the oldest human stories and one of the youngest nation-states on the same landmass, and it hasn't entirely figured out how those two truths sit next to each other.

Ray gets past the postcard version — Sydney Harbour, Uluru, kangaroos — and into the parts that don't fit as neatly on a tourism brochure: the legal fiction of terra nullius, the frontier violence of the 19th century, the Stolen Generations, and the 2023 Voice referendum that Australians voted down nationally and in every state. Along the way: the Great Barrier Reef, the strangeness of a country where a "quick trip" between cities can mean a longer flight than London to Rome, Cathy Freeman's lap of the Sydney Olympic track in 2000, and the legal case that finally overturned two centuries of settler law.

Also: Vegemite, meat pies, a barbecue culture built into public parks by default, and the platypus — an animal so strange that British scientists initially assumed the first specimen was a hoax.

New episodes every Monday at 7pm. Next week — Austria.

There is a monastery in Armenia where, on a clear morning, you can see Mount Ararat rising across the horizon — the mountain on Armenia's national emblem, the mountain Noah's Ark is said to have landed on, sitting entirely inside Turkey since 1921. Armenians wake up every day and see their most sacred symbol on the wrong side of a closed, hostile border.

Armenia was the first nation on Earth to adopt Christianity as its state religion, in 301 CE. In 405 CE, a monk named Mesrop Mashtots invented an alphabet that would keep Armenian identity alive through fifteen centuries without a state.

Ray takes you through the ancient kingdom of Urartu, the golden age of the Bagratuni dynasty and the lost city of Ani, the ongoing tragedy of Nagorno-Karabakh — most recently the 2023 displacement of its entire Armenian population. We meet Aram Khachaturian, whose Sabre Dance became one of the most recognisable pieces of music on Earth. We meet Charles Aznavour, a refugee's son who became one of the biggest stars in French music history. We eat khorovats grilled over open coals, lavash baked in an underground clay oven, and khash — the dawn soup that Armenian men swear cures a hangover and mends a friendship in the same bowl.

We stand at Khor Virap, looking at a mountain that isn't theirs anymore. And we ask what it means for a nation to survive on memory alone, for a while, and then decide to keep going anyway.

The mountain is still there. So are they.

New episodes every Monday at 7pm. Next week — Australia.