Elizabeth Farrelly

2 weeks ago | thesaturdaypaper.com.au | Elizabeth Farrelly

Each Easter my local bakery sells Not Cross Buns in sixpacks. They look slightly naked, sans the traditional embossed pictogram, but they’re delicious. With every bite, though, I’m conscious that the messaging – no doubt intended as a badge of the secular pluralism that largely defines my tribe – is also a loss. We live in the world of things, but to shear those things of their numinosity, even for all the right political reasons, is also to sacrifice spiritual and imaginative depth.

2 weeks ago | architectureau.com | Tom Grant |Elizabeth Farrelly

What, exactly, are the rights of the dead? In particular, what rights do they have to occupy space on a shrinking planet? What claim should they have on our place-making? We think of death as an absence – at least from this world. Architecture, on the other hand, is about the living, the present.

1 month ago | thetawnyfrogmouth.com.au | Elizabeth Farrelly |Iain Walker

Paradise on earth? Our recent What’s Next? forum in Mona Vale almost had us convinced that, as several speakers insisted, the Northern Beaches is pretty much it. Even here, though, housing is becoming unaffordable, public transport is difficult, climate change increasingly threatens coastal erosion, storm surges and fire. So change must come. We think the best way to shape that change is to access the deep popular wisdom via a Citizens’ Assembly. What is a Citizens’ Assembly?

1 month ago | architectureau.com | Tom Grant |Elizabeth Farrelly

The TV shows a young couple standing outside a crisp inner-city terrace (“Whether you’re buying your first home…”), before transitioning to a blousy suburban McMansion (“…or housing a growing family…”). It’s an ad for some insurance company, but the unquestioned subtext is: it’s all about growth. If some is good, more is better. Is it, though? Just how out of touch can a cultural propaganda meme be?

2 months ago | thesaturdaypaper.com.au | Elizabeth Farrelly

Fires and floods. The message is getting harder to ignore, assiduously as we try. It is increasingly evident that nature has something to tell us. Something urgent. Basically, we’re not on top. In Australia, whose edges we cling to like ants fleeing a hotplate, we’re hearing calls for a “managed retreat”  from the coast. At the same time, increasingly destructive bushfires advocate a similar withdrawal from the bush. Then there’s all the floodplains we’ve approved for development in recent years.