REVIEW
Killing Sydney, The Fight for Sydney’s Soul
Paul McGillick reviews Elizabeth Farrelly’s new book
on what’s gone wrong in modern Sydney.
posted 01/02/22
Villains of Sydney Town
King Lear's plangent complaint that “some villain hath done me wrong” might well be an apt subtitle for Elizabeth Farrelly’s new book.
Born in New Zealand, Farrelly is a trained architect with a PhD in urbanism from the University of Sydney. She re-located to Sydney in the late 1980s where she has taught at the University of NSW, has been a Councillor at the City of Sydney and for many years, until recently, wrote a weekly column on architecture and urban affairs for the Sydney Morning Herald.
Her SMH column was known for its wild ad hominem shotgun blasts and dramatic rhetorical flourishes. For those who were predisposed to agree with her it was heady stuff. For those who preferred a more nuanced analysis of inevitably complex issues it was a turn-off.
It is, in my view, a mistake to transfer this polemical style – as she has done – to the scale of a book of over 350 pages. Try as she may to regularly exercise some discipline and provide some structure to her material, the book invariably reverts to being just a rant – often contradictory, frequently unfair, driven by prejudice and inclined to ignore instances which don’t support her millennarian scenario.
In Farrelly’s world there are only goodies and baddies (mainly baddies). It is a black and white world: old Sydney good, new Sydney bad (except for remnants from the past). Never mind that the old Sydney she loves was once new Sydney. Never mind the endless wrangling over the city’s planning that goes back to 1788 and Augustus Alt and William Dawes. Forget context. Forget how the real world requires negotiation and compromise. Forget that humans are fallible and that even politicians may act in good faith but still get it wrong.
This is a pity. I, for one, am often inclined to agree with her criticisms – because, like her, I have a strong sentimental attachment to historical Sydney where I was born and where I have spent most of my life and whose depredations enrage me. But the degree and frequency with which she gilds the lily makes me back away.
And it’s not as though she isn’t aware of her own intemperance. Late in the book she advocates “civil dissent (as) our best and perhaps in the end only defence against mob rule, on the one hand, and oligarchy on the other”. This is part of an often thoughtful final chapter fruitfully informed by Farrelly’s philosophical training.
Here she defines the city as a “perpetual tension between our yearning angel selves and our inner tribal primates”. She opposes post-modern relativism and “contemporary offence culture” which suppresses healthy public discussion and causes us to “retreat into our individual silos of underdeveloped personal taste leaving our aesthetic debate to fester at the crude ‘I like it’ or ‘I hate it’ level”.
But it seems as though when the sap rises she can’t hold back and her rational persona melts under the heat of passion, leading to denunciations of politicians and developers – even urban planners and designers.
“Early in 2019,” she writes, “for reasons I will never fathom, New South Wales re-elected the most destructive of neo-liberal governments for a further four-year term: another four years of park shaving, tree-lopping, fossil-fuel-polluting, sweetness-destroying exploitation. Another four years of role-playing ‘liberalism’ while actually centralising power and handing it to corporate and developer mates.”
This is just one of numerous incendiary rants against the conservative NSW government which not only do not facilitate rational, evidence-based discussion of the systemic and context-sensitive urban issues the book is meant to be about, but which are wilfully unfair and inaccurate – after all this is the same government which has committed to electrifying its bus fleet, which has committed to net zero emissions by 2050 and which has reversed earlier policies on the development of North Parramatta and the future of the Powerhouse Museum. This she grudgingly acknowledges, but does not discuss, notwithstanding a lengthy prior attack on the government for the now-abandoned policies.
At the end of the day, Farrelly only supports dissent with which she agrees. If you think this kind of position suggests the existence of some kind of elite who need to keep the ‘deplorables’ in line, you’re not wrong – and this notwithstanding her advocacy of the ‘new Democracy model’ of governance, a wildly utopian idea involving ‘citizen juries’ who only people completely ignorant of the history of the Soviet Union, Communist China, indeed revolutionary France, would contemplate.
Not surprisingly, Farrelly’s Sydney is a geographically constrained entity, essentially bound by the inner suburbs of Surry Hills, Chippendale, Glebe, Balmain and Paddington. It apparently does not exist at all north of the Harbour Bridge – Mosman gets one mention (“a sunny place for shady people”) and Ku-rin-gai is singled out for its purported anti-density NYMBYism – just take one look at the horrors of medium-density development along the rail corridor up that way and you will understand why the locals confuse density with bad design.
Apart from the Parramatta issues mentioned above, the western and southern suburbs – i.e. Greater Sydney – are not acknowledged. What of the Greater Region Sydney Plan – is this just another front for Sydney’s rapacious Georg Grosz-like developers, yet another example of the LNP government’s larceny and stupidity? At least some acknowledgement of life beyond Surry Hills and Redfern would be welcome.
When Farrelly does venture out of her inner city bubble, though, it is to Canberra, which becomes her whipping horse – a kind of Australian version of Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville, the ultimate urban dystopia. Once again, there is plenty to criticise about Canberra, but a lot to like as well. This kind of all-or-nothing approach is not helpful.
On the other hand, her proclivity to gild the lily leads to some odd distortions. Individual quaint vegetated streets and lanes in places like Balmain, Surry Hills and Paddington lead to the suggestion that those entire suburbs are like that when we all know they are not. Her magical representation of Danks Street in Alexandria bears no resemblance to the Danks Street I know – a precinct which actually failed to deliver on its original promise and which is now quite dreary.
And as for Devonshire Street in Surry Hills which Farrelly paints as a kind of lost Garden of Eden – victim to the new light rail which she hates but also seems to imply is necessary – well, I walked up and down that street five days a week for years when I worked in Surry Hills and I have to say the light rail with its new landscaping has improved the street significantly.
Sure enough Rowe Street, the legendary laneway linking Castlereagh and Pitt Streets near the GPO – an icon for those who lament the loss of old Sydney – receives extensive attention. Here Farrelly really gilds the lily, describing it as “the best known and best loved of the entire laneway network that characterised pre-modern Sydney”. That may be true, but to hint that Sydney’s laneways were all like Rowe Street is ridiculous – they were (are) dingy, grubby backstreets used for deliveries and nightcarts.
But to illustrate how Farrelly habitually takes one modestly attractive feature and blows it up into a mighty motherhood statement it is worth quoting her at length on Rowe Street:
“By the 1940s, it (Rowe Street) had become an outlet for the creative energies of many European interwar migrants. Often living in Potts Point (then the most densely populated part of the country and Sydney’s only centre of apartment living), these creative immigrants established galleries, music shops, cafes, print houses, design stores, fashion emporiums and tearooms in the tiny shophouses of Rowe Street, turning it, by the 1950s, into Sydney’s Little Bohemia.”
None of the above is untrue. But neither is it entirely true. What is true is that it is a gross over-statement, beginning with the utopian re-imagining of Potts Point. Rowe Street certainly had its charm. I knew it if only because I was an habitué of the amazing Rowe Street Records (as I recall the only music shop, but indeed run by an Hungarian emigré who may or may not have lived in Potts Point).
The laneway was perhaps 200 metres long, somewhat raffish, popular for its coffee and vaguely cosmopolitan consumer products. But Farrelly typically overstates her case – note all the plurals when there was generally just one of each – and in so doing prevents us forming a more evidentiary sense of what Sydney was like – and therefore what it could be.
At the end of the day, Farrelly is a romantic. This not only explains the rose-coloured vision she has of those aspects of old and contemporary Sydney that she likes, but also her splenetic hatred of all those villains who hath done it wrong – neo-liberalism, modernism, Liberal Party politicians, developers et al.
I mentioned Svetlana Boym’s book, The Future of Nostalgia, in an earlier piece on the Powerhouse Museum, and her distinction between restorative and reflective nostalgia – an urban vision based either on preserving an imaginary past or one which is future-oriented but informed by the need for continued connection to the past.
Elizabeth Farrelly would probably see herself in the reflective nostalgia camp, but for most of her book she is hopelessly tied to restorative nostalgia.
I say “for most of her book” because there are sections where she writes like a sea breeze in summer – thoughtfully, imaginatively, lucidly and constructively.
Ultimately, though, I see this book as a missed opportunity – not just because it is a book which needed to be written, but one written by Elizabeth Farrelly whose training, experience, intelligence and breadth of experience fully qualifies her to do so.
That she hasn’t done so is an indictment of her publisher and editor whose job it used to be to make a silk purse from a sow’s ear and to be sufficiently cruel to be kind to their writers. But, sadly, today there is no jurisdiction more woke than Australian publishing…they probably think that Farrelly’s polemics will sell books and that they should have edited out all the sensible bits for good measure.
Killing Sydney by Elizabeth Farrelly.
Picador Pan Macmillan, 375pp. RRP $34.95
Read Paul McGillick’s response to the Henri Matisse exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW.
https://mcgillick.com/the-magic-of-matisse
Paul McGillick reviews Elizabeth Farrelly’s new book
on what’s gone wrong in modern Sydney.
posted 01/02/22
Villains of Sydney Town
King Lear's plangent complaint that “some villain hath done me wrong” might well be an apt subtitle for Elizabeth Farrelly’s new book.
Born in New Zealand, Farrelly is a trained architect with a PhD in urbanism from the University of Sydney. She re-located to Sydney in the late 1980s where she has taught at the University of NSW, has been a Councillor at the City of Sydney and for many years, until recently, wrote a weekly column on architecture and urban affairs for the Sydney Morning Herald.
Her SMH column was known for its wild ad hominem shotgun blasts and dramatic rhetorical flourishes. For those who were predisposed to agree with her it was heady stuff. For those who preferred a more nuanced analysis of inevitably complex issues it was a turn-off.
It is, in my view, a mistake to transfer this polemical style – as she has done – to the scale of a book of over 350 pages. Try as she may to regularly exercise some discipline and provide some structure to her material, the book invariably reverts to being just a rant – often contradictory, frequently unfair, driven by prejudice and inclined to ignore instances which don’t support her millennarian scenario.
In Farrelly’s world there are only goodies and baddies (mainly baddies). It is a black and white world: old Sydney good, new Sydney bad (except for remnants from the past). Never mind that the old Sydney she loves was once new Sydney. Never mind the endless wrangling over the city’s planning that goes back to 1788 and Augustus Alt and William Dawes. Forget context. Forget how the real world requires negotiation and compromise. Forget that humans are fallible and that even politicians may act in good faith but still get it wrong.
This is a pity. I, for one, am often inclined to agree with her criticisms – because, like her, I have a strong sentimental attachment to historical Sydney where I was born and where I have spent most of my life and whose depredations enrage me. But the degree and frequency with which she gilds the lily makes me back away.
And it’s not as though she isn’t aware of her own intemperance. Late in the book she advocates “civil dissent (as) our best and perhaps in the end only defence against mob rule, on the one hand, and oligarchy on the other”. This is part of an often thoughtful final chapter fruitfully informed by Farrelly’s philosophical training.
Here she defines the city as a “perpetual tension between our yearning angel selves and our inner tribal primates”. She opposes post-modern relativism and “contemporary offence culture” which suppresses healthy public discussion and causes us to “retreat into our individual silos of underdeveloped personal taste leaving our aesthetic debate to fester at the crude ‘I like it’ or ‘I hate it’ level”.
But it seems as though when the sap rises she can’t hold back and her rational persona melts under the heat of passion, leading to denunciations of politicians and developers – even urban planners and designers.
“Early in 2019,” she writes, “for reasons I will never fathom, New South Wales re-elected the most destructive of neo-liberal governments for a further four-year term: another four years of park shaving, tree-lopping, fossil-fuel-polluting, sweetness-destroying exploitation. Another four years of role-playing ‘liberalism’ while actually centralising power and handing it to corporate and developer mates.”
This is just one of numerous incendiary rants against the conservative NSW government which not only do not facilitate rational, evidence-based discussion of the systemic and context-sensitive urban issues the book is meant to be about, but which are wilfully unfair and inaccurate – after all this is the same government which has committed to electrifying its bus fleet, which has committed to net zero emissions by 2050 and which has reversed earlier policies on the development of North Parramatta and the future of the Powerhouse Museum. This she grudgingly acknowledges, but does not discuss, notwithstanding a lengthy prior attack on the government for the now-abandoned policies.
At the end of the day, Farrelly only supports dissent with which she agrees. If you think this kind of position suggests the existence of some kind of elite who need to keep the ‘deplorables’ in line, you’re not wrong – and this notwithstanding her advocacy of the ‘new Democracy model’ of governance, a wildly utopian idea involving ‘citizen juries’ who only people completely ignorant of the history of the Soviet Union, Communist China, indeed revolutionary France, would contemplate.
Not surprisingly, Farrelly’s Sydney is a geographically constrained entity, essentially bound by the inner suburbs of Surry Hills, Chippendale, Glebe, Balmain and Paddington. It apparently does not exist at all north of the Harbour Bridge – Mosman gets one mention (“a sunny place for shady people”) and Ku-rin-gai is singled out for its purported anti-density NYMBYism – just take one look at the horrors of medium-density development along the rail corridor up that way and you will understand why the locals confuse density with bad design.
Apart from the Parramatta issues mentioned above, the western and southern suburbs – i.e. Greater Sydney – are not acknowledged. What of the Greater Region Sydney Plan – is this just another front for Sydney’s rapacious Georg Grosz-like developers, yet another example of the LNP government’s larceny and stupidity? At least some acknowledgement of life beyond Surry Hills and Redfern would be welcome.
When Farrelly does venture out of her inner city bubble, though, it is to Canberra, which becomes her whipping horse – a kind of Australian version of Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville, the ultimate urban dystopia. Once again, there is plenty to criticise about Canberra, but a lot to like as well. This kind of all-or-nothing approach is not helpful.
On the other hand, her proclivity to gild the lily leads to some odd distortions. Individual quaint vegetated streets and lanes in places like Balmain, Surry Hills and Paddington lead to the suggestion that those entire suburbs are like that when we all know they are not. Her magical representation of Danks Street in Alexandria bears no resemblance to the Danks Street I know – a precinct which actually failed to deliver on its original promise and which is now quite dreary.
And as for Devonshire Street in Surry Hills which Farrelly paints as a kind of lost Garden of Eden – victim to the new light rail which she hates but also seems to imply is necessary – well, I walked up and down that street five days a week for years when I worked in Surry Hills and I have to say the light rail with its new landscaping has improved the street significantly.
Sure enough Rowe Street, the legendary laneway linking Castlereagh and Pitt Streets near the GPO – an icon for those who lament the loss of old Sydney – receives extensive attention. Here Farrelly really gilds the lily, describing it as “the best known and best loved of the entire laneway network that characterised pre-modern Sydney”. That may be true, but to hint that Sydney’s laneways were all like Rowe Street is ridiculous – they were (are) dingy, grubby backstreets used for deliveries and nightcarts.
But to illustrate how Farrelly habitually takes one modestly attractive feature and blows it up into a mighty motherhood statement it is worth quoting her at length on Rowe Street:
“By the 1940s, it (Rowe Street) had become an outlet for the creative energies of many European interwar migrants. Often living in Potts Point (then the most densely populated part of the country and Sydney’s only centre of apartment living), these creative immigrants established galleries, music shops, cafes, print houses, design stores, fashion emporiums and tearooms in the tiny shophouses of Rowe Street, turning it, by the 1950s, into Sydney’s Little Bohemia.”
None of the above is untrue. But neither is it entirely true. What is true is that it is a gross over-statement, beginning with the utopian re-imagining of Potts Point. Rowe Street certainly had its charm. I knew it if only because I was an habitué of the amazing Rowe Street Records (as I recall the only music shop, but indeed run by an Hungarian emigré who may or may not have lived in Potts Point).
The laneway was perhaps 200 metres long, somewhat raffish, popular for its coffee and vaguely cosmopolitan consumer products. But Farrelly typically overstates her case – note all the plurals when there was generally just one of each – and in so doing prevents us forming a more evidentiary sense of what Sydney was like – and therefore what it could be.
At the end of the day, Farrelly is a romantic. This not only explains the rose-coloured vision she has of those aspects of old and contemporary Sydney that she likes, but also her splenetic hatred of all those villains who hath done it wrong – neo-liberalism, modernism, Liberal Party politicians, developers et al.
I mentioned Svetlana Boym’s book, The Future of Nostalgia, in an earlier piece on the Powerhouse Museum, and her distinction between restorative and reflective nostalgia – an urban vision based either on preserving an imaginary past or one which is future-oriented but informed by the need for continued connection to the past.
Elizabeth Farrelly would probably see herself in the reflective nostalgia camp, but for most of her book she is hopelessly tied to restorative nostalgia.
I say “for most of her book” because there are sections where she writes like a sea breeze in summer – thoughtfully, imaginatively, lucidly and constructively.
Ultimately, though, I see this book as a missed opportunity – not just because it is a book which needed to be written, but one written by Elizabeth Farrelly whose training, experience, intelligence and breadth of experience fully qualifies her to do so.
That she hasn’t done so is an indictment of her publisher and editor whose job it used to be to make a silk purse from a sow’s ear and to be sufficiently cruel to be kind to their writers. But, sadly, today there is no jurisdiction more woke than Australian publishing…they probably think that Farrelly’s polemics will sell books and that they should have edited out all the sensible bits for good measure.
Killing Sydney by Elizabeth Farrelly.
Picador Pan Macmillan, 375pp. RRP $34.95
Read Paul McGillick’s response to the Henri Matisse exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW.
https://mcgillick.com/the-magic-of-matisse