So you want my arts job: Architectural historian and writer

As a child, Peter Andrew Barrett spent endless hours exploring Melbourne's rooftops and alleyways. Now he works to preserve and celebrate the city's heritage.

Peter Andrew Barrett is a Melbourne-based architectural and urban historian, heritage consultant and writer.

His interest in buildings and the urban environment began at an early age. He spent endless hours as a child exploring the old city buildings in Melbourne’s western end, where his father’s business was tenanted. It was the 1970s and, at that time, ‘the lowbrow end of the city’.

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Rochelle Siemienowicz is a Melbourne writer and editor. Her first book Fallen, a memoir was published in 2014 and her second, Double Happiness, a novel, in 2024. She has a PhD in Australian cinema and was previously a journalist at ScreenHub and ArtsHub. ou can find her on Instagram: @Rochelle_Rochelle or at Substack where she writes a fortnightly newsletter, The Fool and the Queen.