Sharon Wright on Doing Less, with Love

Public service. These two words evoke visions of grey office buildings with unopenable windows, policy documents thicker than a forearm and acronyms galore. But after I speak with Sharon Wright, a Sydney based landscape architect and head of design at Hassell, the phrase public service takes on a livelier, more generative and generous tone.

Sharon’s 30 year career might be seen as a deep commitment to public service. Her form of landscape architecture is not about grand gestures, pattern-making or spectacle. It is quiet, highly considered and oriented always and only towards public benefit.

I know very little about Sharon’s work before we chat, though I’ve heard about her for years. She’s one of the smartest landscape architects around, I’m told by one of the smartest landscape architects I know. What I do know is that we share a love of birds. The first time we met she told me how each year she records the date the channel bill cuckoos arrive on her farm (they migrate from Papua New Guinea each year to breed). Each spring, when I first hear their grating-screeching call, I think of Sharon. As I’m setting up for this conversation I hear a thud and a flap and a little friarbird has somehow found themselves inside the boat-shed next door. They rarely leave the treetops, feasting on flowers of Corymbia eximia and chattering incessantly, and I take their appearance as an omen of sorts.

We talk a little about birds, but more about how Sharon sees her work as a landscape architect, how growing up on a dairy farm in northern NSW has shaped her practice, the legibility of love within design, and the challenge of doing less within a discipline – and culture – focused too often on more.

I am inspired. Sharon Wright embodies a way of being in the world that is deeply important: quiet, purposeful, thoughtful leadership in service not of self, but all.

Sharon will be speaking at the Australian Landscape Conference in Melbourne on the 20-22^nd March, 2025.  

GR: you’re very mysterious, Sharon. I’ve been trying to find things out about you online but it’s nearly impossible!

SW: You won’t find much. And that’s an incredibly conscious decision.

GR: Is it?

SW: I have no social media presence at all. I never have. It’s just not me to put myself on show. I am an introvert at heart. I like the idea of getting to the end of my life and there being no online trace of me.

GR: I resonate with what you’re saying – I have a complicated relationship with social media and self-promotion.

I’m wondering if you can speak a little about where you grew up, and if there is a particular landscape that says something of who you are and how you move in the world?

SW: I’ve been reflecting a lot in the last year. Lots of big things have happened:  my mum died, Jon’s mum died, we had a bushfire and then I turned 50. Also, this year marks 30 years of practicing as a landscape architect. It’s a long time, and I’ve been asking why I did it and who I am as a landscape architect.

One of the things that I’ve been reflecting on is the importance of where I grew up. Which was a dairy farm in Kyogle, far north New South Wales. The Border Ranges National Park forms the backdrop. There’s a mountain called The Helmet and its peak is called Hermits Peak, it’s very dramatic. It’s such a mysterious looking thing.

It’s an orientating thing. You can see the peak from town, which is a 15-20 minute drive away, so there’s a sense of returning home. You know home is just there.

Hermit’s Peak is also a bit mystical. It’s my version of Hanging Rock [the geological formation in Victoria, and the setting for Joan Lindsey’s 1967 gothic novel Picnic at Hanging Rock].

GR: And what about the farm? How did growing up there shape your practice as a landscape architect?

SW: At the end of year 12 I won an art competition. And the prize was a box of plants, three of which were trees. We planted the trees around the farm, and they’re huge specimens now.

I remember planting one of them with mum and dad. On a farm, that act is very functional – you dig a hole, put the plant in, make a fence to protect it from hooves, and that’s it. It wasn’t until this Christmas that I really looked at that tree and went, oh my goodness, it’s 25-30 metres tall. It’s huge, and such a majestic shade tree for cattle. In terms of landscape architecture, a lot of it is about legacy. One of the truly important things to me is a tree reaching maturity.

I was thinking about some other tree planting I did with dad – shelter belts and along fence lines, again, very functional. The trees are incredibly closely spaced, at about two meter centres, with no care for species mixes. There’s the line, pace them out, plant. They, too, are now 30 years old, and they’re doing what they’re meant to do, which is casting shade on a certain side of a paddock.

That line of trees has always been in the back of my mind, because I  don’t like how challenging it is to plant a tree as a landscape architect. It’s also very expensive now. You’ve got all these rules and restrictions. People don’t like tree centres that are closer than 10 – 15 metres.

Maybe it’s a mix of function and nostalgia, but there’s something about the genuine simplicity of those tree plantings on the farm. I have always struggled with waste of money in terms of design projects. Coming from a rural community where there’s not big budgets, the importance of public spending has always been huge for me.

GR: Can you say more about this?

SW: My preference is never to spend the budget. Public projects and public benefit is really important to me. This comes from my childhood on the farm, but it also comes from working at the NSW Government Architect early on in my career. Some of the individuals there at the time were very influential in terms of the way I went on to act as a design professional. Penny Allan, Peter Mould and Chris Johnson, and many others.

The budgets were small, and this taught me about doing a lot with a little. You have to be creative. It’s easy to do something impressive when you’ve got a thirty million dollar budget but if you’ve got thirty thousand dollars, how do you make something equally as amazing as an entrance for a public school? Because a kid has to walk across that for six years of their life, right? So you want it to be interesting.

We worked on a huge volume of public infrastructure, public buildings and schools and hospital projects. I think the role of those projects, and working for government, that’s who I am at my heart, in my very core.

GR: Can you tell me about a project you’re really proud of, Sharon?

SW: The streets of Victoria Park, Zetland. The trees are incredible, the eucalypts in particular. It was a bold proposition on paper 20 years ago and it’s an amazing urban forest today. The project was a collaboration between the Government Architects Office & Hassell. We were the joint winners of a landscape competition; post-competition, the design and delivery of the project was split – the Government Architect responsible for the design and delivery of the streets and small green spaces and Hassell responsible for the three larger parks. I was working for the Government Architect at the time and was involved in the design of our initial competition scheme, then the overarching master-planning, followed by the detailed design and design development and detailing of the streets.

GR: You said earlier that you’ve been reflecting on 30 years of being a landscape architect – what does this mean? 

SW: As I’ve gotten older I want to understand the decisions I’ve made about myself and my life. And because landscape architecture has been my world, a huge chunk of my life, it’s the first thing I want to question – the way I’ve designed, the way I’ve thought about projects, why I’ve stayed with this career. I’ve been asking myself whether I’d do it again.

GR: Would you?

SW: It depends on the day. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. And I don’t have a reason why I wouldn’t do it again. It’s just that there’s days I’d choose not to do something creative, or in the design industry.. And the way projects are delivered has changed a lot in my 30 years.

Time is a huge factor, what I want is an amount of time where I can step back from a project and reflect on whether the right decisions have been made. I need to know that I’ve spent public money wisely? Is that an extravagant choice for this? Or is that the best solution for that? It’s allowing enough time to question a heap of stuff about whatever I’ve designed.

GR: Holding yourself to account?

SW: Yeah.

GR: What you seem to be talking about is an ethical framework within which you work. What other values, in addition to the question of public benefit, shape your work?

SW: Recently, thinking about other species has become more important to me. I know it’s a popular thing at the moment, but I’m thinking about how to genuinely deliver ecological diversity in public spaces.

I can make a lovely conceptual drawing saying that a project will have strong ecological connectivity, but how do we actually do it? It’s been important to me to think deeply about how to deliver upon that. I don’t know if I’ve been successful yet – I think it’s hard to get beyond the poetic headline of it. But I know it’s possible because I do it in my garden, and we should be able to do it in urban spaces in a meaningful way.

GR: I imagine, in practice, it’s not always easy to reconcile your values and commercial expectations?

SW: It’s a constant balancing act, yes. Inherently, what I want to put on a page is incredibly simple, but sometimes simple is very hard to sell.

GR: Over the 30 years of your career as a landscape architect, you’ve constantly challenged yourself to think beyond the discipline. Can you talk about this?

SW: I’m always trying to find things that will provoke, stimulate or push me in a different direction. If I feel like I’m getting stuck in my ways, I will always go off and look for something to give me a kick along.
At one point, after about a decade of practice, I went back to university and studied fine arts with a major in drawing. It was to create a schism point in practice. Every seven or eight years, I tend to do something to break whatever pattern I’m in, to change the way I think and design.

Teaching at UTS [Sharon has a close involvement in the University of Technology Sydney landscape architecture program] is also something that pushes me to think differently. I don’t see myself as a theoretical landscape architect but I like to challenge myself into being in that space as well.

GR: Is this openness unconscious or deliberate?   

SW: When I reflect back on this now, I think it’s deliberate. I never want to get into a pattern of too much of the same thing in my work.

GR: Let’s talk about your work. How do you define your role as Head of Design at Hassell?

SW: There are eight Heads of Design at Hassell and our remit is strategic. It’s about our design process and the quality of our projects, design review and design conversation, all those things that govern the purpose and quality of our work and the people that work with us. I find it incredibly interesting. It’s a different way to use my design brain. The point where I get to influence the way we practice is really interesting, and has been a really good career challenge for me.

GR: Zooming out further, what do you think are the opportunities and responsibilities are for landscape architects at a time of climate emergency?

SW: This is a big question – too overwhelming if you think about it too much, which is not helpful to anyone or the planet. Maybe I have an attitude rather than an answer: I think projects should always aim to have a light touch. I think we can and should do more with less. What I mean by this is it’s about doing what really matters most in the most deliberate, most intentional and smartest way possible. 

GR: Sharon, you and your partner Jon Hazelwood [also a landscape architect and partner at Hassell] have a property north of Newcastle. Can you tell me about the garden you share there?

SW: The garden is Jon’s labour of love. I’m there for a happy ride, learning from him.

My love of the garden is about my love for him, as much as it is about all the wonderful plants. The garden is Jon at his best, and happiest, in terms of experimentation and learning and sharing. What the garden has taught me is that plant it and all of those other species will come. And if I can orchestrate it so they come right to wherever I’m sitting, then I want to be able to do that.

The newer section is a honey eater garden. It’s more about both of us. It’s not even a year old. It was my dream to sit in the chair at the edge of the shed and watch honey eating birds coming to the grevilleas. The day that happened I was like oh my God, I can’t believe it. And the best thing with most of that stuff – which is so joyful – is that it can’t be captured. Not for Instagram, not for anyone else. It’s just for us.

GR: Is there a relationship between your home garden and your thinking about large public landscapes?

SW: A garden like ours is such a detailed exercise. It is an investment of time and care and love. The thing that it’s really taught me is the importance of that, even in public landscapes.

Maybe the shift that Jon’s work’s doing – that might change the industry – is about this. You have to care for plantings like this in a different way, and think about management practices differently, in order to make better public spaces. It is a legacy over time. And it’s so important in terms of the quality of those public spaces.

GR: That’s a beautiful framing.

SW: Jon won’t like me saying that [laughs]. Too melodramatic, too romantic.

GR: I disagree. I’m fighting for more love.

SW: I like that. When there’s love [within a design], it’s legible. You can tell the difference between something that’s planted because I need green planting, and where it’s a labour of love.

They’re two very different gardens for me. I think it would be amazing to feel that in public spaces. Real, genuine care and thought. That is different thing to beauty. I think it becomes a beautiful thing because it’s so intensely loved by someone. It might not be the world’s best collection of plants, but you can see and feel the love.

GR: Absolutely. Something I’ve been thinking about a lot is where, and how, deep feelings like love fit within the design process. Can they be designed in, or how can space be made for them?

SW: I think they can, and there’s projects that do that. If you really think and take the time to methodically think about small changes, then you can feel it.

One of my favourite projects I’ve ever done is a high street in London. The design is so simple, but the transformations are dramatic in terms of the daily to and fro of somebody, say an elderly lady walking from her house down to the newspaper shop and getting extra footpath space. Simple things like that – the addition of a place to sit under a tree that didn’t have a tree or a seat before.

Most people looking at the street might say what did you do there? Because the changes we made were small. The footpath wasn’t paved in gold, there were no fancy paving patterns. I love it because it’s such a robust detailing of the streetscape that’s going to have longevity. That stuff for me too is love.

Reflecting more broadly, this all comes back to growing up in a small country town and knowing what a bench in a street means for an elderly person I might have stopped to talk to with my parents. They know that they can’t walk another 100 metres and they need to, so they need a seat, and the seat needs to be in the shade and they’d like to lean their back against something and they need an armrest in order to get up and down.

GR: Looking back to the Sharon who grew up on a dairy farm and who’d just moved to Sydney to study landscape architecture, what advice would you give her?

SW: Hmm… probably to be more confident. I don’t know how many times I’ve been told that over the last 30 years. It’s easier said than done.

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Header image caption: Eastern Spinebill in the Garden for the Honeyeaters. Rose Hill, Worimi Country. Sharon writes: ‘The Eastern Spinebill, one of many visitors to the honeyeater garden, is one of my favourites – with their distinctive short, repetitive, high-pitched piping call.’