Biographies are typically the study of one life by one author. Rick Farley's biography (or this version) is being co-authored by a historian and a landscape architect. This collaboration could be described as contextualised narrative (history) meeting applied case study (landscape architecture). The intention is to bring different professional logics and motivations together in the study of one life and in a single biographical text.

The benefits of history to biography are accepted, but what can a case study approach drawn from an applied profession really contribute to Farley's biography? Taking Farley's leading role in negotiating the Kosciuszko Plan of Management, this seminar will explore such a fusion.

In 2002 Farley was appointed Chair of the Community Forum, which was established to represent a broad range of groups associated with Kosciuszko National Park. The Plan, released in 2006, gave posthumous acknowledgement to his ‘lasting legacy [in] building consensus between competing interests and creating common ground on conservation and Aboriginal issues’. As an example selected from the many areas of similar consultative and negotiating work Farley undertook, this case study will draw out the elements of his approach to both ‘interests’ and ‘consensus’ in practice, and in their personal and historical significance.