We need to take note. The historical timelines of Newcastle and Sydney are similar. The British dispossessed Aboriginal people along both of these coasts. Penal colonies were established and ruled from London for decades. The grand colonial buildings in each city came from the same master drawings. Historical cottages in inner neighbourhoods are similarly identical, Balmain and Mayfield, Surry Hills and Cooks Hill.

Farrelly, although writing for our wicked sister city, gives us language to talk about what is happening here. Sydney's "messed up beauty", a delight for Farrelly, might apply to Newcastle. Certainly, like Farrelly's Sydney, it's true for Newcastle that "the closer you come to the city's centre, the lovelier it gets."

There are good reasons for this, says Farrelly. Sydney's inner city has pokeability, she says, meaning you can walk through a neighbourhood and poke around its nooks and crannies. It's true still of Newcastle East and Cooks Hill, Mayfield and Carrington. Crikey, it used to be true of our industrial sites -- a confident stride could take you deep into the steelworks or along the Dyke wharves for a poke about.

Pokeability, says Farrelly, comes when the city is composed of "rooms", with "thresholds" dividing these rooms. By rooms, Farrelly means those little portions of a neighbourhood where you recognise you are somewhere different, and then there is a threshold between that place and the next that must be travelled, and that it's fun to move around these rooms, and cross the thresholds. Newcastle's many inner city rooms survive, but only just. Laneways and small clunky lots are disappearing as the roller doors, brick walls and glass panels of residential apartments chew away the walker's paths.

We need to be mindful of how heritage, density and passageways come together in a city, says Farrelly. Sydney has a built core, a layered story, that is precious and irreplaceable, she says. We might adopt Farrelly's sentiments for Newcastle's inner bits.

Of course, the threats to Newcastle's inner core are different in significant ways to Sydney's. Remarkably, Newcastle doesn't have a single arterial road let alone a motorway lapping its inner core, an accidental blessing, but a blessing nonetheless. Sydney, poor thing, has an agenda for motorway construction deep into the 2030s. And, unlike Sydney, beaches lap right against our city centre. Indeed, in 2004 Elizabeth Farrelly wrote that Newcastle is "one of the country's - perhaps the world's - most spectacularly sited towns, blessed with a street grid that runs willy-nilly over the topography."

In that piece, Farrelly expressed concern over the Honeysuckle developments along the harbour foreshore. Newcastle, said Farrelly, was wedging "multi-storey barriers of view-guzzling, mind-numbing mediocrity between itself and its focus, the harbour." The failure of much-trumpeted, expensive, plans - Honeysuckle and the removal of the rail corridor at their core - to connect inner Newcastle with the harbour is distressing. Will we ever be capable of enacting an urban plan to achieve a long-term goal?

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Away from the harbour, the surviving inner-core is now under threat, its best blocks in the hands of residential apartment builders and their queue of retiree buyers. The problem, of course, is the disappearance of the inner city economy, the day-time one and the night-time one, such there is little or no demand for retail space, office space, small-scale craft spaces, theatre and gallery spaces, the activity rooms people the world over expect to find in an inner core. So the residential apartment wins by default.

Killing Sydney is timely, another call to arms from Dr Farrelly for Sydneysiders to confront the swindlers, bullies and power mongers that threaten their city. Killing Newcastle, if it were written, would have different lead players in a way - more Anglo, smaller guns, thinner wallets, older bagmen - but, left unrestrained, a cabal equally capable of destroying this city's surviving soul.