This thesis project looks to be informed by a series of walks through the Melbourne CBD, along which mess and detritus will be documented and subsequently worked for insights into the potential utility of the city’s material make up.

Characterisation of the material make-up of the city here as detritus centrally informed by Suzanne Kiernan’s analysis of The Fiction of Christina Stead:

How do you tell finished from unfinished work in writing marked by fractures, gaps, detritus, and inconsistencies, where the hallmark of style is refusla to apply “the final polish”, and even the apparently willful excoriation of a surface that risks finishing up polished? 1

  1. Kiernan, Suzanne. “‘Ugly by Design’: The Fiction of Christina Stead.” Modern Fiction Studies 34, no. 2 (Summer 1988): 185–202. ↩