ABSTRACT
The book Division and Multiplication, produced in collaboration with Kim Halik, is a series of case studies and analyses of very particular parts of inner Melbourne. It started by simply walking around the city and noticing things. In Parkville – a very intact and precious nineteenth-century area – there is all of a sudden this moment of severity or ‘blindness’, where one comes across a 50-metre long section of blank wall and backyard fence in the street. We were drawn to this on a purely physical, material level – it is quite beautiful. You can read the logic of the bluestone foundation, the brick boundary wall and the thin copper water pipe which travels from front water meter to back yard, and the garden trees appearing over the back fence. But we were also interested in why this should occur.
