On the night of his wedding to Effie Gray in 1848, Ruskin, who was also a noted writer, artist and philosopher, stood in front of his wife’s naked body, and was so disgusted by what he saw that he was unable to consummate the marriage. Six years later, the still-sexless marriage was annulled.

In Australia – a wealthy and democratic country – we have a wealth of ‘shit’. But most of ‘it’ is invisible: the imprisoned refugees hidden in the torture prisons on Nauru and Manus islands; the homeless people of Melbourne who will soon be removed from the city’s centre; Indigenous peoples whose individuality and personhood is obscured by the tabloid spectre of blackness that links Indigeneity to alcoholism, barbarity, and violence.

Last week, Scott Morrison commented that he intimately understands the persecution of LGBTIQA Australians because he, too, has been persecuted – for homophobia.

Since at least the 1970s, writing on the experience of women in cities has focused on the ways in which the built environment acts as an expression of or enabler for the violence enacted upon women’s bodies: sexual assault and other violent crime, and the spatial separation of supposedly ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ space – that harmful dichotomy of public and private dividing the home from the street and workplace.