If we are to better understand inequality within Australia, we must begin with the recognition that disadvantage does not only reside in income brackets or postcodes associated with urban poverty. It is also embedded in the sheer physical scale of the nation and the political choices made about who gets connected to opportunity and who remains at the margins of it.

We crossed the half-buried railway line and the crazy man known as Treadly Tim turned a corner around the van park on Simeon Street and came toward us on his Malvern Star bicycle.