Gay Hawkins in Shit in Public in the Australian Humanities Review (Issue 31-32, April 2004) says that it's difficult to imagine a world without a distinction between public and private though there are times when you get an insight into what it might be like.

Seeing half the contents of your garbage bin spread over the street after collection night is one of those times. After irritation, this experience can trigger strong feelings of disgust and exposure. All this evidence of your intimate life revealed as waste. In the rush to pick it up your body shudders with the horror of contamination.Consider a different example. When it rains heavily in Sydney the stormwater system, designed to manage runoff from streets, is regularly polluted with raw sewage that leaks into it from broken pipes and ageing infrastructure. This makes the beaches dangerously toxic and it can produce a strange miasma. When the rain clears and everything is meant to smell fresh and cleansed you can often get a strong stench emanating from gutters and street grilles. Shit is in the air. This is unpleasant but we generally don't feel personally exposed, let alone implicated. We don't feel that our privacy has been challenged. It's an environmental problem, a failure of infrastructure. It can upset our sense of civic order and public health but our response is most often limited to 'what are "they" going to do about it', if we even care at all.

In the first, it is resolutely connected to practices of the personal, to rituals of everyday life and routines of self-maintenance. Waste functions as a marker of the structural differentiation between the realm of intimacy and public life; managing it is something you do in private, something that is naturalised as part of a pre-public individuality.

In the second, the public waste evident in deteriorating stormwater systems and contaminated rivers and beaches is most often represented as an environmental issue; regularly generating special investigative reports in the press and even the occasional beachside mass demonstration. Accounts of this waste problem constitute it as a failure of the state.