Knowing the culture of the past
The Tip at the End of the Street is a gently humorous picture book about cultural crisis. It inverts the usual meaning of tip (that is, ?rubbish dump?) and transforms it into a cultural resource as two children are depicted sorting through the refuse of a throw-away, consumerist society (a society all too willing to discard its past and its memories) and constructing for themselves a deeper sense of culture than possessed by their parents.
The struggle between a culture with a deep sense of the past and a culture with nothing but a shallow, atemporal present culminates in the discovery of an old man at the tip. The children?s contact with this symbolic figure equips them to conserve cultural knowledge and tradition. The process of finding and retrieving emphasises notions of loss, discarding and valuing, issuing a warning that contemporary culture is at risk of becoming threadbare. However, the story is ultimately optimistic about how the cultivation of imaginativeness and resourcefulness through exposure to cultural traditions may prevent modern society from decline into a postmodern wasteland.