This house, on the right hand
side, is where our house was. This same tree, actually, same
tree, that has always been here. And that big gum
tree up the back there used to be full of fruit bats. They would come and screech
all night and I was very happy. And life was pretty
good. It was pretty good. It happens suddenly. My partner basically
said to me one day, we don’t have any money left. And, um, it’s sort of too hard to
kind of even comprehend really. He just kept saying to me
“don’t worry about money, don’t worry about money. Everything is under control. You just keep doing your thing.” But then, this day he said - it was a Saturday, and he said,
we don’t have any money left. The removalists came and
basically took everything. Homelessness was
not even on my radar. I had never, ever considered
that I would be homeless. Never. For many years, owning a house was known
as the Great Australian Dream. The belief was that home
ownership would lead to a better life. A home represents more
than just bricks and mortar. More than a roof over your head. It is a shelter. A
safe place to live. Giving us security and
a sense of belonging. Australia was called
the lucky country — a land of hope and opportunity. The myth was that if
you worked hard enough, you could achieve anything. The aim was, for many, to own a quarter acre
block in the suburbs with a clothesline out the back. Housing developments
were everywhere. New suburbs were sprawling and
the property market was booming. We’re selling! For a while, the
future looked rosy. Politics and economics
change everything. As time passed, the great Australian
dream has slowly eroded. And for many people, that
dream has been shattered. I’m going a bit ranty now, but it’s absolutely crazy,
vile and reprehensible how our society
treats homelessness. There’s this thing in the
current neo-liberal agenda of wanting everyone to
think that people are homeless because it’s their own fault. Technically homeless just
means, I don’t have a home. That can happen to anybody. Anyone could end up
homeless in two weeks. Everyone who looks down
on homeless people thinks: these homeless people have done
something wrong, or they deserve it or they just need to work
hard or they should’ve, shouldn’t be on
drugs or whatever, not realizing that they could
be the next homeless person. I didn’t think I could end
up homeless and I did. I was homeless
for over 10 years. I got sacked from my job and had a relationship
fall apart on the same day. And then two weeks later, because I couldn’t afford to pay
the rent, I lost my house as well. So I went through the lost
partner, lost house, lost job, which are 3 of the 5
most stressful things you can have in your
life, all happened at once. So from that, I ended
up on the street. I had a generic white van
and I pulled up to a park and just went to
sleep in the back. I actually slept in
one particular park for almost a year in my car. I want to introduce
Claire G. Coleman. I’ve heard Claire speaking
with moving insight about her experiences
of being homeless. Claire’s novel, Terra Nullius, won the Norma K. Hemming award, which is a science fiction
award named for Australia’s first significant female
science fiction writer. It’s a powerful story of colonial
dispossession, oppression and the resistance
to the invader settlers. I may offend some of you. That’s not a surprise, I
always offend somebody. ‘This land was taken by
force in a violent genocidal war. Every square inch of
the Australian continent is unceded Indigenous land and everyone needs to
always remember that. Australia is not the
country you think it is. Australia is racist, sexist,
xenophobic and homophobic. So, don’t make me choose
which cause to fight for. For I am both, I am
more — black and queer. Aboriginal and LGBTIQ ABCDEFG.’ I’m a resident of the
shire for 20 years. I came from Germany to escape
the cold of the German winter. I found a studio in Myocum. Decent rent, not
too much for me. After 3 years and 3 months, my landlord turned
to me and he said, “Nada, I think I have
to give you notice, due to lack of
spiritual alignment”. He didn’t like that I would
not join him in meditating in his little meditation hut. I had other harassment from
other mainly male landlords. They would turn
up at dinner time with a bunch of flowers
on my doorstep, uninvited. “No, I pay you rent so
just leave me be, yeah?” I have actually lived in a
car for nearly three years now. Today is a lucky
day. No rain so far. It’s getting a bit
darkish already. But I won’t tempt more
“mozzies” (mosquitos) by switching on a
light. Here we go! I feel as though the
car is actually my armor, I don’t even need curtains. I refused putting
curtains on my windows, because when I wake
up in the morning, I can look up
straight in the sky. At night and see the night sky. I don’t get bored, but
sometimes I get lonely. I just want to curl up into the
fetal position and disappear; not feel anymore,
because it feels very sad. Homelessness is often
seen as a man’s issue. What comes to mind is a man
sleeping rough on a park bench. You don’t tend to think
about someone’s daughter, mother, grandmother. As new data emerges,
405,000 women over 50 have been identified as homeless or on the brink of
homelessness in Australia. These women are all over the
country, they are all over the world. It is a crisis on our doorstep. It’s always been a struggle for
women to have equality in Australia. Although there has
been some progress, the fight for equality in
the so-called ‘lucky country’ continues to this day. Women may have raised children,
had a reduced earning capacity, cared for aging parents, put careers on hold and had
little or no superannuation. Now, as they age, and with no prospect of
getting back into the workforce, they find themselves
as part of the growing and shameful statistic
of homelessness. They are often hidden,
out of sight, out of mind. You’re not going to see many
women actually sleeping rough, because they will
sleep in their car. They will sleep out
of the public eye. Women won’t even tell their
families what they are experiencing. You know, I think everyone
would’ve been so surprised if we said that ‘women in
their 50s’ is the fastest cohort of people experiencing
homelessness in Australia. You know, in the 21st
century, no one expected that. And the reasons
for it are complicated. Superannuation, family
violence, pay equity, a whole range of
issues, that have led to, what we’re seeing as a crisis. Good morning, Peter. Good morning, how you going? Good, good, good, good, and
the photos are already uploaded? Already up. Sometimes it looks so
bloody big, when we see that, you know, hundreds
of thousands of people are either homeless
or on the brink of it. Well, it really started with a
conversation with my daughter. It was at the time when the
Flinders St station grand hall was in the news, how it
had been empty for 10 years, and below it, people
were sleeping rough. And I said to her, “how many other buildings
in Melbourne are empty?” and from that, Housing All
Australians really evolved. Pop up shelter is a
short term solution. It is not a solution for
housing for the long term, because it’s only temporary. But why not use buildings
that are lying empty to house people that are
really in housing stress? It was an old home that
got converted into an office and now we’re converting
it back into a home. The good will of
the property industry, we can refurbish these
buildings for short-term use with an appropriate
not-for-profit like the YWCA or Salvation Army and
there are many others. It is not a total solution. We
must build a lot more housing. Well, it’s a great space. Yeah, and it’s big enough
that we can, as you said, get people-in-training
in, upskill-people, if they want to re-educate, so then they can get back
into the workforce as well. Thanks Rob, that’s fantastic. You’re passed a certain age, experience counts
for nothing apparently. It’s all about
disposability. Burn ‘em up. It’s consumerist in the
same way, young and new — use it until the next newer,
younger thing comes along. So you just think,
who are you anymore? I don’t even ... I’m not the me I
always knew, or thought I was. I didn’t know such
places existed. I didn’t know about
Women’s Housing, because that wasn’t in my experience
or it wasn’t relevant to me; that was for poor
women in awful situations who had to leave, you
know, domestic violence, or poor single mums
trying to bring up kids and like barely coping.
It was for people like that, it wasn’t for me. I was never going to
be on benefits or welfare or a disability benefit. Never going to happen, never. Old age pension? Sure, maybe. But, of course, it did. You can go
from being incredibly successful, have everything in place and
then, oops, a few little quirks, a couple of trip ups
you never expected, you hadn’t actually allowed
for, and then there you are, on the doorstep of homelessness. I lived in Sydney for 13 years, I was in advertising for
many years, creative director, very high powered job, very
successful, lots of pressure. But I was an unmedicated
bipolar depressive. I was diagnosed as
bipolar when I was 20. I went through years
of taking pretty much every antidepressant on
the market and trialing them. I was on anti-psychotics. I've been on
anti-epilepsy drugs. I've been on all
sorts of things. I've been sleeping
17 hours a day on bloody Seroquel
and Risperidone. And eventually that
caught up with me when I had the year from hell. I lost my mother, my
brother and my lover in a 12 month period. I had no money. I had to get back to Melbourne,
find somewhere to live. Started work again,
got myself an apartment. Lost my job in retail, could not
get another one. Just could not. I could no longer afford to
be paying $400 a week rent. Went through super(annuation), went through
everything like that, and then you get to the stage
where your stage of stasis, where you can't go
forward, you can't go back, I couldn't afford to live there
and I couldn't afford to move. And I honestly did not
know what I was going to do. And somehow this lovely
friend had a friend of hers that she was referring to a
place called Women's Housing. That is the only way I found
out about Women's Housing, who came to my rescue. I found somewhere to live,
that was a major turning point. I feel secure. They told me I
have this apartment as long as I want it or need it. If, per chance, George Clooney
breaks up with Amal and, you know, we finally
hook up as it should be, he can move into
my apartment with me, but it will still be my
apartment in my name. This van is called Rosie. And I... it took me a while
to decide on a name, but I always felt very
close to my grandmother and that’s the name
that came to me. I've been houseless,
not homeless, since 2018 and I bought
the bus in December 2018, so pretty much, I have
lived in her ever since. This is my home. I don’t wanna be
living in the suburbs. I don’t want to be stuck in one
place. My dad was a wanderer. You know, my children are there, but they're busy
with their lives. So this is my home and
my little life and life’s good. I used to think: I need a home.
I need stability. I need a house. And then, after 17 years
of marriage, it was no more. I was a stay at home mum,
so I didn’t have any money and I had to fight
for child support. I can still remember a
moment in time where I realized I was on my own. I thought, how do I do this? Yeah, one day I just
thought, well, this is it, this is my life now
and I think from then on I started to pick up. I
probably thought too: there’s gotta be
more to life than this. It was a real game-changer. I decided that I didn't want to
be stationary or living in a house. So I went for a big trip. This bus has just been
the best thing ever. I guess I haven’t found
‘home’ apart from this bus. It's the choices you make, and sometimes fear of the
unknown prevents those choices. Like I used a fair whack
of my super (annuation) to buy this bus, so
I could be thinking, "Gee, she's done
a lot of kilometres. Maybe something will
go wrong with the engine." But I talk to her all the time,
and she gets the best oil, the best diesel. She gets serviced regularly.
She gets her new tires, you know. So all those things, you think, "Well, that could
possibly wipe me out." Well, don't think it, you
know? So much of it's just here. As long as I can drive,
I'll just keep doing it. As well as state and
federal governments, there are hundreds of
organisations, charities, not-for-profits and individuals
working around the country to assist and find accommodation for the growing number of
women in housing stress. Even if a woman is lucky
enough to be given a place to live, it’s not a gift, it’s not free. She must use a portion of
her pension to pay the rent. This type of accommodation
may look fancy, but it is often located far from
the woman’s social network, and has little or no connection
to the life she once had. I’m from England, I
came when I was sixteen, and in that period of time
since I’ve been in Australia, I have moved 25 times. My house in Brighton is
not there anymore, for me, but it comes into my head a
lot more than I actually realize. I think I must have been
walking past a building site. So I’m here, in Newport. I’m not 100% happy living
here in women’s housing, and though it was wonderful
to have a roof over my head, I wasn’t in my comfort
zone. It’s scary. I actually didn’t realize that all this homelessness is
happening for women 55 and over. I know that I’m not
in my comfort zone. But, hey, I’ve got
my apartment now. I hope that I won’t ever
have to move from there. I don’t have the emotional
strength to move again. I don’t want to. I want to make the most
of everything I’ve got now. My mum died in 2018. I then found out from
the solicitor that in her will, she had made it quite clear
that myself and my brother were to have
nothing of hers at all. And the house has
been left to neighbors. She was my mum. And she really hated us. I’m
not quite sure why, but she did. A lot of Christmases,
I was on my own. I just feel that it’s a family
time and, as I don’t have family, I’d prefer probably not to
acknowledge it too much or think too much about it and
probably treat it as another day. Here I am at 71 and I don’t think I’ve still
woken up to the fact that, you know what, sometimes life just doesn’t
turn out how you think it will. I finished my third novel and
I’ve written a commissioned play. I wrote that entirely
during lockdown. It’s about four people,
two of them homeless, two of them kind
of middle class, trapped in a
disused train tunnel during a pandemic
outbreak apocalypse. And I pitched that
before COVID happened. I always thought there was a
chance of getting back off the street. The thing that kept me
doing what I was doing more than anything else, was hope that things
will get better one day. If anything, having
been homeless has left me a little bit paranoid
of something going wrong again. You get this kind
of paranoia that if... that I could mess up and
my life could go to shit again, so I tend to go for things that
are security in case of disaster. It’s like being, in a way, constantly with heightened
paranoia about ending up homeless. The writing that has gotten
me out of homelessness and poverty, started
while traveling in this car. I think subconsciously, I don’t want to get rid of the
positivity this car has given me, in that I built up from
nothing, to doing ok, starting from experiences, while traveling in
this old hunk of shit.” Her name’s Helga Hogarse. Also known as Helga
Hogarse the Unstoppable. But she’s now really dying. She’s not well um. She’s rusted out, so...
But, yeah, this is my old car. The massive housing boom
over the last few decades has pushed up house prices. And the cost of
renting has skyrocketed. The universal declaration
of human rights states: ‘everyone has the right to
an adequate standard of living that includes housing.’ Whether it’s a utopian
vision or not, at its core, homelessness is the
responsibility of governments. But also, as a society, we cannot
ignore this situation any longer. There is just not enough
affordable housing, there is not enough
public housing. Without governments
taking charge, the non-governments
support services are buckling under the pressure. For many people, home
ownership is a dream out of reach. Oh, this is so beautiful. There’s a sense of safety
and there’s a sense of being, of a home. I wanna thank you all
for coming to the opening of Garden House. In the last year over
two thirds of the people who were accessing
homelessness services were females, and the main reason for
accessing those services was a result of family
and domestic violence. In the majority of the cases, women need to
choose between either staying in an unsafe home
or becoming homeless. And while transitional
housing like this, it doesn’t solve homelessness, but it really provides a lifeline for
those that need it in the moment. For forty-six years of
marriage, I struggled. Then when I came
here, I am secure, I feel safe and
everything is ok.” I got married at the age of 21. We were very secure,
we had properties and cars and servant maids and all that. We have so much,
but from the beginning, my husband kept
me like in a prison. He was like a military man, applying the military
rules in the house. He used to assault me and he
used to push me out of the doors and all that sit for a long
time outside the house. Throughout my life
I was with a family. And this is the first time
I came without a family and living alone. But still I feel all my, these
residents are my family, I feel. I became independent, I
became free from everything, all the bondages and
all the struggles in life, and together we
share with each other, and we support each other. So I am happy here. I don’t really get lonely as
such, but it hasn’t been the same. I’ve kinda lost a little
bit of my passion for it and I think that creates
a little bit of tiredness. It’s like I’m just
tired of this for now. It’s just not feeling
like it used to, so I don’t know if that’s
what’s happening this year with more people on the road
or if I’m going back to places I’ve already been and
seen, but I don’t think it’s that. It just doesn’t feel the same. I don’t think about it too much,
about what I’ll do as I get older. I could imagine that living in
a van will have its difficulties. You know, I’ll get a
step to step up here, just little things like that. Yeah, I honestly don’t know. Hopefully I’d find a
quiet place just to be.... I have this tendency to
romanticize my situation. It kind of motivates me
to get up every morning to make my tea,
to keep on moving. But there is another
side, obviously. Part of the society we
live in just isn’t happy with the choice I made
of me living in a car. Not leaving the area. Where I just want to stay
here where my home is, where my friends are. I look in other people’s
cars, who live in their car, and I wouldn’t want
to share with them, because some
people are very messy and some people are
neat and tidy like me. I had managed to
live fulltime, 24/7, in my car over 1000 nights, then I got this first offer
basically of you know moving into a place
with my own bathroom. That’s a very
important factor to me. I have no drama
with sleeping in my car and I have no drama in
preparing my meals of the car. Bathroom is an issue. I
always missed the bathroom. That’s the one thing
that is... I don’t know... just there is not
much in the “shire” that is above disgusting
actually, in public amenities. This place is usually
used as a retreat centre. Due to the COVID-19 lockdown, the person who normally
runs this retreat center, he kept getting cancellations, so it was standing empty so
he offered to let us stay here due to the lockdown. I was the last one to arrive
of 5 women and 2 children. Immediately I started to
unpack everything in my car, sort stuff into what is
really essential to me, and give other stuff away. So the fact is that I have space
here to kind of reorganize myself. It’s pretty clear that
there will be a day when I have to move out again. What I don’t know
is when that will be. I have been given
nearly three more weeks. That’s a lot of uncertainty. I’m a bit afraid of the day
that I have to leave again, to put it all back in
my car and in storage. So, I spend my time
here in the bad weather. I couldn’t leave
even if I wanted to. If I don’t really take care that
it stays dry inside my vehicle, it can get smelly. I had that once, and I
just don’t risk it anymore. So that means I have to
have a meticulous plan, like I would not put my
umbrella wet into the car. I would not put my solar
panel wet into the car. The candle gives me an
idea of warmth and coziness. The unpredictable nature of
living without a roof over your head is just one of many complications
that homeless women face. Whether you’re sleeping
rough or in short term or in temporary accommodation,
without stable housing, it is a rollercoaster of emotions: anxiety, trauma, fear, and trying
to survive each and every day. There is a need to reimagine
a new Australian vision with the political will to rebuild
the hopes that we once had. The great Australian
dream might be over. Maybe it's time to
build a new dream. Well, next, I’ll be
heading down to Brisbane to see my children
and my grandsons. So I’ll probably stay there
for a little bit and catch up. And after that I’m
not sure. No set plans. I kind of fly by the
seat of my pants and intuition
comes into it as well. It's like I know what to do,
when to do it and I trust that. I’ll be traveling as
long as I’m able to. Home is where I park my bus!
