Being genuinely homeless, which is to say having to sleep in public areas without option, is an enervating but, for me at least, vivid experience. The first thing you find is that you walk a lot. Walking, walking, walking from one place to another. And not in the healthy beach power-walking kind of way that’s common in this neck of the woods (the real fanatics start their super-striding at around 4:30am, I’ve noticed (from your vantage point under a tree or wherever they are incredibly annoying). No, homeless walking is an endlessly draining round of traipsing around a big, sprawling city, looking for somewhere to crash, sleep, lie down, drink wine in public somewhere where the police can’t see you, avoid the police in general, find shelter from the rain, find a soup kitchen, and find the cheapest but strongest wine you can – which is $3 from Dan Murphy’s for a bottle of vinegar sharp Sauvignon Blanc, if you’re interested. I don’t look for the quality or varietal any more, just the price and the alcohol percentage. Anything under 12% is dead to me now.
Resources for homeless people on the Gold Coast, in terms of actual shelter, are scant. There are a few shelters I’m aware of, but all have waiting lists as long as the very long road you’ll probably find yourself walking on to get to them. It’s almost impossible to get into these places. Understandably, when people do their get their hands on a bed, they cling on for dear life.
There are, however plenty of places that will serve you free food, and a marvellous group called Oz Harvest, who collect unsold or ‘sell-by’ food from various outlets, and deliver it to soup kitchens around the place. Problem is, ‘the place’ is huge and the soup kitchens are spread out all over, and don’t come to you. So you walk. Walk here for breakfast, there for lunch and somewhere else for dinner. Or you just drink and forget about food altogether.
And you pray that it doesn’t rain. Rain is truly the enemy of the homeless in this part of the world or anywhere else I guess. Of course in this part of sub-tropical Australia, it is a little easier to sleep rough than it is in, say, Northern Europe or the colder climes of the northern USA. But we’re in autumn here now and it still gets cold at night, sometimes very cold indeed. You’d think sleeping on the beach would be okay, but the wind whips cold off the midnight ocean and the sand gets into every pore. By day it’s not much better as the beaches here are long, wide and open with little cover and the sun, even in the colder seasons, is merciless. I was sat on Kirra Beach one morning, having literally slept in a ditch that night, with the sun beating down on me, and was passingly reminded of that scene in Lawrence of Arabia where they’re about to cross the Nefud Desert to attack Aqaba and Omar Sharif says hammishly, ‘It is the sun’s anvil!’. I knew what he meant, and went and lay in a park somewhere instead.
I do try to look for silver linings and homelessness does give you a streetwise angle on things that you may not have previously considered. You learn all the city shortcuts, illicit or otherwise, to get to where you’re going more quickly and thus reduce the walking thing. You learn about the private security guards, whose cars are everywhere at night and move you on from whatever shopfront you’re hiding under. You learn which public toilets lock up for the night and which don’t in case it’s raining and you need to sleep indoors (even if it’s a toilet). Australian parks mostly have outdoor electric BBQs with plug outlets, which are handy for charging your mobile at midnight or whenever. You learn to carry a nasty looking lock knife, just in case (I lost mine, because I’m hopeless). You befriend shoplifters who target the big supermarkets and are generous with their harvests. You learn how to eat for free, and you learn how to go op-shop raiding. Enormously popular with the homeless community, op-shop raiding is the illegal midnight art of trawling around the city’s many charity stores and helping yourself to the clothes that kindly citizens have left around the back, for the store to sell for charity. It’s classed as theft by the police, who routinely patrol the op-shops looking for junkies stealing old jumpers and blankets or whatever, so you need to be careful. But you need to stay warm as well and so, to get you through the night and with due respect to my police officer friends, fuck that particular law. To be homeless is to be desperate, and desperate makes its own rules.
How I ended up homeless is perhaps something for another post. It happened and somehow you have start to deal with it. But it’s a question of survival in a busy metropolis which, under the wrong conditions, is as unforgiving as any desert. But survive you must. The other options simply don’t bear thinking about.
One day at a time.
Photo by Jonathan Kho on Unsplash
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