The new face of homelessness in Australia

This isn’t the retirement that Mary had dreamed of.

The former midwife spent years living on a cattle station with her husband on the north-western edge of Australia – outside her window, the vast and ruggedly beautiful Kimberley region.

Now, though, the frail 71-year-old spends most of her days in her battered car. Her current view is the public toilet block of a Perth shopping centre.

Mary is not her real name. She does not want people she knows to find out she is living like this.

She is one of the roughly 122,000 people who are homeless in Australia on any given night, according to data from the country’s bureau of statistics.

A recent government report says that 40% of renters on low income are now at risk of joining that cohort.

That’s what happened to Mary. Pushed out of her flat last year when her landlord opted to lease it for short-term stays, she couldn’t find anywhere affordable on her state pension.

Her husband can’t help – he’s in a care home with Alzheimer’s disease.

“He’d be horrified [if he knew], absolutely mortified,” she says.

So now Mary’s 4×4 is full to the brim with her belongings. A walking frame lies in the back, along with piles of clothes. On the passenger seat sits a tin of rice pudding.

“That’s my evening meal, every night without fail,” she says, picking it up, her hands shaking.

She sometimes gets a bed in a shelter, but most nights, Mary settles down in a part of the city where more police are around. She explains she has been assaulted four times and does not want to take any risks.

Every so often, Mary coughs – the after-effects of a recent bout of pneumonia she suffered after getting caught in a rainstorm. The car battery died when the windows were down, and she had no money to fix it.

“It seems that the moment people know you’re homeless… you become what I call a non-person,” she says. “You no longer have any value in people’s lives.”