Trevor Brown feels like he’s slowly drowning.
Brown has been homeless, on and off, for more than a decade, after his life spiralled out of control on the back of a failed business, health problems and depression.
Recently, he’s been sleeping on a tent on top of his broken down Subaru in the bush near Cockatoo, just past Melbourne’s easternmost suburbs. He’s given up on rentals. Owning a place of his own is a fantasy.
“I’ll be honest with you, I don’t think I’m ever going to live in a house again,” he says. “I actually think that what’s more than likely going to happen is that I’m just going to end up dying out in the bush somewhere.
“It’s going nuts out there at the moment. There are so many people camping out in the bush, so many people who are sleeping in their cars. And we feel like the government doesn’t give a crap, nobody really cares.”
The prospect of premature death is real and confronting for those sleeping rough.
Earlier this year, a major Guardian Australia investigation of more than 600 homelessness deaths showed they were dying, on average, 30 years prematurely, a crisis fuelled by despair, critical housing shortages, a breakdown in health provision, violence on the streets and failures of the justice system.
Brown has known friends who have died on the streets. One who took their own life. Another who died while living beneath a bridge.
“He never escaped that bridge,” Brown remembers. “He never got out.”
The Guardian’s investigation has prompted widespread calls for reform, including for a massive boost to investment in social housing and for greater efforts to track homelessness deaths, which are currently invisible to governments at all levels.
Three state governments have since pledged to consider reforms that would refer all homelessness deaths to state coroners, allowing them to be counted and monitored properly for the first time.
Progress, however, has been slow.
This week alone, both the Uniting Church and the Salvation Army wrote to the Victorian attorney general, Jaclyn Symes, stressing the sector’s calls for mandated coronial reporting. Trevor supports those calls.
The Uniting Church’s Rev David Fotheringham says such a reform would “assist the Victorian government and community organisations in identifying measures that could be implemented to prevent unnecessary deaths of people who are homeless”.
In a separate but similarly worded letter to Symes, the Salvation Army’s Col Kelvin Merrett, the divisional commander in Victoria, said reducing homelessness was a key focus of his congregation’s members.
“I note that chief executives from community organisations that work with homeless people or in social housing wrote to you in February making the request,” Merrett said. “I would welcome the opportunity to meet with you or your staff to understand if there are any barriers that need to be addressed in order to implement the measure.”
Deborah Di Natale, the chief executive of the Council to Homeless Persons, says the government could mandate coronial reporting with “the stroke of a pen”.
“The housing and homelessness crisis is killing people who have nowhere safe to call home, and are forced to sleep out in the open during the wet and bitterly cold nights,” Di Natale says.
“We need to investigate these deaths and understand what is driving them.”
A Victorian government spokesperson said the state budget had invested $197m over four years into the frontline homelessness sector and $300m annually into specialist homelessness services. It said this funding assisted about 100,000 vulnerable Victorians each year.
“Through expanded frontline homelessness services and our record investment in social housing, we are helping people rebuild their lives,” the spokesperson said.
Guardian Australia understands the government is considering the proposal to amend the Coroner’s Act to mandate the referrals.
But Brown has lost faith in the government to act. Australian society, he says, doesn’t really care about what happens to people like him.
He believes the only way they’ll be motivated to stop homelessness deaths is if they can see a financial imperative in doing so.
But he wants society to start thinking about the other costs of premature deaths. Brown himself has used the last 12 months to write his first book, something that he says has kept him alive and shown the potential rough sleepers like him have.
“People talk about numbers and whatever, but these are people’s lives and that’s the tragic bit,” he says. “You’ve got people who have done amazing things and they could have gone on to do amazing things. It’s tough.”
In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
