Grace Camilleri promises she’s not complaining.
The pensioner says she is grateful: she owns her own home in Hoppers Crossing in Melbourne and has three beautiful grandchildren who live with her and their mother. There is laughter in the house.
Her daughter works full-time, but her income coupled with Camilleri’s pension is not enough to feed the household of five, so she has started to visit food banks.
“It’s the cost of living,” she says.
“If we didn’t have this we would have to cut down. Fruit and vegetables are so expensive.”
On Thursday morning, Camilleri lines up with dozens of others outside Equip church in Melbourne’s west. Everyone is there for the food bank bus.
Camilleri gets on the bus and comes out with two bags full of fresh vegetables – a luxury in these times – some frozen fish, rice and yoghurt. Two bags full of reprieve from price hikes.
After their last gas bill hit $398, the family stopped putting the heater on.
“But I am not complaining. Everyone is in the same boat,” Camilleri says.
Mothers with newborns, young families and pensioners are also lining up – many of them chat as they pass around hot coffees and ask after each other’s families. The church makes it comfortable.
But some avoid eye contact, wear dark glasses and keep to themselves. The charity isn’t just fighting hunger, but also the shame at needing to be there.
Around 40 people go through the bus that morning.
Foodbank Australia, the largest provider of food relief in the nation, says they are helping about a million people each month at the moment.
The general manager, Sarah Pennell, says everyday costs are now overwhelming households. And increasingly those accessing the service have jobs.
“What we’re seeing now is a new cohort coming into the charity seeking food relief, people that have never done it before,” Pennell says.
“In fact, 54% of food-insecure households have someone in paid work now. A job isn’t a shield against the cost-of-living crisis.”
Their data shows that each time interest rates are hiked, people go looking for food relief.
After the cash rate went up in August last year, 5,378 visited the website looking for their closest food bank. That number increased to 24,755 in June this year, when rates were hiked for the 12th time.
Further back in the line is Delores, who did not want her last name used. The pensioner started coming to the food bank in March, when the cost of food rose so high that she couldn’t afford to eat.
“I don’t even go grocery shopping any more,” she says.
Her rent has just increased $70 a month. Tears well in her eyes. Her friend Didi, who helps out at the church sometimes, interjects. She bought five things at the supermarket yesterday and it cost her $50.
“There was no meat in the bag,” she says. “I’m not renting, but I’ve got all the bills to pay.
“You need to buy this or that, and that’s how we end up here,” she says, waving at the line.
The Foodbank Victoria CEO, Dave McNamara, says they’re currently feeding 57,000 people every day in the state.
Everyone is talking about the cost of living, but not all suburbs have been hit equally. Dandenong in the south, Whittlesea in the north and Wyndham in the east are feeling the pinch hardest. In regional Victoria, it’s Ballarat, Mildura and Warrnambool.
“There are a number of high-impact areas that we’re trying to service at the moment,” McNamara says.
In Sydney, Brett Bonus travelled nearly an hour to get to the OzHarvest Market in Waterloo.
“Without them, I’d be hunting around somewhere else or I’d just be starving. This just really helps, I don’t come here each week, just around twice a month, but it’s heaven sent.”
The 56-year-old, who works as a gutter cleaner, says the job is getting harder on his body and more scarce as people cut down on spending. Work is either “feast or famine”, he says, and with the rent increasing on his site in a caravan park in Heathcote, he’s had to rely on the food bank to make ends meet.
“When your rent is $400 a week, and with food going up and up and up, it’s a struggle,” he says.
Charles arrives at the market soon after Bonus, saying it’s his first time but that he’s volunteered there in the past.
Having fallen on hard times, Charles says the cost-of-living crisis is biting hard into his welfare payments.
“I basically live in a closet. It’s a room in a share house but it only fits a single bed. After all the bills and everything on top of that, I only have $100 to spend a fortnight. So I have been utilising a lot of services at the moment, but it is quite tough out there.
“I have a criminal record, which means I can’t find a job too easily, there isn’t much work going around anyways. So trying to balance everything on Centrelink payments is just insane, I can’t keep up.”
Micki is a waitress at a local restaurant. She says she has only attended the market once before but she is struggling to keep up with the increasing cost of rent and groceries.
“I live in a share house here in Sydney, and the prices of everything just keeps going up. I try and shop a little here and a little at supermarkets, but I have a small budget,” she says.
Sophia Clifton, the market’s manager, says the service is helping up to 400 people a day, which has included an increasing number of young people in recent months.
“We’ve seen more teachers, nurses and single parents, with many saying they’ve been looking up where they can get food.
“We’ve had people say they’d be starving if they didn’t come here. One single mother of four said she be ‘living on the edge of nothing’ without us.”
Clifton says that while there is still some stigma attached to using food banks, people are often forced into it or they’d have to stop eating regularly.
“It’s often the little things that tip people over the edge. People who come here are often ashamed, but will admit they’d have to go without meals if they didn’t.”
Ronni Kahn, OzHarvest’s founder and CEO, says demand for food is at the highest level she’s seen in the 19 years of running the charity.
Up in Queensland, 64-year-old Frank, or Franko as he prefers to be called, has been getting his weekly groceries from the community pantry at the Townsville Seventh-Day Adventist church for the last six months.
“Coming here and getting a week’s worth of food, I mean without it I would probably be going backwards.”
Franko says cost-of-living pressures, including increases to his rent, are stressful but he’s grateful to be in Townsville where the rental rises are milder.
According to the pantry’s organiser, Tricia Hatfield, most of the people it serves are single, elderly and in need of support. The food bank currently hands out about 250 boxes every Friday morning – up from close to half that earlier in the year.
“It’s definitely getting busier, but we are getting heaps of stuff from supermarkets and other groups,” she says.
Brisbane’s Jaye Kemble, 28, likes to cook healthy meals – and knows how crucial it is for the growing brain of her baby daughter Ahkira-Kaye.
But as the cost of food rises, meals fall off her repertoire. No more crumbles – green apples are extremely expensive.
“I haven’t done a roast in a good while,” the Gaythorne mother says.
So Kemble was grateful to score a cut of silverside at the food bank she turned to two months ago.
Kemble goes to The Pantry in Bardon every fortnight, picking up capsicum, bananas, kiwifruit, ingredients for stews – all produce Kemble and her partner, who is looking for work, can no longer afford.
“I don’t have any family left around, and I don’t have very many friends because I am moving forward from a lifestyle that I shouldn’t have been living. Bettering myself,” she says. “I don’t really have anyone else to help me.”
Ahkira-Kaye is thriving. At seven months, she is hitting many of the milestones of a one-year-old. She’s a bubbly, happy little girl.
And Kemble is doing her best to keep her that way. If she can fit it into her $700 weekly budget – after $250 goes towards rent, $100 to nappies and formula, and after electricity, internet, public transport are paid – Kemble likes to do something nice with her family at the end of the week. Like a day trip to the beach.
“But I still constantly feel like I’m teetering on the edge of losing everything,” she says.
