Every night, I walk the city’s streets. For someone like me, it’s safer to keep moving

I spend many nights walking the streets of Melbourne. You wouldn’t know it though as I’m not yelling abuse or sleeping off substances outside shops.

I follow wide empty paths that a few hours ago were full of people eating, talking, taking photos. Around 3am I get tired, stop and lean against a pole, marvelling at the sky or pondering the river. I go on and on until it’s time to start the day with a well-placed coffee.

The city has been my home, for want of a better word, since early 2025 when my landlord put their 1970s unit on the market. I’d been surfing the wave of unsustainable housing for years. It had to break at some point, and I’ve been in the wash-up since.

My homelessness isn’t for lack of trying. I’ve been on the Victorian Housing Register since 1994. I’ve been labelled Priority One or homeless/at risk of homelessness since 2016. My choice was to stay in a private rental I couldn’t afford or live on the street for years to get to the top of the list for social and public housing. To be offered a place, I have to become one of the most vulnerable.

I liken the housing situation to the Mario Brothers game. I jump, run, hit some points, land in a pipe and fall into a chasm of more blocks and holes to jump over in the dark.I recently struck a jackpot – short-term housing at an aged care place, a transitional space between street and permanent. It’s got a rapidly approaching use-by date.

To me, the terms “homeless” and “rough sleepers” are not the same. The rough sleepers have friends, regular pozzies, shared language and history. Being homeless feels like a spinning gyroscope. Money and resources are committed to the “named” rough sleepers in Melbourne. The rest of us don’t display data for a spreadsheet, the sort of operational management government systems love.

In my travels walking the streets, I’d say the ratio of rough sleepers – people who seem OK to spend a night (or day) on a pavement in full view – to the rest of the homeless population is about one to 50. I see more people squirrelled away in blink-and-miss bivouacs around Southbank, council parks and universities than I do around Flinders Street. The last trains are often speckled with returned service people, older folk and gentler souls getting some sleep.

The city is our bedroom, loungeroom, kitchen, bathroom, if we’re lucky a “home” office. Really, rough sleepers have more skills and resources in their kit than some others. It’d be hard to let that skill set go.

While homelessness is relatively new for me, walking the streets is not. As a kid, night and its cosmic space was a salve to all the shouting and scaring that went on in the daytime. I was an unsupported autistic gender-confused teenager with no social compass. My parents worked 12-hour days in thankless jobs and my role models probably grew up in tense homes too. My school was focused on the bright kids, not night kids like me. All along, my autism, sensory-processing issues and mental health has meant the streets are my familiar quiet room.

Being homeless is not a lifestyle to dabble in. I had to give away most of my life’s belongings, 54 years’ worth, including my drum kit, art materials, favourite homewares, gifts and clothes. I crammed the remaining essentials into a storage unit. Now I have one shoebox of childhood belongings that sum me up beyond furniture. I lost my passport, birth certificate and other useful identity documents (which were likely thrown out accidentally); a catch 22 when you want to apply for a post box, vote, pay bills or get a library card.

It’s expensive to live in various forms of nowhere. It costs more to pay for a safe place to sleep, get the news, shower, change clothes, eat meals, participate in society and be someone you’d like to be – or hope to be – when you have to pay every single time you do it. My work running a successful community arts organisation for people with complex mental health is hugely rewarding but unpaid.

The transitional housing is like a human storage unit, a bizarre reprieve from walking the streets where I at least have some identity. It’s out in a suburban equivalent of Pluto; workable for people with families, sporting clubs and fireplaces but not for someone like me. I’ve had one offer of government housing – on a busy road in a mega public housing complex, brimming with trauma-stress coping mechanisms I don’t want to be part of any more. I get one more offer; a gamble of going to the bottom of the list if I feel it’s even less safe.

I don’t sleep rough. For one thing, sleep isn’t an option. I’m tall and non-binary, but look like a 54-year-old woman on her own. I try not to yell but sometimes the exhaustion of this life and the arthritic agony in my knees pushes me into a few soothing expletives. I get why people have to yell. Most rough sleepers you see on pavements in Melbourne are men who’ve mastered the layout. Not having a home is much easier to qualify for.

I’d love to see a city kitchen where people like me can prepare our choice of food. I’d like a women’s homeless register, so women and vulnerable people can learn where to camp and sleep, knowing the police know we’re there and that we can look out for each other.

I’d like to see a migrant homeless service for all the students and refugees. I’d like a homeless system that doesn’t just operate to fix the problem people, but offers more optimistic engagement.

Most of all, I’d like us to stop saying things like “stop homelessness”. We cannot prevent un-housing, just like we can’t prevent trauma causing complex mental health problems. We need to embrace that humans hurt, and laugh, too.

Heidi Everett is an artist, writer and mental health advocate.

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