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Homeless crisis.
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PHOTO: MARK SCHNEIDER
Colleen is desperately looking for a home for herself and her faithful dog Pippi Longstocking.
Bridgetown has a homeless crisis C
olleen* has been doing it tough for months now, living out of her small car with her faithful dachshund Pippi Longstocking. By now, she says, she’s getting used to it. In her current stretch of homelessness she’s been doing it for two months. Before that it was six. In between she found temporary accommodation in a run-down 50-year-old caravan, and for four months was the caretaker of a Serpentine property. Living off unemployment benefits of $800 per fortnight while the average rent in Bridgetown hovers around $620 per week she has no hope of finding a rental home. And with a history of substance abuse that she’s since overcome she’s loathe to try share accommodation with unknown people where she may be exposed to their potential problems. It’s been like this for her for the last 18 months. Before then she’d called Margaret River home for 30 years until her rent hit an unaffordable $750 per week. *Colleen did not want to use her second name.
What that says about our government is rather devastating, isn’t it? Despite the hardship of living out of her car she’s found “silver linings”. “I’ve learnt not to be a victim because I am not, I know I have a voice,” she said. “I’ve overcome addiction through this process.” Survival skills While in Perth her strong survival skills taught her the safest places were 24 hour service stations with their cameras, lights and amenities. “It was scary. It’s all been scary, the one saviour was my little girl sausage dog.” “We are a team.” With family history in Bridgetown, she travelled here “on a whim and a prayer” for her uncle’s 80th birthday and lived in the old caravan. But the caravan was in poor condition and “beyond its time”. She’s looking for a suitable caravan or a granny flat in exchange for dollars or work.
Her job seeker payment of $800 per fortnight, makes even renting in the caravan park unaffordable. Local resident Elisabeth Pellicaan is a highly qualified mental health professional who became acutely aware of the homelessness problem just before Christmas last year, when she encountered a homeless middle-aged woman in one of the town’s parks. She reached out to help with an offer of food and shelter. She’s been instrumental in assembling a group of concerned people to do something about it. There’s little information about the scale of homelessness locally, she says, and neither the police nor the Shire have a clear idea of the numbers. CONTINUED PAGE 3