| Home Archived by the National Library of Australia Adelaide Homeless Gossip Latest 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Oldest Fred's Van soup kitchen clients Where do they come from? We often hear "the next Pope", David Cappo and other social inclusion bureaucrats refer to us as if we're little more than criminals, drug addicts and mental patients. Below is a range of personalities seen in the Adelaide homeless scene. Gambling addicts; can and scrap collectors; chronic rough sleepers and secondary homeless; alcoholics; semi-disabled people from car smashes, work accidents and beatings; brain damaged people gestated by petrol sniffing and alcoholic mothers; high intellect people who suffered nervous breakdowns; sexually traumatised men and women. One man worked as a software developer for twenty-four years, then eleven as a taxi driver then two as an unpaid worker rehabilitating computers for poor people. There are two ex-journalists in the homeless scene. Ex-prisoners released after twenty or thirty years in the slammer and who haven't adjusted to being "outside"; institutionalised psychiatric patients dumped into hostels and cheap hotels; drug addicts and dealers; chronic criminals in and out of jail and not finding alternatives; parents with children who use free food places as part of their food sources; financial predators looking for victims who may be homeless or working for a church group; culturally dislocated people (Sudanese and Aboriginals); eccentrics who refuse welfare and live outside; one unemployed corporate comedian. Government spies; homeless gossip columnists; occasional social work students (rare); people who want to do something good in their life by helping others; lonely people who use homeless joints as social venues; stroke victims (incredibly) and others with life-threatening and terminal illnesses; desperados on the run; street and door-to-door charity collectors; ex-prostitutes past their prime; unknown people who never give a hint of their lives to others; a polio victim left with disability and his wife and four children; those suffering mild and deadly depression, Big Issue vendors; one former medical student; a man living outside so as to save welfare money for a bond and advance rent on a flat; another man living outside because he fled his HousingSA unit after a schizophrenic neighbour waiting in the bushes smashed him in the face; a man, aged 76 who fled his unit in the MACHA/HousingSA complex (known as Alcatraz) in Lockleys, after being threatened by drug dealers living there; another man who fled his rented unit after being intimidated; a quiet elderly woman who says little and eats little; a depressed woman; a woman can collector; Aboriginal people travelling south from their homelands for medical attention or alcohol and/or to escape "income management"; work-for-the-dole people initiated into the culture through being forced to do work-for-the-dole; terminal cancer patients; mystery people. |