I knew that at any point it could get taken away. We'd moved
lots of different times. But I didn't think it would be that
hard to find a house again. I didn't imagine that, you know,
when I was earning great money and when I had a stable job, and
you know, that I would be living out of my car and all my stuff
be in storage, in a storage shed, and I'd be couch surfing
and staying with friends. I imagined that may be like that
for a few weeks, but not for years.
Hi, my name is Ilona Harker. I'm 43 and I'm from Brunswick Heads.
I studied visual arts and then I studied music business
management, because I thought I was too old at 19 to ever become
a musician, which is what I always wanted to do. And so I
thought I'd get into the sort of managerial side. Then I had a
baby. And when he was about sort of three or four, I started
singing.
The day after his 17th birthday, I was renting privately and the
landlord at that point said he was going to put the rent up $70
a week. And it wasn't something at that point that I could
afford. And so, yeah, I had to pack up this house that we'd
been in for four years. We'd paid over like $100,000 in rent.
And just that feeling of again having everything taken away
that that fear of not having anywhere to live. There's no
stability. You can't make decisions you can't - like
feeding yourself, like being able to sleep properly. All of
these things have an incredible impact on a person and they
certainly had a huge impact on me, and a huge impact on my
health and also my mental health.
You feel like a failure.
You feel like a really bad, I felt like a really bad mum. I
was really ashamed of myself. And I remember trying...
I remember the frustration...
because I think when you have problems in your life, you have
to look at yourself and what... how can you do better? And I
remember that frustration was like, there's nothing more that
I can do. There's no houses. And the fear and seeing the effect
it had on my son and how much it hurt our family was...
probably... yeah... it still sits very uncomfortably with me.
People say things like, well, just move away. My son and all
his friends were here. All my support group was here. Where do
we move to? Somewhere really far away where we don't have, we
don't have our friends and we don't have our support and we
start again? It doesn't seem like a very healthy solution.
And it's not people like me, it's not our fault, that there's
a housing crisis. It really isn't our fault. And I think
that people have to really change their perception of who
they see as homeless, and whose fault it actually is. They're
like 'get a real job, you're a musician' but like, I do work, I
go out and I sing to people who have dementia, and I look after
your grandparents, you know, while they're in care. I have a
job and I and I really love that job. I could go and work in a
bank or go and work in a mine. But I see this job as really
valuable and really important. Even with people who have come
from like sort of wealth or have had money behind them and
through decisions that they had no control over - a car
accident, someone running into them - they lose everything. It
can happen like that.