Being with no roof around your head or no security around
you... there's always that fear.
I think doesn't matter who you are, you've got a chance of
homelessness. You've got a chance of just losing
everything, no matter how much you try and just keep pushing
forward.
My name's Khan Snow. I'm 27 years of age. I'm born in the
Bundjalung area, but my tribe is Amaroo.
I grew up in Lismore area. I've lived in several places from
Sydney to Griffith, all the way up the coast. I've been homeless
a few times. It's always been an ongoing battle. I probably
haven't had stable accommodation for even a year straight. It's
always been in and out of housing.
It wasn't that it wasn't my choice, I had my mum's place to
go to, but having five brothers and sisters, and my father the
way he was, out and about, I chose to kind of follow him,
because he was homeless and in and out of just, places where he
couldn't see his kids or anything like that. As a carer,
you do sacrifice a lot of things. I'm not just caring
because it's a job or it's an income, I do it because
sometimes it is the right thing to do. Dad's medical condition
when I first went on the carer's pension was for his back in
emphysema. His medical condition has been pretty up and down. In
the last two years he's got MAC disease eating his em
hysema, which is kinda like no -contagious tuberculosis. He
s got, still at current, five sl pped discs. He's 41 kilos, 42 ki
os, which is only his bone we ght. Over the last five ye
rs, his deterioration, his we ght loss, his mood swings - hi
just whole sense of health co ditions have started to de
eriorate rapidly.
But what keeps me there is... that's what I've got to hold on
to, really.
I've done it since I was 16, 17, off and on. Work hasn't always
been stable. He's been, you know, sick, you know, pretty
greatly up and down, his health circumstances. My siblings and
other relatives, we're all in pretty much same rough boat, so
I choose just to do it rough with him. Yeah, really.
And sometimes I do it because I want my father to keep going and
not to give up, really.
I find the people that say, you know, it's your choice to be
homeless, haven't really been in that position of homelessness.
I've worked, I've been a full-time carer, I've been
self-employed. I think the hardest thing I've had as a
young adult into my adulthood would be that I had actually no
rental references. And I didn't have really any support behind
me. Living from pay to pay, you know, being on on just social
benefits can be quite hard. If I was asleep on the street - I'd
just walk the whole night and find a place during the day and
just rest until I either found a relative, a friend, even some
people that I've just met randomly have put us up in their
caravans out the back and, you know, sometimes you lower your
pride a little bit just to, you know, to get on.
You can't, you can't buy the proper food to be able to cook
on a long-term basis. You can't freeze milk or, you know, bread.
And when we do get a place from being in and out of places, it's
actually overwhelming that we do have electricity to pay, and we
do have a lot of bills coming out into the household to the
point it's overwhelming and we ended up jeopardizing our
accommodation because we're having trouble working back into
a normal environment.
I think it doesn't matter who you are, you've got a chance of
homelessness. Whether we earnt something or whether we got
given something, we all can lose it - just like that.