Submarine Life

It’s a submarine kind of life. Living below the waterline; noticed, sometimes, if and when you appear on the surface.

People can visualise homelessness in that way. Homelessness at its most extreme. The rough sleepers in the city streets ... their numbers growing. The cardboard, the spilt clothes, the shopping cart packed with a life’s belongings; the sleeping bag with a body inside it, zipped up over the head for warmth or privacy on a cold bright day.

But this is only the tip of the issue. The sadly visible. Numbers for homelessness in Australia are now estimated at over 122,000. The upcoming Census may help to give the Addison Road Community Organisation (AKA ‘Addi Road’) a clearer picture of how accurate that statistic is.

Like many other charity and civil society organisations, Addi Road is working as a focal point for the next ABS Census and its activities, helping to get more information about homelessness by reaching those who are often unreachable.

But the complicated truth is that homelessness also involves people who are hanging on to the world as best they can ... sleeping in cars, couch-surfing, or living in temporary and poor circumstances most people would never accept. This is the life of no-choices. Making of that lack-of-choice whatever you can manage.

Fear clouds into it and around it. The psychological as well as physical damage as many forsake meals or are unable to access and afford any medical care. Essentials mutate into hard-to-access luxuries. The body itself a kind of poverty frontline marked by everything from the clothes you wear to the state of your teeth and your skin.

Anyone battling rental duress feels this kind of homelessness as a threat and a form of terror. People ‘coping’ can still get an edge about them; little cracks, the wear and tear and constancy of just coping from payday to payday.

Isolation can kick in, no money for a casual coffee let alone a social outing like going to the cinema with friends ... the shame of not affording things, the slide towards loneliness. To be dehumanised is to be severed from other human beings and social connection. Bit by bit it can happen to even the best of us.

One of Addi Road’s biggest innovations these last few years has been Wednesday Night Lights from 6pm till 8pm, held every week at the community centre in Sydney’s Marrickville.

On the night they offer free nutritious hot meals prepared by their chef Heather and a group of volunteers working all day in their solar-powered kitchen. Tables are set up on the road outside the Addi Road Food Pantry and Office area. Wraparound services surround them, offering everything from free medical help to free laundry, legal advice and more.

Everyone can sit down, dine together and work out what else they might need or want. Each week, Addi Road’s Wednesday Night Lights gets around a 100 people on average. Sometimes almost twice as many; now and then a few less when it’s rainy and very cold. Mostly they’ve been lucky with the weather, serving sit-down meals like it’s an open-air picnic or community fair. Giving people time to access all the extra services that are here on offer from their partners. They also have their resident DJ GK playing her ‘classics’ playlist. Bands and performers often pitch in too, everything from African drumming to blues and classical musicians giving their best.

In the last year or so, Addi Road say they have noticed more and more ‘well off’ people joining them too for dinner after shopping at their budget-priced low-cost Addi Road Food Pantry. Often these people are dealing with mortgage or rental stress too, a relationship break-up, serious illness, or Sydney’s cruel, persistent way of chewing up every last trace of what were once secure financial foundations. Again, that threat of becoming homeless emerges, rising in the heart even if it is something many do their best to keep compartmentalised or secret. Students who can’t afford their rent – and are dropping out of courses and degrees– are part of this growing cohort. Alternatively, they just make the rent and don’t eat, a depressingly common Sydney living equation.

Australia is a very wealthy nation. Having 122,000 people sleeping rough, couch-surfing, living in their cars, and sliding from one boarding house or dubious premises to another is not how this country should be.

When there seem to be just as many people who are in a home (for the time being) – but left perpetually fearing the loss of that roof over their heads – organisations like Addi Road bear witness to how bad things really are.

This need to change. The inequity and pressure is too great. Its repercussions spread like body-blows to the community spirit, affecting everything from mental health to ‘social cohesion’. It’s become a cliche, but we really are only as good as how we treat the weakest and most vulnerable among us.

It’s one of the reasons why Addi Road tries to make Wednesday Night Lights a happy and pleasing event. The hot meals are the backstop, a foundation moment each week, for people to come together and feel valued, treated with respect. They sit down at the white-clothed tables, talk, share information, enjoy conversation. The wagon train of services around them allows time for everyone to see them, a set-up provided in comfort and at a steady human pace.

Addi Road also has a Little Sprouts program running on the night from 5.30 to 7.30m. People with kids get a break while they’re having a meal and sorting themselves out. Their children get involved with art, music, sustainability projects and preparing their own lunch-box snacks for the next day. The atmosphere is not hopeless. If anything it is everything but heavy… children playing, music, conversation, food, social services all in one place.

The theme for Homelessness Week 2026 in Australia is ‘Homelessness Action Now’. Addi Road supports this strongly and believes in the base-line assistance it offers – along with something that is harder to ‘give’, a few hours of happiness and no-questions-asked, no-pressure help. A few hours at Addi Road every Wednesday Night Lights where everyone can see how connected we all are. And make the best of it.

M

Disclosure Note: I work for the Addison Road Community Organisation a few days a week as their Media and Communications Manager as well as being the founder and Artistic Director of the Addi Road Writers’ Festival.