After 11 months of sleeping rough, it was the little things Jamaine liked. Showering any time he wanted, cooking on his own barbecue. Locking the front door.
When the 29-year-old made it into social housing in March last year, his time sleeping rough stayed with him. Unused to a proper bed, he slept on the couch. He kept his shoes on at night in case he was asked to move on.
Within six weeks of living in his new home, Jamaine, whose last name has not been used for privacy reasons, was dead.
His case workers say the home, one of 137 built last year in Croydon, in Melbourne’s east, came too late. They say his death was preventable – and his family don’t want it to happen to anyone else.
Jamaine’s premature death is far from unique. A Guardian Australia investigation last year into 627 homelessness deaths since 2010 showed that rough sleepers died 30 years prematurely on average, at an average age of 44.
Almost 1,500 people die each year in homelessness, research from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) revealed last month, with the annual death toll rising from 914 in 2012-13 to 1,489 in 2021-22 – a 63% increase.
Advocates say no one who’s homeless should be left to die.
Falling through the cracks
Jamaine was a proud Wurundjeri man. He was smart and kind, an IT guru who could recite incredible facts off the top of his head – the flight paths of rare birds, the history of computers. He wanted to do social work in Aboriginal services and find a girlfriend.
“He was very intelligent, he made his own computer,” his uncle Michael says. “In high school he was offered a scholarship, but he didn’t take it.”
His aunt, Colleen, pauses. She looks down at the table.
“He was a really good person,” she says, “everyone loved him”.
Jamaine was the oldest of four siblings. His father was abusive, as were his mother’s partners after that. His housing was never stable and he started drinking when he was in his early 20s. After his mother died, it got worse.
One case worker said Jamaine had complex PTSD, and drank to escape the past. He told her it was the only thing he could do to dull the memories. That he felt worthless.
“He said to me, ‘I’ve seen everything you can imagine,’” Colleen says.
“He would come and stay with us [as a kid] and come Sunday night, no one would be there to pick him up. We used to have [him and his siblings] a lot. He remembered every little thing we did together, we took them to the show, or Geelong park.”
The year before he died, Jamaine had given up his rental to go to rehab. After six months he was sober but had nowhere to go – and he became homeless.
Erin, whose last name has been withheld for privacy reasons, works for Anchor, a frontline housing organisation in Melbourne’s outer east. Jamaine ended up at their door.
“He came out with nowhere to go,” she says. “We provided him with a tent, and we helped him set it up.”
“The housing system is broken. It’s not as easy as just coming out of rehab and then saying, ‘Can I have a house?’”
Jamaine started sleeping by a creek in Lilydale, an outer Melbourne suburb. But his camping area was often attacked by people and during winter his things got wet and mouldy – the temperature would get down to 0C at night.
Erin and her co-worker Talia, whose last name has also been withheld for privacy reasons, would check on him regularly, take him new bedding or to a community lunch. Behind the scenes they were desperately trying to get him into social housing – but there just wasn’t any. Meanwhile, Jamaine had started drinking again and his health was getting worse.
“He had pancreatitis, to the point we called an ambulance one day and the ambulance arrived and said, ‘if you had not rung he would have been dead in an hour’,” Erin says.
The new housing development in Croydon was funded by the state government in partnership with Community Housing Ltd and wanted low-needs tenants, she says – no drug and alcohol problems or untreated mental-health issues.
“We fought really, really hard to get him a spot in that social housing build. It was sort of delayed and delayed and delayed,” Talia says.
The homes were finished in November 2022, five months before Jamaine moved in, but a building defect meant some of the units needed to be repaired, delaying the process.
“It was probably an achievement of a lifetime,” Talia says. “But unfortunately for Jamaine, it came too late.”
Jamaine’s body broke down and he died from liver failure. Talia said if he had gone from rehab into stable housing he “would have had a much better chance”.
Colleen and Michael say “all the wrong things” happened at all the wrong times and Jamaine fell through a huge crack.
“I had planned that once he was in that unit to … get him involved in Indigenous community groups,” Michael says.
“Then [he] got really sick and never recovered from it … it was too late.”
‘It shouldn’t be a death sentence’
In the last 12 months, Anchor has seen three people they were supporting in the Yarra Ranges die while homeless, CEO Heidi Tucker says.
She says fundamentally there “is not enough accommodation” but that services needed to work together, especially in regional areas.
“If any young person becomes homeless or is sleeping on other people’s couches, I’m not quite sure why we all don’t see that as an emergency,” she said. “To intervene and get them back on track.”
“No one should be left behind in homelessness, and it absolutely shouldn’t be a death sentence.”
Despite a recent report by the AIHW, there is still limited visibility of homelessness deaths.
In Perth, University of Notre Dame professor Lisa Wood and her research team have pioneered a project counting deaths among Perth’s homeless population.
That project has recorded a disproportionate number of deaths among Indigenous Australians who have experienced homelessness, due to the vast over-representation of Indigenous Australians in homeless populations.
“In the last ABS census, 20.4% of homeless people identified as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander, almost six times higher than the proportion of the Australian population who similarly identify,” she said.
“In our most recent published paper on deaths among people who have experienced homelessness in Perth, 30% of those deceased were Aboriginal people, and they died at a slightly younger age on average (at 49.1 years) compared with those who were not Aboriginal (average age 51.3 years).”
Wood said the late detection of health conditions is common for homeless populations, particularly rough sleepers. This, she said, was due to the significant barriers they faced in accessing screening and preventive healthcare, maintaining healthy lifestyles, and adhering to recommended treatment, including, for example, using a fridge to store insulin, or rest in bed.
“Having healthcare workers do outreach to where people sleeping rough are located not only increases the likelihood of symptoms or deterioration in health being identified earlier, thereby hopefully avoiding some premature deaths, but also helps rebuild trust in health services among a population whose past experiences of the health system have often been traumatic or stigmatising,” she said.
The Victorian state government would not comment on whether it will follow the NSW and SA governments in considering mandating the reporting of deaths of homeless people.
