A pile of dirty nappies and the sound of a crying baby led to the discovery of a teenage couple and their one-year-old child living in squalor in the Cairns scrub.
Mission Australia has been running its Going Places homeless program in Cairns for more than a decade, but rarely have outreach officers stumbled across such a distressing situation.
For it to happen twice in two days is almost unthinkable.
The inner Cairns suburb of Manunda is home to run-of-the-mill suburbia, a TAFE campus and some of the city's thickest swampland, with heavy vegetation concealing a number of campsites for people living rough on society's fringe.
On Thursday last week, outreach officers visiting one such campsite heard something that stopped them in their tracks.
The previous day, they had noticed a pile of used nappies and resolved to investigate further.
When they returned, they followed the sound of a crying baby and discovered a 16-year-old mum, an 18-year-old dad and their one-year-old baby living in a tent among the trees and bare earth.
That wasn't all.
Toddlers in the bush
By Friday, another young mother residing in the makeshift camp with her three-year-old child had also reached out for help.
Mission Australia area manager Mark Jentz says finding children in Cairns bush camps is a rarity – but to find two in two days is a testament to the troubling depth of the current social and rental housing shortage.
"Traditionally, anyone who's rough-sleeping is potentially a single male or adults," he said.
"The vast majority of families we work with are couch-surfing … still in difficult, complex situations but staying with extended family."
Life in the bush camp is less than ideal for anyone, let alone a child.
Residents usually sleep in tents and might have access to some off-site sanitation facilities, but substance abuse and violence are often rife.
"They’re really unsafe situations for people to stay in — for really anyone to stay in," Mr Jentz said.
"The people we supported out of there highlighted people coming in that were drinking and using drugs.
"And once they get established … the people that start to attend those aren't always necessarily homeless.
"They've just found this place to potentially drink or use it for drugs usage, and it becomes quite unsafe for anyone who stays there."
Quick fix for a deeper issue
The Christian charity, which traces its origins back to Brisbane in 1859, was immediately able to find temporary hotel accommodation for the teenage couple and their infant.
Its next step will be to ensure long-term sustainable housing in a city where the current rental vacancy rate is just 0.2 per cent.
Mr Jentz says the teens will be offered ongoing support and training to get skills and jobs to avoid falling back into homelessness.
The camp's other young mother was in a different situation.
She and her child travelled from a remote Aboriginal community on Cape York to attend the Cairns Show in mid-July.
They had been couch-surfing with extended family in Cairns until overcrowding became an issue and forced them to find whatever lodgings they could muster.
The woman heard how the outreach officers had helped the other young family and asked for assistance to return to country when they came back to the site the next day.
The organisation bought her a plane ticket home for later this week and organised temporary accommodation, food, clothing and nappies in the meantime.
"The family we spoke to were very eager to have them come back," he said.
The woman had cited dangerous conditions at the camp, including drug use, and said she held concerns for her safety.
A history of bush camps
The Manunda camp is by no means the only one in Cairns, and multiple similar sites have appeared over recent decades.
A significant makeshift community existed in scrub beside the southern access road to the city in the 1990s and early-2000s, and new sites regularly pop up at different locations.
Mr Jentz says the camps usually start with just a handful of people, but often blow out with 16-20 "casuals" as word of their existence gets around and outsiders gravitate towards them for somewhere to drink and take drugs.
Those outsiders often have homes they can go to.
"They come and go," Mr Jentz said.
"In years past, we had three longer-standing camps that our services and Anglicare and a lot of the outreach services were able to support to disappear, and support all of those people into long-term housing.
"But, obviously, there's increased pressure in our housing market at the moment, so that's seeing more people rough-sleeping in town … and potentially those camps popping up."
No end in sight
Homelessness outreach services across Cairns are stretched thin amid ballooning numbers of couch surfers and rough-sleepers – many of whom have taken up residence on the streets of the CBD.
Cairns Regional Council has recognised the issue in terms of the impact of antisocial behaviour in the inner city.
It has endorsed a four-year plan that flags the potential of developing a "wet centre" facility where itinerant people can drink alcohol and access support services away from the public eye.
However, Mr Jentz says the crux of the issue comes down to a critical shortage of housing.
"I've been working in homelessness for almost 15 years and it's probably the worst I've seen it," he said.
"A three-bedroom home in Cairns over the last two years has gone up almost $150 per week.
"We certainly need to act now and come up with a national plan, I think, on housing and homelessness
"Certainly more stock and building more homes is paramount at the moment."
A Mission Australia spokesperson says the Going Places program has been able to help more than 1,200 adults and 600 youths out of homelessness in the past 11 years.
