Nine years ago we lost my sister. All the kids loved her – she was the best auntie for all her nephews and nieces. Everyone loved her. She was a very strong person. She would do anything for anyone. She’d take the shirt off her back.
When my sister was a child, she was assaulted and she nearly died. Years later, when her abuser was about to be released from prison, she used to ring me every day screaming down the phone because she was so scared that he was going to come back.
She was really beside herself but she had poured so much into her little house in Northam, which is a regional town in Western Australia. My sister was only there for over six months when she was told she was being evicted for rent arrears, just as her abuser was being released. She had received a compensation payment for the attack but with the payment came a lot of trauma and memories and she didn’t want the money.
There wasn’t much help for her in Northam and she was really isolated, so when she got the eviction notice she didn’t know what to do. It was like, “Where do I go from here?” She just felt at her end.
Because when you are evicted, where do you go? Where are you going to lay your head? How are you going to see your kids again?
If she hadn’t been evicted, she’d have her home now. She’d be right. It’s very sad that she felt the only way out was taking her own life and that there was nothing more she could do.
When I had my little girl three years ago, I named her Sherilee after my sister.
I had been homeless for about 10 years before I had her. Once I became pregnant, someone who’d seen me sleeping in the park in Midland offered me a private rental place but we had to leave there again before my daughter turned one.
Some nights she had to sleep in her pram. I’d just sit up on the side of her and put my hand through the belts and hold her. I wouldn’t really sleep at all. It was really, really tiring.
We couldn’t get into a refuge because I wasn’t suffering from domestic violence.
During the time I was homeless we lost four family members in less than a year. I didn’t realise how expensive funerals are until I grew up and had to start sharing the costs.
First was my cousin. He had just got his first public housing rental after more than two decades on the waiting list and he was there for less than a year when he died of renal cancer. His kidneys had failed from long-term alcohol abuse and poor lifestyle because he had been homeless for years.
The same was true for my mum’s sister shortly after – she was in her place for less than a year and she passed away as well from cirrhosis of the liver. A lot of the homeless people will drink wine because it’s cheap and it keeps them warm at night during winter. But it’s killing them all so quickly. It took its toll on everyone. If they had a home they wouldn’t need to be sitting out in the streets, they wouldn’t have to be drinking all night.
Next was my other cousin. He was homeless all his life. He was in his early 40s and he was so badly depressed from his long life of homelessness that he would slice himself up, he’d stab himself, he’d smash the bottle that he was drinking and cry and cry. It was really sad – all he wanted was his own little space.
He lay down on the road and got run over by a bus. But I don’t think he wanted to die. Everyone knew him down here, everyone, so when it happened, it was a whole community thing. His family lost him but the whole community lost him as well.
We lost another cousin very young. He was only 26 or 27. He would sleep around the parks and one morning in the depths of that freezing winter he was found hanging from a tree, with bruises on him. But he wasn’t a sad kid – he was always smiling, he never had any enemies – so I don’t understand why that happened.
It left a lot of the family feeling a lot of guilt or shame because everyone just thought: what if we’d been able to help sooner? What if we’d had a home we could bring him to?
But the whole family has been homeless for so long and it started when they took his mother’s home off her. She had an old farmhouse but she got evicted by the government over an outstanding water bill. And when they took her house everyone just became homeless, because that’s where everyone lived.
Just last month I lost another cousin – his funeral is this week. He died from long-term alcohol abuse at the age of 31. He’d just got his first public housing property but again he was only there for less than six months. He wasn’t built for the streets because he was a soft boy.
He is the third son his mother is going to bury in three years.
The government needs to cut the wait times for housing. It’s ridiculous for families to be waiting this long – for anybody to be waiting this long – in this day and age. We are a rich country.
I just keep thinking about my own daughter. What happened to my sister and my family should never happen again. I want this to stop.
• In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
• Benita Windie is a Noongar woman who lives in Perth with her daughter Sherilee and other children
