The letter for George Abraham arrived two years after he was buried.
Western Australia’s housing authority wanted to know whether he still needed public housing.
George’s mother, Barbara, a Noongar woman, remembers it like a knife through the heart.
The letter was from the same state government that had dispatched the family into homelessness by forcing them out of public housing in Armadale, a suburb to the south of Perth.
Two days after the eviction, George was found dead in a suspected suicide.
“I thought, ‘What are they doing sending this now, surely they must have heard?’” she says.
The case is not unique.
Guardian Australia has spoken to multiple Indigenous families who have been evicted from public housing in WA, despite warnings from their advocates they would be left homeless and highly vulnerable.
In late January 2015 a young Indigenous woman, Sherilee, received a notice telling her to leave her Homeswest public housing property in Northam, a town about an hour’s drive east of the WA capital.
She killed herself just before she was due to be evicted.
Documents suggest the state housing department had been warned that Sherilee, whose family asked that her surname not be published, was highly vulnerable and an assault victim, and her abuser had been released from prison into a town near Northam.
Daydawn Advocacy Centre, a housing group that worked with Sherilee and Barbara, told the government about Sherilee’s extreme distress about her attacker’s release, and criticised the lack of security at her public housing unit.
She was made to leave regardless.
“Although being fully aware of the very real danger faced by this young woman, the department of housing did not ensure her safety, not even the most basic duty of care on her behalf,” the centre wrote in a letter to the then premier Colin Barnett, less than two weeks after Sherilee’s death.
Sherilee’s sister, Benita, herself homeless for extended periods, still remembers the shock that rippled through her family after the suicide.
“Everyone loved her,” she says. “All the kids, she was the best auntie to all the nephews and nieces. She’d do anything for anyone, literally take the shirt off her back.”
She says Sherilee waited years to access public housing. The eviction, coupled with an “overwhelming” fear about the release of her childhood abuser, left her beside herself, Benita says.
“She poured so much into that little house,” she says. “She was only there for just over six months. Things got really hard because, being in the country, there wasn’t really any support then.
“It was really hard because she was alone. She was alone.”
Premature deaths the norm
Guardian Australia has spent 12 months investigating the deaths of Australians experiencing homelessness. Across the more than 600 cases it could identify, premature deaths were the norm. The average age of death was 44, more than three decades below the median age for the general population.
Deaths of despair – suicides and overdoses – were major drivers and researchers say they cannot be untangled from the trauma, despondency and loss of hope associated with homelessness.
George was just 26 when he died. Barbara vividly remembers his last moments.
She was lying outside a family member’s home in Pinjarra, a town south of Perth, on a mattress, pondering her family’s uncertain future. George – her good-hearted, youngest boy – walked past her.
Something in his face made her worry.
“He must have said, ‘I don’t want to live that way’,” she said. “He went down the river but I said, ‘Don’t go down the river.’ I said, ‘Come back.’”
“But that was the last we seen of him.”
Barbara found him that night, hanging from a tree on the banks of the Murray River.
It wasn’t the only homelessness-related death her family has endured. Last year, her great grandson died while experiencing homelessness.
Now, almost a decade on, history is repeating itself.
The WA government is trying to issue Barbara’s son John with a no-grounds termination notice, which would again cast the entire family into homelessness.
That prompted them to complain of racial discrimination to the Australian Human Rights Commission. The federal court has stayed their eviction until the AHRC complaint can be resolved.
“I just want to see if there’s any chance of anyone to help us, to find a place that we can call home,” Barbara says.
A longtime housing advocate and campaigner with Stop Evicting Families, Jesse Noakes, who worked with Barbara and Benita, says no-grounds evictions are causing immense damage.
“The consequences of ongoing ‘no reason’ public housing evictions are acute, chronic and too often fatal,” he says. “For children, it’s a pipeline out of education and into juvenile detention, child removal, health and mental health problems, incarceration and even death.”
Public housing shortage
Clarice Quartermaine, a Noongar woman and family violence survivor, was made homeless in Perth in early 2022, when she was evicted from her brother’s public housing unit after he died.
In a failed bid to stave off eviction, her supporters at the Daydawn Advocacy Centre wrote to the WA government.
“If Clarice is evicted from this property she will have nowhere else to go and will return to homelessness on the streets, where she will be especially vulnerable as Covid spreads rapidly through the WA community,” wrote Betsy Buchanan, a well-known housing advocate.
“It is untenable to leave Clarice homeless just as the Covid pandemic finally begins to sweep through the WA community.”
The plea fell on deaf ears. Clarice was not given her brother’s unit and was rendered homeless.
It wasn’t the first time it had happened.
The year before Clarice was made homeless after the WA government enforced a no-grounds termination on her, despite warnings from Daydawn that her history of family violence and mental health problems made her particularly vulnerable.
Clarice, who has arthritis and carbon rods in her legs and one arm, is now back on the priority list for public housing. She has been told the wait will be eight years.
“It’s depressing,” she says. “It just gets to the point where I say to my counsellor or someone, I understand how people die, or want to die.
“It gets so depressing to the point where I just want to end my life sometimes.”
Constantly moving her possessions puts extra strain on Clarice’s physical health, which she says has deteriorated significantly.
“It’s draining, it’s tiring, it’s emotional,” she says. “Mentally it’s exhausting. It takes a lot out of you.
“A lot of people, health-wise, they can’t really handle being on the streets. They’ve got to find the old schools, the old people who have been on the streets, to tell them how to survive.”
The WA Department of Communities said evictions were a measure of last resort and only occurred after extensive contact and attempts to link tenants up with support services.
A spokesperson said termination proceedings were only started if “tenants repeatedly or egregiously fail to utilise all the opportunities provided to them to resolve tenancy concerns”. They were often necessary to ensure the safety of the community and neighbours, the department said, and were ultimately orders made by a magistrate.
The department also released information about Clarice, Sherilee and the Abraham family’s tenancies and related complaints.
A spokesperson said the department had “done everything it can to assist the Abrahams in remedying issues to sustain their housing tenancies, including extensive access to support services”.
The department said the Abrahams tenancies were subject to poor property standards, property damage and substantiated complaints of disruptive and antisocial behaviour.
It also released further information about a series of complaints arising from properties where the Abraham family has lived. That prompted criticism from the Abraham family’s lawyer Kate Davis, from SCALES Community Legal Centre, who disputed the veracity of the information and described its release as “appalling”.
“At least one allegation has never been put to the Abrahams, is not included in any of the complaints disclosed to us, and when I spoke with Elder Abraham about it he instructed that he hadn’t heard of anything like that happening and did not know what they could be referring to,” Davis said.
The department said Sherilee had been on fixed-term agreements throughout her tenancies and said the magistrates court had granted a non-renewal of her fixed-term tenancy in 2015.
A spokesperson said Clarice’s tenancy had prompted almost 50 substantiated disruptive behaviour complaints between 2010 and 2021, prompting it to ask a court for termination.
Noakes, who has been a long-term representative for Clarice, including in a court battle to stop her eviction, said she had been made aware of three complaints, which she says were not directly caused by her conduct.
Despite the department pointing to complaints since 2010, Noakes said she had only been in the property from which she was evicted since 2020.
“After Clarice responded to each of these three complaints, the Department withdrew a ‘for cause’ eviction application and replaced it with a ‘no reason’ eviction at the end of the fixed term tenancy,” he said.
He also criticised the department’s suggestion that a magistrate was ultimately in control of evictions and said it was false to suggest the evictions were only being pursued after tenants were given opportunities to rectify breaches.
“In the case of a fixed term tenancy, the magistrate is required by legislation to order the eviction provided the requisite notice has been issued – without any evidence or witnesses or defence available to the tenant,” he said.
“The government is therefore wrong to claim ‘that the decision to terminate a tenancy agreement ultimately sits with the Magistrate, who will only make an order for vacant possession if satisfied that there has been a breach of the tenancy agreement, and that the tenant has been given every opportunity to rectify the breach and has failed to do so’.
“This is not true and they should stop lying.”
Buchanan has worked with Clarice, the Abrahams and Benita and criticised the department for releasing information about their tenancy history, particularly without the context that the families were themselves victims of serious crime.
Nothing can justify the deaths or the decision to evict vulnerable residents into homelessness, she says.
“Both [Benita] and the Abrahams had the tragedy where their beloved family members took their own lives, in front of their HomesWest properties because of evictions,” she says. “I don’t think anything can justify that.”
• In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
