Nomadland, Australia

The housing crisis is tipping more Australian women towards homelessness, and in northern NSW the situation is critical. Five local women share their stories, hoping that their courage and honesty will inspire change.

- SUSAN CHENERY

If you know where to look, you will see them. In cars, vans, campervans. Trying not to be noticed in dead-end streets, on headlands, around parks. Trying to sleep in tents, in sand dunes, in bush camps. Women who have been tipped into homelessness. Traumatized, exhausted, disoriented. Always on high alert because they are not safe. Looking for a place to sleep, to shower, to charge a phone, to wash clothes, to eat, to get through the long nights. All their energy is taken up by basic survival. Constantly moving because they could be moved on and fined.

They are no longer the welfare cases, the addicts, the unemployed, the mentally ill. They are often educated, middle-class, working women – mothers, grandmothers, aunts – forced into desperate circumstances by the lack of affordable housing or any housing at all. They are the recipients of decades of systemic failure and an economy facilitated by low interest rates where housing has become an investment, a commodity. There are mothers who go to work every day, not telling anyone that they and their children are sleeping in the car, because if they do, their children could be removed by social services or lost in custody battles. Mothers pretending that camping is fun.