Newly released and nowhere to go!

This weekend I spent some time house-hunting with a couple of guys who are newly released from detention. It's quite a sombre experience, actually, because it's just like house-hunting with anybody, but with the restrictions of money, communication, transport, and unawareness of other factors multiplied by ten. The equal first considerations are price, and proximity to a train station. Of course, they have no tenancy referees, so they have references and letters of support and guarantee from organisations like Melbourne City Mission. They have almost no choice but to accept charity and favours from their friends. They were looked at funny by receptionists in Real Estate agencies. I sort of felt like i was there so that my friends would be taken seriously and given the opportunity to look at houses. They were apologetic about asking me to drive them to houses in the pouring rain, and thanked me for my time over and over again. It must be very unempowering for them, but I'm not even sure if they feel it. I really hope they don't. They seem to approach the whole thing with an earnestness and honest attempt to make a go of it, and start their lives from today, leaving all their crap behind.

One of the guys I've hung out with a few times recently lives in housing commission flats near where I live. In my socio-economic milieu, housing commission flats are an horrific, mythological, fictitious notion - one with which we never have to engage or interact. So i find it annoying that 5 minutes down the road are hundreds and hundres of people living in tiny little fire-trap boxes stacked on top of one another. When I was little i used to comment to my mum as we drove past that the windows looked like microwaves. Apparently the suicide rate in housing commissions is astronomical, and I don't know how that statistic (and education / employment statistics??) stack up against the fact that the vast majority of inhabitants are non-white, but it can't be good.. Perhaps there is some degree of racial inequality so rusted on to our collective national psyche that we don't even notice it anymore. If you're an immigrant, stiff bickies, good luck getting your life off the ground now! Ha! You can start by living in a microwave-shaped flat somewhere in an otherwise affluent suburb like North Fitzroy or Richmond (bordering on Hawthorn...). Just don't look around you too much or you might start to notice what you're missing out on...

Please excuse me - I don't mean to sound bitter.

(artwork above courtesy of Kate Durham)