On a gloomy grey Friday morning most people are rushing to walk along city pavements and perhaps not even noticing, except to step around, a man lying motionless on the cold wet footpath.
The man was lying outside Sydney’s Wynyard station on York Street. But just nearby, people were waking up in luxurious hotel rooms to enjoy a steaming hot shower.
For rough sleeper Robert, his life on the streets means he instead must jump into freezing Sydney Harbour from the Pyrmont foreshore for his occasional bath.
The sight of people living on the streets has become a normal part of the urban landscapes in a country that once prided itself on being egalitarian and avoiding the extremes of closely co-existing wealth and poverty seen in less ‘fortunate’ places.
However, now commuters exiting Wynyard station can see one glass wall lined with the stashed gear of people living on the street like an open air locker.
Daily Mail Australia approached Robert at the spot where the man was lying as he sat on a stone bench hooded head slumped as people streamed past him seemingly oblivious.
Robert who had all life’s possessions next to him in a supermarket trolley revealed his sleeping bag had been recently stolen.
‘Everywhere I go they just take my s*** and I have got no money,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to wait all week or a couple of months until I get some money (to get a new one)’.
A man settles in on the street near Wynyard station in central Sydney on a wet Friday morning
Later in the day Robert could be found in the spot where the sleeping man was on a bench with his belongings in a shopping cart
‘That’s bulls***.’
While Robert receives a Centrelink payment, which he thought was a disability pension, but it ‘runs out’ over the space of a fortnight.
‘I hand out my money to the first person who asks for it,’ he said.
However, it does afford him the occasional night indoors.
‘I put myself in a motel sometimes, it’s about 80 or 90 bucks and then I have no money for a week,’ he said.
Robert said he eats ‘whatever he can get’ but sometimes that means just one meal a week.
‘I love Burger King, Hungry Jack’s or McDonald’s meat pies,’ he said.
He sometimes goes to a charity service in the city for help when ‘he’s got no money’ but doesn’t mostly doesn’t ask for help.
‘I don’t beg,’ he adamantly declared.
He said that ‘sometimes’ gets offered money by passers by.
‘I was standing over there and some gentleman comes up and gives me a $50 note. Twenty minutes later, someone gave me $20 when I had no money,’ he said.
Robert said he was forced onto the street when he lost his job at a glass maker.
‘I was a specialist in the glass trade,’ he said. ‘I was on $108 a week I worked out a couple of years ago but I cut my finger.
‘I got 38 stitches and I didn’t get my insurance money.’
Robert said when his life started on a downwards spiral, everyone who knew him abandoned him.
Robert said he had been living on the street for eight years after an injury lost him a job at a glass makers
Robert said that during some weeks he might only have the one meal but he refused to beg
‘I trusted a lot of people and they ended up stabbing me,’ he said. ‘They can’t hurt me regardless but are having a go at me for some reason.’
Despite his precarious lifestyle, Robert said his health has ‘never been better’ and credited training he had done in martial arts and breakdancing.
‘I am very fit,’ he said.
Robert said he did not talk to other people living on the street.
‘I want to be alone,’ he said.
Sometimes the police bothered him but he ‘was ‘not sure why’.
In May it was reported that annual street count for NSW revealed a 25 per cent spike in the tally of people sleeping rough statewide.
Officials found 2,037 sleeping on the streets during the February, up from 1,623 a year earlier.
Some of the largest increases were in coastal areas, including a near-80 per cent rise in rough-sleepers in the Coffs Harbour council region.
Byron Shire, a popular tourist region in the state’s north, had the most people sleeping rough of any local government area in the state.
It and other ocean-side regions, such as Sydney’s northern beaches, have become home to large camps of homeless people sleeping in tents amid a dire shortage of affordable accommodation.
A wall of Sydney’s Wynyard station has become a type of open air locker for homeless people to stash their gear
Robert claimed an injury to his hand cost him his job and received no insurance payout for it
Homelessness Minister Rose Jackson said the regional figures were unprecedented but not unexpected.
‘We don’t just need data to tell us this – our regional communities are feeling this every day,’ she said on Friday.
‘The sobering street count figures again paint a harrowing picture of homelessness and street sleeping across our state.’
Ms Jackson said the government was looking at every option to tackle the housing crisis, including through a review of short-term accommodation rules.
Tighter restrictions have already been introduced in Byron Shire, where a 60-day annual cap on non-hosted short-term rentals applies.
***
Read more at DailyMail.co.uk