Under the Bridge – the Home of the Homeless

By Tony Birch
‘White people own the earth and commit all manner of abomination and injustice on it’ – James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Sun

He arrived with a single blanket and a scuffed and dirty backpack. It carried his few possessions. It was also where he rested his head when he slept. It was Summer when he arrived. The nights were warm, so the single blanket was enough I guess. But then I couldn’t really know, as I have never had to sleep rough, even for just one night.

He has been returning to the same spot each night for months now, and it is getting colder, much colder. If he had just that one original blanket, he would now be freezing at night. But he is not, because he now has a padded mattress, a doona, spare blankets, clothes, pairs of shoes, food, and plastic bags full of additional offerings.

The goods are left by passers-by; locals, runners, bike riders, dog walkers and kids. When I pass by on my bike I wave and he waves back. Last week I stopped and asked him, ‘Are you right, mate? Is there anything more that you want?’
He looked along the line of plastic bags and several pair of running shoes and laughed. ‘No brother. I don’t need nothing, mate. I got more than enough.’

And materially he has too, having become the benefactor of an excess of our excess.

I have no doubt that those who have left the goods for him have done so out of care and concern for his welfare. And I am confident that he would appreciate the gesture — in an immediate and tangible way. The blankets keep him warm. The food ensures that he does not go hungry.

And maybe the passing conversations keep him connected, in some way, to a society that he is also marginal to. Maybe.
He is just one man sleeping under a bridge. He is also one of the 20 000 homeless people who sleep out every night in Melbourne, along with the many thousands of others who bed down in appalling living conditions for which they pay a relatively appalling amount of money just for the ‘privilege’ of a roof over their heads.

I cannot think about this man without considering the attacks by government, an array of ‘leaders’, both black and white, and the media, on Aboriginal people across the country during the last year or so. While poverty and government neglect have been occasionally admitted to, a dominant discourse remains — ‘Aboriginal people must pull themselves out of poverty by their own bootstraps’. If only some Aboriginal kids could afford a pair of shoes.

But perhaps worse than this is the constant, and now dominant, refrain that the disadvantage suffered by Aboriginal people is as a result of an essentially internal dysfunction. We suffer this because we cause this. We suffer this because we are by nature a brutal people who choose to brutalise our children, who choose to neglect the fragile and marginalised amongst us.
While poverty and government neglect have been occasionally admitted to, a dominant discourse remains — ‘Aboriginal people must pull themselves out of poverty by their own bootstraps’

We, as Aboriginal people, suffer this because we do not care enough about each other.

What should we think and say then about the man who sleeps under the bridge? Or the 20 000 others who we ride by, walk past, and ‘give generously’ to in a city that enjoys great wealth while also creating extreme poverty? More importantly, what should we think about a society of excess, such as ours, that not only allows such outcomes, but also points a moralistic finger at communities deliberately neglected in order to bring about dispossession?

These are not new questions, of course. They are perhaps simplistic, or even naïve. But when the dominant and powerful sector of society hectors Aboriginal people that we are the cause of our own problems, and that we are cruel and neglectful of each other, we would be seriously neglectful if we did not ask the emperor – and the crowd – to at least take a look in the mirror.