Here’s one for you. Evicting homeless people from their harmless nightly resting spots.
On my walks into work from Potts Point a year or two ago, I used to swing up through the courtyard behind the State Library when it was summer and the lawn was fenced off for festival central. The quiet murmurings and stretches from homeless people waking up in the shrubs in the courtyard seemed like a harmless place to sleep at night and appeared to be well sheltered from the elements.
Today, I wandered past and saw metal bars bolted deliberately in the shrubbery to deter sleepers. Ugly metal triangles have taken residence in some nooks and crannies where humans once slept.
I was trying to think of how the homeless residents would have coped the first night they saw these bars.
Hopelessly they have no rights, no one to hear their concerns and as the twilight twinkled, they probably had a rush to find another spot for the night . What a feeling to experience.
Perhaps it was a dangerous place to sleep. Ticks lurking in bushes attacking sleepers, or waking up with bark and leaf marks on their faces instead of pillow case streaks.
Could it have been an eyesore for the little café up the stairs? I mean, really? My favourite homeless man, Adam, shakes my hand and says hello to me in my café in Martin Place and I enjoy seeing him.
Aren’t our homeless peers part of the fabric of our society? As stitches and threads in this fabric, we are bound to care for our peers. So how can we over-lock them out of their beds?
I feel frustrated and I dislike the injustice. I’m going to write to council and see why they made our homeless – homeless.
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