Homeless

In Australia, we live in a society where we are supposed to be able to get work to support ourselves, form relationships within which we will be physically safe and to form families with which we can live safely in a home.

We tell ourselves that we are in a society with “safety nets” to protect us if bad times threaten to take this away from us. Seeing homeless people in Australia tells us that it is not working and that one day it might be us.

I feel both compassion and empathy for the more than 100,000 homeless people in Australia and my drawing was done to remind everyone that we need to work together to improve our society to help the homeless, to avoid there being more homeless and to remember that bad fortune can happen to anyone so it is all of us who need a social “safety net”.

Reference for this charcoal drawing was my own original photograph, taken when living in Newcastle, NSW, but sadly it is a familiar figure everywhere.