“I used to sleep on a bench in Camperdown Park. I did it for about seven months.
“I was doing casual warehouse work and rented a unit on Egan Street. Then I didn’t get enough work and gradually got behind in my rent. Basically I ended up not having enough money, went from there to backpackers. Then when the money had totally run out I thought ‘stuff it I can sleep in a park’.
“It’s a bad idea when you start sleeping in a park. You just go downhill bad because you’ve got to spend all your time finding somewhere to leave your stuff, to get some sleep. You probably don’t get a good sleep because you’ve always got to keep an ear open for any trouble. So then you’re wrecked the next day. It’s just a whole bad circle.
“In the day, I would go to bookshops and read books to keep me sane. I thought I was invisible because I didn’t mix with anybody. I’d just pack up early, around six o’clock in the morning, hide my stuff behind a fence and go to libraries and bookshops.
“But people do see you, even though you think they don’t. Some guy used to come along when I was sleeping, I’ve never seen his face, and he would come along in the middle of the night and leave me 20 bucks every now and then.
“One night a couple of idiots came along in the middle of the night and kicked the hell out of me as I was sleeping. They broke my collarbone so I had to stop sleeping in a park. I borrowed $400 off a guy in a coffee shop I knew and got a room in a boarding house.
“A guy at the Newtown Neighbourhood Centre told me about the Big Issue, which I didn’t know anything about. He called them up and that’s how I got started.”
