PLAZA Palms was once part of the Cairns Colonial Club Resort. Its 71 units, with steep pitched roofs, are clustered on a large 10,000 square metre property, complete with a resort-style pool, only a few kilometres from the Cairns CBD. By 2010, it had fallen into disrepair and disrepute; it became a backpackers’ hostel, then accommodation of last resort.

“I’ve got numerous stories about people who came to this property and never escaped it – never escaped the system,” says Janet Guthrie, its new proprietor.

When Plaza Palms came on the market, Guthrie and her friend Stuart Wright saw opportunity. Both had worked for more than two decades in Aboriginal health and welfare, for government and for non-profits. They’d had enough. They wanted to risk something different.

“What I see is a very tired and lethargic homelessness sector here in this region. In Cairns, the rate of homelessness has increased,” Guthrie says. “I’m like: ‘Sorry, government, your plan is not working’.”

So, in 2011, Plaza Palms became Three Sistas, a for-profit business dedicated to providing affordable crisis and temporary accommodation. Over 270 people, including 44 kids, now live on site. Almost all of them are Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islanders. Many, Guthrie says, are people “regurgitated through the system”, or mob from Cape York, who’ve come down for hospital appointments “and get trapped here for a number of reasons”.

There’s a café, a convenience store, a coin-operated laundry and a heavy emphasis on individual responsibility. A bus service takes kids to school – but it’s a service for which the parents must pay. Tenants are on six-month leases; as part of the deal no alcohol or drugs are allowed on site and visitors mustn’t stay past 10 pm. Three Sistas employs seven people, each of whom had been long-term unemployed.

This year, construction will begin on 20 new units to serve as patient travel accommodation – for that, Three Sistas has partnered with Indigenous health organisations in the Far North.

“We don’t receive any government funding,” Guthrie explains. “We don’t want any, simply because we see what happens to organisations that do. We never want to become complacent. We know we have to work hard everyday to produce income to keep our model alive.”

Three Sistas is a social enterprise.

It’s one of a growing movement. At a time when corporate capitalism roars as the engine of catastrophic inequality and environmental degradation, social enterprise has moved beyond buzzword to great hope. Here’s an answer for our throbbing mess: business for good.

“Social entrepreneurs are not content just to give a fish or teach how to fish,” said Bill Drayton, social entrepreneur, academic and founder of the Ashoka Foundation. “They will not rest until they have revolutionised the fishing industry.”

Drayton, an American, did more than anyone to popularise the concept throughout the 1980s and ’90s, and his is one of the most cited quotes about social enterprise. But his choice of analogy prompts reflection, for aren’t the oceans already overfished? And in whose interests would a revolution be – the industry or the people? Can it be both?

*

Jo Barraket had been an environmental activist until, in the early 1990s, cooperatives caught her interest – self-funded, they seemed better able to pursue their own ends than the grant-driven organisations she’d worked with. Later, Barraket switched to academia and wrote her PhD on the social and political dimensions of the cooperative movement. She describes coops as “the original form of social enterprise: they’re member-owned businesses that exist to meet some unmet need”.

So began Barraket’s “research fascination” with all kinds of social enterprise. She emphasises, however, that she’s not a wide-eyed advocate. “Just like any other citizen, I think some forms of social enterprise are fantastic, and some are frankly not my cup of tea. I do think that needs to be acknowledged.”

She waited ten years for the sector to collect some information about itself; until, impatient with waiting, she did it herself. The research, conducted in 2010 with Social Traders, suggested there were about 20,000 social enterprises in Australia, working in every industry of the economy.

Professor Barraket, now director of Swinburne University’s Centre for Social Impact, is updating that study. While it’s too early to interpret the data, she will venture that “social enterprise is alive and well”.

But – ahem – what exactly is a social enterprise?

 It’s a matter of debate. British social enterprise expert David Floyd cites folklore that Londoners are never more than six feet away from a rat. Likewise, he says, at a social enterprise conference you’re never more than six minutes away from “the social enterprise definition debate”.

Prompted by her Australian research, Professor Barraket adopted a big tent approach: social enterprises are organisations that exist to serve a public benefit, trade to do so, and plough a substantial part of their profit or surplus into fulfilling their mission. That might include charity op shops, community-owned wind farms, or cafes waited by refugees; fair trade chocolatiers, healthcare cooperatives, or recycling businesses staffed by people with disabilities.

She notes that her interpretation is broad enough to include Sanitarium, the large food company wholly owned by the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

“Just being a social enterprise does not indicate that it’s more socially progressive than the thing next door,” Barraket says. “One person’s social purpose might be seen by another as quite regressive, depending on what their values are.”

The Big Issue – which is one of Australia’s best known social enterprises – employs a stricter definition: social enterprises should be not-for-profit and create work for marginalised people.

“There can only be one first principle – either shareholder return, or social benefit,” explains The Big Issue’s CEO Stephen Persson. “We all know businesses that will jettison environmental, social, or employment outcomes to ensure they deliver the profits that are expected.

“Our first obligation is not to make more and more profit, but to deliver a social return – and not go broke in the process,” Persson says.

The Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship, based at Oxford University, takes another line. It holds a torch for the entrepreneurs, not the enterprise. Its director, Dr Pamela Hartigan, is adamant that the two are different. A social entrepreneur pursues transformational change. A social enterprise may or may not; it could just chase money to support a charity’s existing programs.

Recently, Floyd, the British social enterprise blogger, has written that the definition debate has migrated upstream, to the academics and investors. Practitioners are too busy trying to keep their businesses afloat. But by anyone’s definition, more people are trying – and talking about – social enterprise.

Professor Barraket links its popularity to the rise of ethical consumption and the desire, especially among younger people, for workplaces where you don’t have to check your values at the office door. Social enterprises have also been “manufactured” by governments, she says, as they shift to market models of governing: outsourcing and devolving services to private providers. Traditional charities, too, are seeking new ways to secure their funding.

“We’re experiencing a contraction of resources relative to social demands in most societies in a complex world,” Barraket says. “That environment lends itself towards new thinking about social interventions and about business models.”

In this territory the role of social enterprise becomes fraught, liable to accusations of complicity in creating the disadvantage it seeks to address. In the UK, Conservative prime minister David Cameron has championed social enterprise as part of his vision for “Big Society”; it’s a key plank in his plan to slash budgets. Local governments’ discretionary spending will fall by two-thirds by 2020, leaving civil society to pick up the slack.

Persson foresees a similar situation in Australia: our aging population means fewer tax dollars will support growing social need. “The government should and will, I hope, always provide these services in part, but the economics will be really challenging. Unless we come up with different methodologies to deliver services sustainably, we’re leaving those people on the margins in a desperate situation,” he says.

As well as supporting street vendors to sell magazines, The Big Issue runs women’s subscription and school talks programs. One of its latest initiatives is The Big Idea, a competition in which university students spend a semester developing a business plan for a social enterprise. This year’s winners, from Central Queensland University, were Angus Hughes, Jessica Kahl and Mattison Rose, engineering students who devised The Shelter Project, flat-pack emergency housing made from pallets.

It’s one of several such incubators, including programs run by the School for Social Entrepreneurs, Impact Academy and Social Traders – where every month, about two-dozen people attend introductory workshops. “The first message we communicate,” explains Mark Daniels, its head of market development, “is that if you’re not prepared to run a small business, which involves worrying about wages and taking a risk, then social enterprise probably isn’t for you.

“People fall in love with the social side, but our key advice would be you’ve got to be really good at business to run one of these.”

His organisation founded the Social Enterprise Awards in 2013, and that year, the prize for “Youth-led Social Enterprise of the Year” went to Thankyou Water, a bottled-water business that devotes its profits to water aid projects. It has expanded into muesli, soaps and hand creams.

For Daniels, Thankyou is the perfect example of scalable commerce. “Now they’re in Coles and Woolworths they’re reinvesting millions every year, because they built a really strong business proposition,” he says.

Bottled-water is popular, but it’s a dubious product, banned in one Australian town, as well as a few schools and campuses. Its production and distribution wastes water and energy; its consequences are more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and more plastic in the oceans. Consumer advocate Choice estimates that it is almost 2000 times more expensive than tap water.

The business has reverberations, but measuring them makes for a difficult and contested calculus. While it is a brave observer who casts judgement, there is certainly cause for contemplation, not only celebration.

Throughout 2013, the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council coordinated a seminar series called Reconstructing Social Enterprise, presented by experts with “a critical yet sympathetic perspective”.

In the first seminar, Pascal Dey and Chris Steyaert, from the University of St Gallen in Switzerland, called on academics to ditch their “rose-tinted view” and instead, to provoke and intervene: to engage in “myth-busting” about the connection of “social enterprise to system-wide social change or to the sweeping eradication of the intricate problems of our era”; to interrogate failures; to question how social enterprise is used by people in power; to analyse how it contributes to the common good – are market solutions the best way to solve the ills of a market society?

Alan Greig has spent decades investigating and championing all kinds of ways to do business for good. Among other roles, he’s a director of Social Business Australia. With long experience, he’s both enthusiast and cynic.

Social enterprise can be part of the mainstream economy, he says. “It’s not your everyday business of empowering and enriching the individuals who set it up. It’s about empowering and enriching communities.”

As an advocate for cooperatives, and employee- and community-ownership, however, Greig is sceptical of the notion of an entrepreneur as a lone social hero – as in Bill Drayton’s quote about fishing and revolutions. “It attracts a certain kind of determined individual wanting to change the world by ‘doing good’,” he says. “But I’d like to see more emphasis on group enterprises where the focus is more economic – on tackling inequality by using business ownership to share wealth more broadly, for instance.”

Greig is also a member of a working group charged with investigating legal models for social enterprises here and overseas.

In the United States, registered “benefit corporations” have a special legal status recognising that there’s more to their business than the bottom line. There’s a similar model in the UK, called “community interest companies”. Both enshrine the businesses’ social and environmental purposes and guard against mission-creep. In the UK, they can sell shares, but the company can’t be wound up or merged for the personal gain of the shareholders.

“There are massive reforms happening in all the Anglo countries,” Greig says. “Australia is just very backward with these things.”

*

In October, Three Sistas became a certified ‘B Corp’, a voluntary, international standard for good business practice. There’s no special legal status attached and not all B Corps would be considered social enterprises, but for a fee, you can be assessed for social and environmental performance. Three Sistas’ score placed it the highest in Australia and among the best in the world.

And yet, it has not been received benignly: Guthrie says they’ve been criticised by other service providers, accused of profiteering from poor people. She sought B Corp status to help demonstrate their accountability to their community.

Their enterprise is still young, but Guthrie is ready to offer a verdict: “It works”. From their experiences, she and Wright spied a business opportunity to answer a social question: a way to make a living and a difference.

She believes there’s no contradiction, in their case. In fact, the nature of social enterprise will help it succeed: while government contracts and handouts breed complacency elsewhere, she says, Three Sistas’ tenants are free will vote with their feet. She has to do a good job.

“We’ve got skin in the game. Everything I own is tied up in this business. If this fails for me, there goes my children’s future,” Guthrie says. “It’s a case that it won’t fail, because I can’t allow it to.”

An edited version of this article was published in The Big Issue, No. 476.

It was a privilege to be let into their lives. Afterwards I tried to stay in touch, but Albert changed his number before long; I don’t know what he’s doing now. Dee and I, though, are still in contact. After the article was published, something extraordinary happened that involved us both, and a man named Rob, from Sydney, who happened to buy a copy of that edition.

***

Dee had just turned 40 when I met her. It was two decades since she’d moved here from New Zealand. Lately, she’d had a run of bad luck: a serious workplace injury and an associated legal dispute, then cervical cancer, and then her long-term rental house was put up for sale.

She had moved to a flimsy unit, far away from her neighbourhood, but even so, was paying higher rent. One of her daughters moved out. Dee fell further and further behind; the eviction notice was only days away.

When I visited, she introduced me to Brandi, her big handsome dog. “She’s depressed – it’s too small here,” Dee said. “Her face wasn’t grey, but she’s gone grey like me.” She rubbed the dog between the ears. “We’ve turned old, haven’t we?”

Another time, when I left her house, she walked with me as far as her letterbox. In the article I wrote this:

“It was the first time I’d seen her outside her unit, unencumbered by the closeness of the walls and the darkness of her lounge. As I walked away she bent down to pick up her mail and called out, ‘Want to take my bills?’ She gave me a big throaty laugh. I laughed with her and for an instant everything seemed like it would turn out okay, until I remembered it probably wouldn’t.”

That’s what I thought. Albert had found a place in supportive housing – he’d had a tough life, but maybe things had turned around. For Dee, I just couldn’t imagine a way out.

A few days after the article was published, I opened an email from Rob, who found me through my website. He said he’d been “deeply affected” by Dee’s situation.

“I suppose I personally resonate with her story – I’m a Kiwi myself and have been in a similar situation previously. Nowadays life is good and I am successful and affluent in a middle of the road way,” he wrote.

“I do not wish to make things worse by promising things that cannot be fulfilled, but a simple monthly stipend to help cover bills and rent is, I suspect, well within my power. I made a personal promise sometime ago, after pulling myself out of the dark, that I would not fail to act when I have the opportunity and ability to do so.”

I called him to talk about it. Then I called Dee. She was astonished, but wary. She said she’d talk to him.

A couple of weeks later, Rob was in Melbourne on business. I met him and we drove to Dee’s house, near Frankston.

He was about 40, I guessed – Dee’s age – and wore a baseball cap and a blue-collar shirt. He was a straight-talker: before we’d travelled a suburb, he was telling me how he’d nearly become homeless during the financial crisis. He had accumulated debt in the hundreds of thousands, and suddenly, he had no income. For a few months, he covered rent by selling his possessions. He contemplated living in his car, but narrowly avoided it. Slowly, he righted the business. The debt was under control by then, but he was still a renter – not a one-percenter.

His phone rang as we approached Dee’s street, and before we had time to gather our thoughts, she was answering the door.

I sat next to Dee on her L-shaped couch, chitchatting to ease their nerves. After a while, we all stood to make cups of tea, and then Rob sat next to her instead. Dee handed him a stack of bills and paperwork; he made notes as they calculated what she earned and what she owed. He offered to pay her next month’s rent, plus some outstanding bills, and put money in her account every month to top up what Centrelink didn’t cover. For as long as it took.

“Sometimes you just need to know that somebody will be there for you, that you can rely on someone,” Rob said, turning towards Dee, and looking her squarely in the face. “All I ask of you – and I know you’ll do this – is to genuinely look for work. I understand that things take time. It may not happen, and that is okay. I will be here. I’m not going anywhere.”

They hugged. We all cried. “I’ve been around the block,” Rob said. “There’s nothing you can tell me that I’ll be shocked by, and nothing I’ll judge you for.”

When Rob dropped me off, back in the city, I called Dee. She was relieved, giddy. She said she felt as though she had known Rob a long time, as though he was fatherly towards her. In the car, he’d told me he felt like he knew her too. It turned out they’d grown up not far from one another and on the same side of the tracks.

In her flimsy, darkened lounge that day, I got shivers all over. And I still do, every time I think about it.

***

It hasn’t been easy, since then. Every few months Dee and I exchange a text message or an email. She writes like she talks: fast, without fuss or restraint. I got an urgent email one day asking me to contact Rob, because she hadn’t heard from him.

“…im pissed. and hurt i opened up and shared my life with him and he dumps me like a piece of crap with no explanation. hope youre well and happy new year. dx”

In May, she sent me this:

“…now impossible to survive without robs help. thank god hes been my saviour and weve been talking a bit so thats awesome. My plan is to get a JOB!!! But shit michael ive just had ultrasounds of my elbows and been diagnosed with golfers elbow, lol funny name aye… my arms swell and ache for days sometimes…”

About a year after they first met, Rob wrote me this:

“Dee and I patched things up. I sent her a long email and laid things out honestly, and she understood that what felt like me ignoring her was actually just me struggling to keep faith with all my commitments… ”

***

I called them both this week. Rob was on the Gold Coast, on business again. Business is good, but it means he works very long hours – the work of about three people, he guesses. And that means he doesn’t call Dee as often as he’d like. “I feel a bit guilty that I haven’t helped her in other ways that aren’t financial. But I’ve come to realise I really don’t have the time,” he said.

This kind of arrangement, he said, is “probably not for everybody, but there probably should be more of it. There are a great deal of us who have the wherewithal to do it, but we don’t, because it’s too hard, or someone told us once that everyone should fend for themselves. So we just let other human beings go to the wolves.”

He said “probably”, because he knows that helping is not simple. But there was one idea he wanted me to write down:

“If someone is in trouble and they are going to be helped, they need to be helped for a long fucking time. People don’t just get well and all of a sudden it’s peachy. That’s Hollywood. That’s storybook. That’s not how it works in the dirty messy world.”

The day I spoke to Dee, one of her daughters had just returned from New Zealand. They will live together this year, and that’ll help with the bills. When she gets over her golfer’s elbow, she wants to work again. But lately, her depression has been worse than ever, and Brandi, too, has gone grey all over.

Dee and I reminisced about that afternoon when the three of us sat in her lounge. “It still makes the hairs stand up on the back of my neck,” she said. “And every single day I know I can pay rent because of Rob. He is making my life bearable. I wish I could yell it out to the world.”

Illustration by Michel Streich

Read this article on the Wheeler Centre dailies

Read the original article on The Big Issue website or here.

In 2008 the federal government set a target: halve homelessness by 2020 and offer supported accommodation to all rough sleepers who need it. More than three years on, what has changed? Who has benefited? Who is still slipping through the cracks? Michael Green finds some very human perspectives amid the complex housing landscape.

THE first time I meet Albert, all I notice is his hair. I see him from behind, when his social worker points him out on a computer, playing poker on Facebook in the common room of his new supportive housing. He has the kind of hair you notice: long and black, shimmering and incongruous.

I’d been apprehensive about meeting him: unsure about how openly he’d talk with me, and wary about commandeering his story for mine. But Albert puts me at ease in a moment.

“A lot of people say I’m American Indian,” he tells me, and breaks into a modest, raspy laugh. “I’ve even had other Aboriginal people ask me if I am.” (Later, under my questioning, he reveals his only hair-care secret is Head and Shoulders shampoo.)

While we talk, a young man sitting two computers away starts coughing uncontrollably. Unnerved, I glance towards him; Albert sees this, reassures me, and then gently checks on the kid.

Albert has warm eyes and manners, but his nose is off-kilter and his chin angles the other way. The middle and index fingers on his left hand are stained where he holds his cigarettes.

At the end of 2009, Albert completed an Associate Diploma in Aboriginal Studies in Music at the University of Adelaide, and hoped to move back to Melbourne. “It’s got more life, you know. More going on,” he explains. “But last year was pretty bad.”

Until a few weeks ago, he was in alcohol rehab; three months ago, a rooming house; and six months ago, a friend’s couch. One year ago, he was sleeping rough. Tomorrow, however, is payday. First thing in the morning, he says, he’ll get one of his guitars back from the pawnshop.

Soon after meeting Albert, I’m in Melbourne, but not in the lively parts where he wants to be; I’m on the train towards Frankston, about to visit Dee. On my way I flick through the newspaper and see the rich list – since last year, mining heiress Gina Rinehart’s wealth has doubled, to $10.3 billion. Today’s an okay day for Dee, too. She and her daughter are booked in to give blood. The Red Cross bus is parked at the local RSL, only a few minutes’ walk from their unit, which means they can do a good deed without having to buy petrol or a train ticket. Since Dee got injured at work four years ago, she’s been sick or unemployed. Since February, her rent has trumped her income.

Dee introduces me to Brandy, her big handsome dog – a Japanese Akita, a breed known for loyalty. “Related to the Huskies and the white Samoyeds,” Dee explains. “She’s depressed – it’s too small here. Her face wasn’t grey, but she’s gone grey like me.” Dee bends down and rubs the dog between the ears. “We’ve turned old, haven’t we?”

That’s the other activity on Dee’s list: her hair. The Commonwealth Rehabilitation Service has given her a packet of dye, L’Oréal Ultra Violet Red. The box is sitting on top of the fridge, but she thinks she’ll leave it for another day.

***

***

In early autumn, the editors of The Big Issue asked me to write about housing and homelessness. “See what you come up with,” they said, handing over two manila folders of clippings and reports.

I began reading them one afternoon, sitting in the park on the pretty street where I’ve lived for the past five years. It was pleasant outside and I chatted with a neighbour, one of several who’ve become my friends. Then I succumbed to the sun and napped there on the grass, awake to my good fortune.

In the next fortnight, I called charities and peak bodies, more and more of them, because each one recommended another. I boiled down their words into three facts:

More than 100,000 Australians are homeless on any given night. That includes some rough sleepers, but mostly it’s people forced to crash on couches and in spare rooms, or live in caravan parks and boarding houses; in beds without a secure lease or space of their own.

Most of these people experience homelessness only briefly. A crisis hits, in fast or slow motion – a car crash, redundancy, a broken relationship, domestic violence – and they’re out on their arse. But then, with help from agencies, welfare, friends or family, they find a stable home, even if the bills remain a stretch and life a stress.

About one in eight, however, reel from place to place, service to service; repelled and repelling, like magnets the wrong way round. If you think about homelessness, some of these people come to mind: rough sleepers huddling at train stations, old men trembling with booze, beggars withered by childhood traumas. They’re usually men with many problems, long-term problems, all at once.

After I found out these things, I found Albert and Dee. And then these facts evaporated altogether. Albert has been homeless most his life; Dee probably will be soon.

In 2008, at the height of global financial panic, just months after Wall Street collapsed, the federal government released a policy white paper called The Road Home. It announced two ambitious targets for 2020: to halve all homelessness, and to offer supported accommodation to all rough sleepers who need it. Two months later, the government scrounged billions more for social housing, as part of the recession-busting stimulus package.

Soon after I began my research, one charity worker described the new policy to me as “the best chance we’ve had”.

***

I stay in Adelaide for a rainy week, visiting Albert every day, spending the long walk to and from his place thinking about what he’s said about his life and what it would mean to re-tell it fairly. I shelter beneath an umbrella, considering how disadvantage has passed from one generation to the next in Albert’s family, the way prominent noses have in mine. I draw my coat tight and shudder, too, about the holding pattern I have entered.

For this week at least, Albert orbits in a universe comprised of three core elements: instant coffee, Winfield Red rollies and Facebook poker. He is 38 years old, and unfailingly polite. He offers me coffee when I arrive and fetches me a newspaper while he paces upstairs to make it.

Today is the second day I’ve visited. We’re sitting in the common room again, on new IKEA chairs. He’s wearing jeans and a black-and-orange jacket bearing the insignia of Adelaide’s biggest homeless drop-in service, the Hutt Street Centre.

When I arrived, Albert was out the front having a smoke with his friend, Alan, who has a small moustache and a furrowed brow. They had been on the computers playing Facebook poker. Alan’s been on a lucky streak this morning, his virtual fortune rising from $10,000 to $36,000.

Albert talks about his own, more tangible finances: “I’ve got some fines hanging over my head in Melbourne. It’s nothing serious, but they go back a fair while. And because it’s a few thousand dollars and the combination of this and that: whoosht – jail. I’m not really interested in going to jail.”

So, in 2006, Albert decided to try his luck in Adelaide. “I wasn’t getting anywhere looking for work in Melbourne,” he explains. When I ask what kind of work he’s done before, he replies: “Ah, how do I put it? I’ve been in the wilderness for most of my life.”

The year Albert moved to Adelaide, Rosanne Haggerty, an American housing expert, completed her stint as the city’s ‘thinker-in-residence’. Under the state government scheme, international experts live in Adelaide briefly, meet influential people and make policy recommendations. “The Thinker,” says the program’s website, “focuses on the problems of modern life”.

Haggerty’s experience with community housing goes back decades. In 1991, after several years securing donations, investments and grants, she bought the Times Square Hotel in Manhattan, a derelict 15-storey art deco building. She had it refurbished, and when it reopened, the old hotel provided housing for 652 people: the otherwise homeless, together with low-income earners and people living with HIV/AIDS. There were onsite counsellors and common areas – a library, a roof-deck garden, a computer lab, an art studio, a medical clinic, an exercise room and laundry facilities. The lobby had a marble staircase.

The organisation Haggerty founded, Common Ground Community, now manages 12 buildings with nearly 2500 units. Its philosophy is that chronic homelessness is solvable. Housing that comes with linked support services is more effective – and cheaper – than leaving people on the street and relying on police and emergency services to deal with them. Almost nine out of 10 residents stay put.

In South Australia, senior public servants recall Haggerty’s charisma. “She probably ruffled feathers,” one told me, “but she does it in a nice way, in a way that’s always about how to make people’s lives better. And no one can object to that.”

For many charity workers, however, Haggerty had a confronting message: handing out food and blankets is misguided. Emergency shelters sustain homelessness, rather than end it.

She proposed dramatic change. Until recently, most Australian housing services operated on a ‘treatment first’ or ‘housing readiness’ basis: get into treatment for your troubles, then we’ll offer you a place to live. Instead, Haggerty and others pushed for the reverse: ‘housing first’ tied with support services for as long as necessary.

Common Ground Adelaide was launched in 2006, mirroring the New York model. In April, the organisation opened its second premises – a red-brick, heritage building overlooking a park in the Adelaide CBD, retrofitted with 52 apartments. It once housed a printing press and, briefly, a nightclub. For the last month, it has housed Albert.

The building is bright and airy, equipped with its own part-time medical and dental clinic and a worker who coordinates regular activities for the residents, things like gardening and ten-pin bowling. The large common room, complete with kitchen, computers and couches, has a bright orange wall that perfectly matches Albert’s jacket. His onsite social worker explained to me about the pair’s regular meetings and the support plan they’re drawing up together.

But as I walked home that day, my footsteps wavered. I had Albert’s words in my head, with a scene from 10 years ago: the time when he accessed his human services file. Among other things that continue to upset him, he read that not long after he was born, his mother, a diabetic and bad alcoholic, left town without him. Her partner told people the baby had died. Someone made an anonymous call and Albert was taken away.

“I grew up on the welfare system, ward of the state and whatnot. Never had a proper family.” The longest time Albert had a stable home was between the ages of five and 10, in foster care.

“There was a time when I was a teenager and I thought ‘I’m on my own now’. But when I pulled that file out and read a lot of stuff, I thought, ‘Ah no, no, I’ve always been on my own, even before I was born.’”

Around the time he read his file, Albert told me, he had a tendency to get a bit wild.

***

I get unsteady again when I type the transcript from my visit to Dee’s house. She speaks fast, in staccato sentences without pronouns. I’ve slowed the tape way down, but still she outpaces me. The birds chirp slowly and every 10 minutes a train toots, stretched out along the line. All the while there’s a warped hum in the background, like a tape on rewind.

“Boss dropped a pallet on my shoulder,” Dee says. “Rotator cuff stuffed. Went through rehab and ops and for a good 18 months I wasn’t able to work. Incapacitated.”

As I listen, I picture her two-bedroom unit, neatly kept, but flimsy like a cardboard box. Dee is Maori; in good humour, she described herself as “not your petite young girl who wants to sit and type”. Yet somehow, the dwelling seemed to have diminished her big laugh and limbs.

The tape continues and I recall the scene: the two of us sitting on an L-shaped couch, arranged with fluffy cushions; Dee talking about the big things in her life. “Went back to work maybe a year ago, and got cervical cancer. So had that removed and I got all-cleared end of January. And I’ve been trying to get a job since. I was a warehouse manager, travelled interstate. But with the injury, not allowed to do that anymore. Turned 40 last month. Find a new calling at 40? With no experience, no nothing? It’s not happening.”

My concentration slips again from the recording and I wonder how I’ll be able to express the heat of Dee’s despair. Then I hear myself ask: “Uh, so do you have enough to eat?”

“No. No. We go without,” Dee replies. “You have to. We’ve got no family. I’m not lining up in a soup kitchen, I’d rather go without. It’s just the way I feel. Sorry. Nothing you can do about it – I’m not going to rob somewhere. Some people do. Geez, I hope I don’t ever feel that way.

“You hear about it on the news, people robbing 7-Elevens and taking 50 bucks and this and that, and some people are so desperate you wonder – are they just scum? Are they just bums? Or they just someone like me who’s lost it and who’s sick of not feeding their kids?”

Above Dee’s TV cabinet I’d noticed three small lava lamps; green, orange and purple, with gold flakes flowing and shimmering inside. These are her luxuries. She keeps them going because an energy auditor from Kildonan UnitingCare explained they only cost one cent per day.

It was through Kildonan that I met her. The charity mainly works in Melbourne’s north. One of its services is to help people overburdened with energy bills understand how to reduce their usage. After the advisor visited Dee, he negotiated a payment plan for the money she owed the power company.

On another day, I visited Kildonan’s headquarters in Epping, in Melbourne’s northern growth corridor, for a launch promoting a low-interest, micro-finance loan.

In his speech at the event, Harry Jenkins, the local federal member and speaker of the lower house, joked that Kildonan’s CEO, Stella Avramopoulos, was known around the office as “she-who-must-be-obeyed”. Avramopoulos, who has dark, sparky eyes and leaves a residue of energy even after she exits a conversation, grew up in the region serviced by her organisation.

After the launch, she chatted in the foyer while assorted charity workers milled around sandwich platters. Recently, Avramopoulos told a Victorian inquiry into child protection that the number of people requesting financial assistance from Kildonan had doubled in the past five years. “They were really gobsmacked because it was a reality they didn’t know,” Avramopoulos told me. “And I said, ‘Well, that’s what happening!’”

In the first week of January this year, while the nation worried about the English cricket team winning the Ashes, six people arrived at Kildonan’s office asking for help, forced to choose between paying their rent or buying food for their families. The next week, three more presented with eviction notices.

Households who spend more than 30% of their income on their mortgage or rent are considered to be in ‘housing stress’. All the charities I contacted for this article told me housing stress has become an increasingly mainstream concern.

“These are not families who saw themselves as struggling or at risk of homelessness and yet here they are, now in severe financial distress,” Avramopoulos says.

In her lounge room, Dee tells me she thinks about her rent before she goes to sleep, and before she wakes up. Before she wakes up. “Not a nice thought, but an everyday one. Rent. Rent. Rent.” She says words in threes.

“Uh,” I say, and pause. “So, uh, how do you spend your days now?”

“Sit around and look at the walls. Talk to my dog. Teach her tricks. I go for a walk sometimes, but I don’t even feel like doing that.”

Dee is crying, wiping tears away from her cheeks with the sleeve of her purple windcheater. “Do all these appointments, apply for jobs. I go to counselling for depression and anxiety. Drink coffee. I don’t drink alcohol. I started smoking cigarettes.”

I walked back to the train knowing this: Dee and her daughter’s rent is well over two-thirds of their combined income, forgetting groceries, bills or food for the dog. And I know this, too: the rent is due next week and Dee won’t be able to pay it.

***

When Albert was sleeping rough, each day went like this:

“You’d wake up five-thirty or so, quite often by the magpies – that was my alarm clock. You’d have a cigarette, go behind the pavilion and have a piss, then have a few cigarettes and wait till Hutt Street opens. I’d get there just as it opened up. It’s on the good side of town and I didn’t want people staring at me when they’re driving to work.

“First thing I would do is have a few coffees, shit, shave, shower – depending on if it was needed, or if I was up to it. I wouldn’t hang around. I’d come back and have lunch, then I’d grab my sleeping bag. Usually if you had money you’d get a cask of wine because there’s not much to do. We’d just sit and drink and smoke and talk.”

During Albert’s time on the street, Kylie Burns (who leads the Hutt Street Centre’s primary homelessness team) safeguarded his music diploma in her office. Burns has a presence at once cherubic and stoic. “He’s a good guy, Albert,” she tells me. “You really wish him well and hope he can achieve what he wants.”

The day I visit, she’s wearing a white, knitted top. There’s a pink toy pony sitting on her desk and bubblegum pop playing on her radio. Earlier in the morning, I’d seen bearded, scraggly men waiting for the centre to open, with plastic bags tied over their feet to keep out the wet.

Hutt Street serves breakfast to about 100 people and lunches to about 200 people every weekday. Burns walks me through their facilities, past the dining room, showers, laundry and storage room, to an art and education centre, an op shop, a lounge and a bank of computers.

The centre signed a new funding agreement with the South Australian government at the end of 2010, as part of reforms that backed more outreach and long-term housing programs – in line with Haggerty’s recommendations.

Burns has reservations about the change. “I can see [Haggerty’s] point of view, but in a practical sense, if we weren’t here, where are people meant to go?” she asks.

“We don’t just do crisis stuff; we do long-term response, too. But I think that sometimes, the ‘housing first’ model sets people up to fail. Living close together wouldn’t work for a lot of our clients – some of them have been sleeping rough for 15 years.”

A senior employee at a national charity tells me that while the ‘housing first’ philosophy has broad support, its implementation is still in question. “The bottleneck is bricks and mortar – if you don’t have access to suitable housing, the whole tenet of ‘housing first’ breaks down,” he said.

Even so, the approach has spread throughout the country, both in pre-existing scattered housing and in new dwellings. More Common Ground-style apartments are under construction in Sydney, Brisbane and Hobart, and a large building opened last year in Melbourne.

This year in Brisbane, a ‘housing first’ outreach campaign run by Micah Projects, called ‘50 Lives 50 Homes’, out-performed its target. It housed 73 of the city’s most at-risk rough sleepers in less than 12 months.

But it is the South Australian government that has made the biggest changes, across all its housing services. In the words of one insider, they’ve “thrown everything up in the air on the evidence that it’ll land in a better place”. In a few more years, she said, they’ll know if it has.

The same goes for Albert. I walk to visit him on a Saturday. The common room is closed at weekends. He shows me to his bedsit on the second floor, apologising several times for the mess.

I think his room is tidy. It’s small, about five bed-lengths by two, with a high ceiling and perky furnishing, like the rest of the building. There’s little marking the space as his own besides the laminated music diploma stuck to the wall and a small figurine of an American Indian on his coffee table.

Albert pulls his hair into a ponytail and starts doing the dishes, standing neatly with his legs together, half-turned towards me while we talk about his plans, long-term and short.

He wants to enrol in a bachelor degree in Aboriginal Studies in Music next year at the university. “My intention is to stay here for a few years, but because I’m so used to not being in the same spot too long, who knows? I could be here for one year and decide I’m going to move on – even though it is ideal.”

Earlier in the week, Albert’s social worker from Common Ground called the job network on his behalf, chasing up training. The following day, they booked him on a course to get his forklift ticket.

This afternoon, he tells me, he’s planning to watch a DVD – maybe Avatar – then at about three o’clock he’ll begin reading through the information booklet for the course. Alan had planned to go out for a drink this Sunday night, but Albert said he couldn’t come; he wanted to be okay for the training, which starts on Monday.

“A woman once said I was a quiet achiever. That’s what I am, you know, a quiet achiever.”

***

I visit Dee again. I’d been hoping to be there when her daughter helped dye her hair, because I thought it would make a hopeful scene. But when I arrive, her hair is already dark red. It looks good, and she appears several years younger. She returns to her couch in the darkened living room to continue watching the mid-morning TV news with the sound down, arms crossed in her loose fleece-lined jacket, the three lava-lamps flowing.

Before long, the questions taste sour in my mouth. It is her face that turns grey now, as I ask her again about all those worries. She’s $600 behind on the latest rent. The payment plans brokered by Kildonan for the utility bills have expired and disconnection notices came for the gas and electricity.

Upset, Dee directs conversation through her dog, who is lying at her feet. “Yeah, it’s not fair is it? It’s not a nice conversation, no it’s not – tickle, tickle,” she pats the animal, speaks in cuddles. “She’s eight today. Old lady now, aren’t you? No birthday cake, no dog food!” she laughs, and then briefly falls silent. “She knows when I’m not happy. She’ll stare at me.”

When her old home that she’d lived in for nearly a decade was put up for sale, she moved half-an-hour down the train line to a much smaller place. The rent was higher, but it was the only one she could find that allowed pets.

She has long been on waiting lists for public housing, and for a housing co-op in which she would pay below-market rent. But around the country, waiting lists for public housing run to the tens of thousands. As decades have passed and the population and economy have grown, governments have not provided the public housing to match. The tenants have shifted from low-paid workers to the most marginalised in society – carers, single mothers, the elderly, disabled or chronically unemployed.

The federal government’s stimulus package included funding for nearly 20,000 new social housing dwellings. Many not-for-profit housing associations received balance sheet boosts they should be able to leverage for ongoing investment. But Australia’s cities are growing fast, and much more is needed. The National Housing Supply Council, a government body, estimates that there was a national shortage of about 180,000 homes in mid-2009, the number having doubled in the preceding year, while prices for existing houses rose sharply.

Near Kildonan’s office in Epping, the landscape has transformed. “When we moved here in 2003 there were still kangaroos hopping around everywhere,” Avramopoulos says. “People thought we were mad to set up a building in the middle of nowhere. There’s been an extraordinary amount of change and some of the service systems have not moved in.”

When population growth outstrips investment in housing, infrastructure and services, the economy still grows and most people become richer, but we are subsidised by the suffering of the poor. “Those at the upper echelons are getting so much stronger financially, but there are fewer and fewer options for the bottom percentile,” Avramopoulos says.

When I left Dee’s place, she walked with me to the letterbox. It was the first time I’d seen her outside her unit, unencumbered by the closeness of the walls and the darkness of her lounge. As I walked away she bent down to pick up her mail and called out, “Want to take my bills?” She gave me a big throaty laugh. I laughed with her and for an instant everything seemed like it would turn out okay, until I remembered it probably wouldn’t.

***

For months I pore over books and documents about homelessness. About housing affordability, poverty, education and income inequality. Structural causes that fuse with the vagaries of personal and social circumstances, chance and mischance. I learn of the thousands of agencies, services and workers implementing a web of policies and tailored responses.

But I can’t keep all the bits and pieces arranged in my mind. Instead, I keep remembering a paragraph in Haggerty’s report:

“In advanced democracies, where homelessness during peacetime was rare until the last 25 years, [it] has been particularly disturbing and uncomfortable to deal with: too complicated, too vast, too much of an affront to our societies’ faith in social and economic progress.”

I thought about this paragraph the morning I read the rich list. That was the morning I’d met Dee, and found out she couldn’t pay the rent on her small, cold unit. I wondered if the lack of affordable housing was inevitable, so long as we seek to better society’s material wealth, rather than the quality of life of our people.

And, again, I thought about Haggerty’s words when I visited Common Ground Adelaide and witnessed the green shoots of well-targeted public and private funding. Albert has a home, a support plan, and his own plans.

But, so far, the big funding push in The Road Home hasn’t made it to all quarters. For example, Avramopoulos is yet to see it reach Melbourne’s outer north. Still, she remains hopeful. “We actually save a lot of money if we invest in early prevention. Housing is one of the critical areas that can act as an intervening force. I know it’s possible to make change,” she says. “I’ve seen it.”

Eventually, stuck for how to write about what I’ve observed, I begin listening to Dee’s interviews while I walk through the city. I notice that she was quieter the second time I visited: less feisty, more resigned. Her voice is soft on the recording, and even though I turn it up as loud as I can, she vanishes often in the noise of the traffic, disappearing among the trucks, the trams and the pulsing crossings.

As I walk, her voice comes and goes: “…yeah, I speak to my mum every week in New Zealand. She’s got nothing and I don’t want her to worry. I can come across quite good…make a joke and laugh. But she always asks, have you got a job, have you got a job?”

There are long pauses, too, where no one speaks because I don’t know what to say. “Another half-year gone,” she says.

When I can’t hear the recording for what seems like a minute, I give up listening, unsure if Dee’s predicament was overwhelmed by the city, or by a silence I was unable to fill.

Read this follow up story about what happened after I wrote the article.

BEFORE he takes portraits, photographer Martin Schoeller thoroughly researches his subjects. If they are actors, he watches their movies. If they are writers, he reads their books.

“A lot goes into each shoot,” the photographer told the Artinfo website in 2008. He brainstorms concepts, scouts locations and sources props. All of which seems curious, as each of his photographs looks much the same: a passport-style close-up, enlarged to epic proportions, with shallow depth of focus – the eyes and mouth are sharp, the tip of the nose and the lobes of the ears are not.

Close-Up, an exhibition of Schoeller’s portraits, is now on show at the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra. The gallery’s walls are lined with his large images, some the size of muscle-car bonnets. Almost every square inch within the frames bulge with the (mostly) famous faces they contain, from a grizzled Jack Nicholson and an alien Paris Hilton, to a waxy Christopher Walken and a crinkly Helen Mirren.

The Schoeller exhibition raises an intriguing question: is celebrity, blown up and unretouched, still just celebrity? Or does it convey something more substantial? Michael Desmond, senior curator with the gallery, admits to some initial trepidation as to how the exhibition would be received, before it opened in November. “I was a bit cautious,” he says. “I thought people were over celebrity. They’re so familiar with Brad Pitt’s face that they might not come and see this show. Interestingly, they’ve responded really well. Most people come in as fans. Some come in slightly cynically – as I did – and are then converted.”

Schoeller was born in Munich, Germany, in 1968, and studied photography in Berlin at Lette-Verein – a training more technical than artistic. At 25, he moved to New York to be an assistant to Annie Liebovitz, the renowned celebrity photographer. He has since described that time as very challenging.

“My English was not that good when I first came [to New York], and she’s extremely demanding,” he has recalled. “She doesn’t have that much patience. I got along with her very well after about a year, but the first year was very intense and not very pleasant.”

After three years, Schoeller became a freelance photographer and later began contributing to The New Yorker and other prominent magazines, including Rolling Stone, GQ and Vogue. Dissatisfied with the glamour and commercialism of conventional celebrity portraits, he devised his trademark technique. “They allow me to walk away with something for myself – a very honest, simple portrait that no publicist can say anything about. You can’t see what they’re wearing and they’re not having to do anything, so no red flags go up. Only three or four times have people refused to have a picture taken that close,” he told Artinfo.

Schoeller, who is still based in New York, uses a long lens and simple lighting in his portrait sessions. He takes about 200 frames, talking incessantly to put the sitter at ease while he seeks an expression between expressions: a moment when the subject is temporarily not posing.

His headshots are often praised for their ‘democratic’ approach. By presenting every subject the same way, regardless of their status, the photographs can invite reflection and debate on the nature of celebrity.

“The images are commissioned by high circulation magazines, so in that sense, they’re reinforcing the cult of celebrity,” Desmond observes. “But, on the other hand, the way they’re photographed undermines it. They’re not necessarily flattering. When you are confronted with the images you think about what makes these people famous. Why this person? What are the things you actually see? The size is a bait to make you question the notion of fame.

“The large scale creates a sort of false intimacy,” Desmond says. “You’re forced to make an emotional connection. There’s a feeling that the faces are really close to you. Normally people only get that close when they’re either in love with you or you’re having a fight.”

Close-Up also includes a number of portraits of Indigenous people from South Africa and Brazil, shot and presented in the same way. But given the bias towards celebrities, is ‘democratic’ really the right word for Schoeller’s approach? Arguably, it’s only democracy in the most corrupt form: a means of placating the many, while reinforcing the power of the few.

But Desmond argues: “Maybe it’s an Australian version of democracy, where we bring the rich and famous down to our level,” he says. “They’re imperfect. Barack Obama is one of the most powerful men in the world, but when you see his face in the exhibition you’re conscious of how misshapen it is. He doesn’t look particularly powerful. Even the rich and famous are mortal.”

Desmond also believes the portraits transcend notions of celebrity. “In the end, you’re conscious less of the fame and more of the physiognomy: eyes, noses, mouths. Some are beautiful, some are engaging, some are quite freaky. You see so many faces that you leave with a feeling of the breadth of humanity, which is not something you expect when you walk in.”

Close-Up is at the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, until 13 February. See the article in The Big Issue for photos.

ONE idyllic Friday afternoon – like many afternoons at the Homeland community – an impromptu parents’ circle formed outside Rose West and Kai Tipping’s small, rented house.

Rose knelt on the grass in her long skirt, while their elder daughter, Mali, home from primary school, alternately strode and sprinted around the open space with her friends. Their other daughter, Persia – two years old and possessed of an altogether wicked zest for life, laboured indiscriminately in the vegetable patch.

Two years ago, the young couple had left the city for the country. They sought a manageable, affordable lifestyle and more freedom and safety for their daughters. They found a commune. And in that, they’re not alone.

TWENTY-FOUR years before Rose and Kai made their life-altering move, Phil Bourne’s family moved to Seymour, 100km north of Melbourne, to start a communal living project with another like-minded family.

The small community was named, aptly, Commonground. Over the years other families have come and gone; the community hasn’t yet grown as Bourne had hoped. But the original two families, the core group, remain, and have since formed links with others through Cohousing Australia – a hub for communal living projects, which Bourne chairs.

Living enmeshed with others isn’t always ideal. There are times when, as he says, Bourne would have preferred to be a “hermit”. But he still feels that, ultimately, it’s worth it. “It’s what we term a high-input, high reward lifestyle,” he explains.

Recently, Bourne and the old guard of communal dwellers have been sensing that people are, once again, beginning to see value in their way of life. “I don’t know whether we’re kidding ourselves, but when the people who’ve been in this scene a long time get together, we’re convinced there’s a new energy around,” he says. “People are looking at what’s happening with the world and they’re hungry to find other options.

“In current times of climate change, peak oil and social isolation, when the single person household is the fastest growing housing sector, we think it’s time for the next wave of intentional communities,” Bourne says. “But to get from dreaming it to doing it is not easy.”

In Australia, rural landsharing communities flourished throughout the 1970s. After the 10-day Aquarius festival in Nimbin in 1973 – often described as Australia’s version of Woodstock – a number of attendees stayed on and started utopian communities throughout northern NSW.

The movement was inspired by New Age and simple-living ideas, together with concern about spiking oil prices, environmental degradation and the limits to economic growth.

“The intentional communities of the ’60s and ’70s had a lot of good intentions, but the application was vague,” Bourne concedes. “In many ways, it was downtrodden by the mainstream as hippie nonsense – a percentage of which had truth to it and a percentage of which missed the point.”

The Homeland community was founded in 1977, on a former dairy farm half-an-hour by car from Bellingen, an artsy town on NSW’s mid-north coast. Now, about three-dozen adults and children live there. The members aren’t allowed to own any land, but they can own their home. Each adult pays $30 per week in rent to cover upkeep on the extensive shared facilities, including the recreation house, guests’ cottage, laundry, shower block, barns, orchards and festival fields.

The community was modelled on the Findhorn Foundation, a spiritual community in Scotland, famous for mystical gardeners who grew supernaturally large cabbages on sandy soil. But the connection vanished in the early 1980s, as the overseas philosophy became obscured by the haze of marijuana smoke closer to home.

Like all communities, membership and motivation has ebbed and flowed. “Five years ago,” one long-term Homeland resident explains, “we were lamenting that we were becoming a geriatric farm.” Then a number of young families started moving onto the land.

AT Homeland, the afternoon continued on its comfortably unplanned course. A friend of Rose and Kai dropped in with his toddlers, and two other young mums from up the hill happened by with their daughters. “There are no play dates on Homeland,” Rose explained later. “You don’t ring up the other mother, organise a week in advance and go to a cafe and spend money. It just happens.”

While the children whooped, the adults spoke about placentas and sleeping patterns, the uncomfortable crevices that ticks find, and the humility required when asking someone else to remove them.

It was an earthy conversation, not an astral one: more permaculture than counter-culture.

IN all likelihood, this kind of practical exchange wouldn’t be uncommon among latter day communal dwellers. “You don’t get naked hippies running around the hills any more,” says Dr Bill Metcalf, a ‘communitarian’ scholar at Griffith University who has published several books on the subject.

“A lot of people see communal living as a very sensible option,” Metcalf continues. “They aren’t looking at it in the utopian sense – it’s just a much more sane way to live in a rural area. The interest is moving to a strata of society that wouldn’t have considered it 20 years ago, because it was seen as too outrageous.”

Metcalf says there are hundreds of intentional communities throughout Australia, from spiritual groups to survivalists, nudist colonies to eco-villages.

“No matter where you go, we’ve got these communities. Some are very upmarket, some very downmarket.”

For two decades, Metcalf has been working on an encyclopaedia of communities established in Australia before the ‘baby boomer’ generation. When he began, he expected it to be a brief undertaking. But, he says, “I keep finding new ones faster than I can research them. In every state there are amazing examples: there are lesbian separatist communes from the 1870s; groups who believed in a single tax; nudist groups; vegetarians. You name it, they’re out there.”

JUST as the kinds of communities and structures change over time, utopian dreams are also tempered from within. Close to Rose and Kai’s house, along a short walking track, is an open-walled barn, set among small beds of flowers and vegetables. It is home to Jacque Flavell, who has lived on Homeland for 22 years.

“What we’ve gradually come to realise is that you don’t have to try and work it all out so you love everyone,” she said. “When you see someone and you don’t really want to talk to them, it starts to make you sick. Eventually I think: ‘Well, I better do something about myself. I may not get to love them, but I better not let them give me an ulcer.’”

Flavell arrived on the community as a single mother with two young children. She had been a cabaret dancer, including a stint with the Moulin Rouge in Paris, but decided to radically simplify her life. She raised her children on the property without a car, avoiding machines wherever possible.

“I laugh now, when I look back,” she said. “I thought I would come here and learn from these much more evolved beings, but they were just like us. We’re just a bunch of people who are trying to figure something out. I still have things to learn.”

Later in the afternoon, Kai arrived home after teaching a samba drumming class to school kids in another town. He has the broad shoulders of someone who’s grown up on the land but, until recently, little of the practical know-how. (“I’m terribly scared of snakes,” he confided.) He and Rose, like Flavell, both hail from cities.

“I’m reaping the benefits of the work other people have put into the community, and it’s been a blessing,” he said. “The relationships are more complicated – I’m still getting used to the protocols. If you see an old fridge, you can’t just throw it out. It takes a long time to get anything done.”

The couple are clear about the obstacles associated with life this far from the mainstream, be they snakes and ticks, car-reliance or disputes with ex-members. Even so, their choice makes sense.

“If you look around the world and throughout history, I think people have lived like this most of the time,” Rose said. “When I travelled overseas this is how I saw people living: they pool resources and they share work, and a big part of that shared work is raising kids.”

Mali entered the room with a present for her mother: a soft, crocheted bird she had made at school. Rose murmured her approval by clucking like a chook, but the child protested. “Oh, it’s a bluebird,” Rose said. “It just looks a bit like a hen.” Unfussed, Mali raced off again, after asking permission to go to the common house with another child.

“All the faces around here, I know them all, and they’re my friends,” Rose continued. “I hope to spend many years together raising our kids and doing that all in a beautiful environment, with mountains in the background and a river flowing in front. I can’t ask for more than that.”

DIY community

IF you want to start an intentional community, don’t be naive: expect conflict and learn how to get over it. That’s the advice from Dr Bill Metcalf, gleaned from decades researching and living on communities.

“None of them run smoothly,” says Metcalf. “And the vast majority of people who want to create a community never succeed.”

The flip side, however, is that at their best, communities are socially enriching, environmentally sound and cheap to live on. “Almost invariably, people who grow up in intentional communities say they had a wonderful childhood.”

There are some practical challenges. Wedged by strict council regulations and steep property prices, people often have trouble finding suitable land. Also, properties classed as multiple occupancies usually can’t be subdivided, and without the security of individual title, banks take a lot of convincing to approve loans. Increasingly, would-be communities opt for strata title, rather than a cooperative, corporation or tenants-in-common structure.

“The old model, where a few hippies would pool their dole cheques and put illegal shacks on a clapped out dairy farm – those days are well and truly gone,” says Metcalf. “Now it requires elaborate financial management. It can cost millions of dollars by the time you get something operating with roads and facilities.”

Rural communities aren’t the only option. Phil Bourne, from Cohousing Australia, is promoting an urban hybrid model, called cohousing, in which about 15 to 30 homes are clustered around a common house and open space.

The individual dwellings are private and self-contained, not communal, but the residents pool some resources. The common house might include a shared guest room, kitchen, laundry and shed.

The concept began in Denmark in the 1970s and has become popular in Europe and North America. There are about half a dozen cohousing communities in Australian cities already, and several more in planning.

“Cohousing has a lot of appeal for current generations because you maintain personal equity and autonomy,” Bourne says. “And you don’t have to move out to the country. It’s an option for medium density urban living that still has the room for chooks and a veggie garden.”

Published in The Big Issue, with photographs by Conor Ashleigh.

For further information, go to abc.net.au/rn/utopias

The image comes from a new book of photography by Chris Payne, Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals. It is a room guarding burnt bodies and souls. Who were these people? How did they live? And why are they here, like this?

These themes fascinated the architect-turned-photographer for six years as he documented 70 decaying mental hospitals across 30 US states.

“I fell in love with the buildings and the places – the communities that the hospitals had been,” he says, “and with thinking about the thousands of people who had lived, worked and died there.”

Asylum is a grand, melancholy tribute to the lives spent in the institutions and to the astonishing scale and quality of the buildings themselves.

In 2002, when Payne needed a new project, a friend suggested he visit abandoned mental hospitals. The New York-based photographer drove to Pilgrim State Hospital on Long Island. Opened in 1931, it was the largest hospital ever built in the world – at its peak, it housed over 14,000 patients. “I was amazed to find this abandoned city just sitting there,” he says. “I quickly learned it wasn’t isolated to one hospital or one area. It was all over the country.”

From the mid-19^th to the early-20^th century in the US, nearly 300 institutions were built for the insane – often designed by prominent architects and always set in spacious grounds. The facilities were intended to offer calm and comfort, to treat inhabitants by means of fresh air and beautiful surrounds. The hospitals functioned as self-sufficient communities, including farms, workshops and auditoriums, and in some cases, even cafés and bowling alleys.

But care diminished as hospitals became overcrowded and pressed by tight budgets. Then, as treatment came to encompass extreme methods such as electro-shock therapy, ‘asylum’ became a by-word for squalor and abuse.

Payne’s elegiac photos, with flaking colour and tender light, show beauty in places we least expect. “Every society has its asylums, but I think there is a misconception that the buildings are bad and should be torn down. In a way, the stigma of mental illness has been passed onto the architecture of the buildings,” he says.

His previous book documented abandoned substations that had powered the New York subway. His photography shows the architecture of an optimistic era, a time when industrialism promised human progress. “I’m fascinated with buildings that really had purpose. We don’t build like that anymore,” Payne says. “And I think it represents a shift in the way we function as a society. It’s sad we’ve lost that faith in building.”

This time around he’s skipped the entrée and devoured the big cheese: capitalism. Or more specifically, the idea that the price of something is a good indicator of its value (see the global financial crisis). Prices, he argues, are blind to ecological and social ills and “at best, only give a blurry sense of priorities and possibilities”.

Patel, an academic, activist and former employee of the World Bank, offers up a lively, easy-to-read critique of free market economics and corporate power. And where other recent critics failed to promote meaningful change (ahem, Kevin Rudd), he doesn’t shy away from the radical consequences of acknowledging that markets don’t sell magic happiness beans.

With examples drawn from Chile to Pakistan, Patel promotes a society sweetened by small-scale cooperation and infused with active local democracy. Whether you’re puzzled by economics or worried about the future, The Value of Nothing makes bracing and inspiring reading.

Four-and-a-half stars

It is just before lunchtime at the National Institute of Circus Arts in Melbourne. The 2009 showcase performance is just weeks away. In a stuffy rehearsal room, 14 final-year students listen carefully as the show’s directors give staging instructions for part of the act. The details are precise. Circus is a serious business.

Meanwhile, one of the muscular young men, Aidyn Heyes, bends nonchalantly into a handstand. He stays there, waggling his legs for a while, then shifts from two hands to just one. Minutes later, on his feet again, he amuses a classmate by putting a milk crate on his head.

“We’re all the kind of people who try to get everyone else to look at them,” Heyes says later. His speciality is balancing on his hands.

The institute – the only school of its kind in Australia – opened in 1999, and accepted its first bachelor students two years later. Each year it accepts 24 performers from the scores more who audition.

The students train five days a week, from nine to five, and miss out on the long holidays granted by normal universities. Even so, with the showcase performance approaching, Heyes says preparation time is short. “A lot of the stuff we do in our acts pushes our limits as far as they’ll go. Even though we rehearse and rehearse, no one ever feels like they have enough practice time.”

Heyes grew up in Rosebud on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula and spent his spare time surfing and doing yoga. “Ever since I was young I could always jump up into a handstand and stay there,” he says, constantly stretching and shifting his limbs as he talks. “I’d chill out a few hours a day just doing handstands at home because I enjoyed it.”

Like other circus artists, the 22-year-old uses and experiences his body in ways that gravity-adhering members of the community could scarcely ever comprehend. “When you hit the balance properly, especially with one-arm handstands, it feels like something else is holding you there,” he says. “It feels light, like you’re floating in water.”

The showcase performance is the final step before the students try to enter the real circus world. Some aspire to joining international companies, hotels or cruise ships; others, to making a living from corporate gigs, events or busking. Heyes plans to set himself up as a freelance circus performer, mixing work and travel.

For now, however, he must train and focus for the show. “Hand balancing, like juggling and tightwire, requires single-point concentration,” he says. “When you’re performing, you’ve just got to block everything else out.”

Published in The Big Issue, to accompany a photo essay by Christina Simons.

One blazing hot Saturday morning – the day that will later become known as Black Saturday – a dozen locals gather around the wooden bench in Mark Kilinski’s kitchen, in the Geelong suburb of Bell Post Hill. Under his instruction, they’re filling and shaping pierogi, Polish dumplings.

Everybody is talking or laughing, or doing both at once. It’s pure peaches-and-cream: people are making friends, their conversations almost too good-natured to be true. “It’s much more fun to cook together, isn’t it?” marvels Anne, who lives just across the road. “That’s the thing about community,” chimes Dee, a wide-eyed, rosy-cheeked librarian from the local school.

The activity has been organised by Transition Bell, a group of locals dedicated to transforming postcode 3215 to deal with the twin challenges of climate change and peak oil [see below]. They want to re-make their suburb into a food-producing, low-energy, low-emission, tight-knit neighbourhood.

For well over a year, the group has been an official member of the thriving international Transition Network. The first transition town – Totnes, in Devon, England – was launched in late 2006. Now there are over 200 worldwide. In Australia, there are 18 official transition initiatives and dozens more preparing to sign on.

The movement took-off last year, following the publication of The Transition Handbook by Rob Hopkins, cofounder of the Totnes project. Interest now extends well beyond the English-speaking world, to continental Europe, South America, Asia and South Africa.

An updated Australian and New Zealand edition of the book came out in March. Subtitled ‘Creating local sustainable communities beyond oil dependency’, it details a grassroots approach to sustainability, in which each group strives for change, aiming to live better with less.

Naresh Giangrande, another founder of the Totnes transition town, visited Australia recently as part of a six-country speaking and training tour. “Two years ago, if somebody had told me that I would be in Australia on a worldwide tour teaching people about transition towns I would have said to them, ‘You’re crazy, it will never happen that quickly’,” he says.

In Totnes, residents have started a slew of projects, from community gardens and a local food directory, to business swap meets and eco-makeovers. They’ve even created their own currency, the Totnes Pound, which can only be used in the town.

Giangrande says the biggest achievement so far has been to build broad support among the town’s 8000 residents, rather than just among the usual suspects. Given the gravity of the problem, he argues, it’s crucial to engage people from all walks of life.

“The fundamental message is that our system is unsustainable. It’s not really a question of should-we-or-shouldn’t-we [change]. We’re going to have to,” Giangrande says. “We’re not going to have any choice once peak oil and the effects of climate change become apparent. We’re going to have to make do with fewer resources and with less energy.

“It’s not just a bit of tinkering at the edges; we need to completely rethink just about every system that we depend on for life – for the food we eat, for the clothes we wear, for the buildings we live and work in, and for our transport.”

Despite the daunting change he envisages, Giangrande sees cause for both optimism and joy. “We’ve created the present system and we can create something else. Let’s harness the collective genius of our communities to create something even better than what we have now.

“For many people the environment is very scary because if you take a close look at it you realise that we’re in quite a deep hole. Transition is one of the few things that comes with a message of hope. We all can be involved and a whole bunch of small actions by people all over the world add up to something rather big and rather wonderful,” he says.

***

The Sunshine Coast was the first Australian community to become a part of the transition movement and, at about 300,000, the group caters to an unusually large population. For over two years, Sonya Wallace and others have been preparing an Energy Descent Action Plan to present to the Sunshine Coast council. It will be a blueprint for a regional makeover, from households “all the way up to legislative change, transport systems and all the big picture stuff that you can’t do as an individual or as a community.”

Beneath the broad Sunshine Coast group, small transition towns are sprouting. Wallace lives in Eudlo. Among other initiatives, her 850-strong community is starting a food coop, a seed bank and informal car-pooling, and running backyard permablitzes. “We’re trying to get people to talk to their neighbours and build some community resilience,” she says.

In mid-November, a storm walloped Brisbane’s northern suburbs, causing severe floods, structural damage to thousands of homes and even a Prime Ministerial visit. Amid the devastation, however, came an unexpected sense of community. “As this massive storm went through, people came out of their houses and started talking to their neighbours. They’d never spoken to their neighbours before,” Wallace says. “It generated street parties.”

A similar, though more dramatic story emerged following Black Saturday. In The Monthly, author Richard Flanagan wrote of his visit to Kinglake: “Beyond us the police teams were turning over tin, turning up more and more dead, yet everywhere I looked I saw only the living helping the living, people holding people, people giving to people. At the end of an era of greed, at a time when all around are crises beyond understanding and seemingly without end, here, in the heart of our apocalypse, I had not been ready for the shock of such goodness.”

Scientists predict that the climatic changes wrought by global warming will lead to more frequent extreme weather events, such as droughts, fires and floods. For Wallace, the transition project is partly about preparation. “We’re trying to get people to work together before a crisis hits, because then it’s a bit too late to work out who the workers are and who has the skills.”

Back in the Bell Post Hill kitchen, before the hot sky fills with smoke, Transition Bell’s founder, Andrew Lucas, is adamant that his group’s activities be enjoyable. “It is a really inclusive thing, not just a sustainability group filled with environmentalists. [The transition towns idea] doesn’t tend to alienate people because you’re talking about what we can do to look after each other. That sort of thing is missing in communities at the moment.”

The Bell area has a long-standing mix of residents from different backgrounds, especially Eastern Europe. Lucas says there’s an enormous amount of practical knowledge behind closed doors – like the recipe for pierogi. Among other things, he hopes neighbours will share their cooking, preserving and gardening know-how.

“We declared that this postcode will be the fruit tree capital of Geelong – pretty hilarious, because it’s not like we have anyone competing,” Lucas says. “There’s another postcode, Transition South Barwon, and they’re talking about becoming the shiitake mushroom capital.”

Last year, at Transition Bell’s request, a local nursery offered a 50 per cent discount. Residents cleared their stock in one weekend. Lucas wants to organise more bulk eco-buying deals with nearby businesses. “You can get people motivated to take action, you get much better discounts and you’re putting money back into local businesses as well, so it’s a win-win,” he says.

All up, today’s neighbours-cum-pastry-cooks make about 300 dumplings in just a few hours. Conversation whisks through organic gardening, household efficiency and renewable energy, as well as future activities for the community.

But as always, the proof is in the eating. Janine, a first time attendee, sits at the table, her plate already empty. “Delicious,” she says sweetly. “We want some more.”

Transition, peak oil and climate change

The transition concept is pushed along by twin threats: peak oil and climate change. Peak oil refers to the point in time when global oil production reaches its maximum rate, and afterwards, begins to fall. There is no agreement on its timing, but many observers argue that supply has passed its peak, or will soon do so.

In The Transition Handbook, Rob Hopkins writes that “the end of what we might call the Age of Cheap Oil (which lasted from 1859 until the present) is near at hand, and … for a society utterly dependent on it, this means enormous change.” Both peak oil and climate change, he continues, “are symptoms of a society hopelessly addicted to fossil fuels and the lifestyles they make possible.”

 Can I borrow a cup of sugar?

Saying hello to your neighbours is the new black. Here are some complementary getting-to-know-you schemes:

Started in Melbourne last year, The Sharehood is an ingenious website that, together with a simple letterbox drop, will help you to not only meet the family across the road, but also borrow their circular saw.

A basic training program in eco-living, Sustainability Street can work in your street, school or local sports club. It has been run in over 200 places across Australia since 2002.

A permablitz is a working bee with a veggie twist. Volunteers from a network of permaculture gardeners and your neighbours (if you can convince them) come to your house and work with you to transform your garden into an organic food producing Eden.

Most of the year, Dublar Char is nearly uninhabited. The remote island lies at the southern end of the Sundarbans, a vast tidal mangrove forest on the Bay of Bengal. Then, from mid-October to mid-February, thousands of fishermen sweep in from around Bangladesh. Hindu pilgrims come in their thousands too, for Rash Mela, an annual three-day festival with a 200-year history.

Last year, photographer Rodney Dekker joined the influx. “There were fishing boats everywhere. They are all connected and people walk over each boat to get to the land,” he says. The fishermen dry their catch on the broad beach, then bag and ship the fish to markets in the capital, Dhaka.

With the festival on, the island was vibrant. “There was dancing and singing, and people were worshipping clustered around a little temple,” Dekker says. “There was lots of energy and atmosphere.”

Situated in the fertile Ganges Delta, Bangladesh is one of the poorest, most densely populated and lowest-lying countries on earth. Exposed to rising sea levels, melting Himalayan glaciers and increased cyclone frequency, the country’s people are critically vulnerable to the effects of climate change. A Bangladeshi rights organisation, Equity and Justice Rights Group, estimates that 30 million people on the southern coastline are already facing its consequences.

That’s the reason for Dekker’s journey. “Dublar Island will be one of the first places in Bangladesh to be affected by sea level rise and this culture will be lost as a result,” he says.

The 34-year-old photographer is a former environmental scientist. In Australia, he has shot series on droughts, floods and bushfires. “My photographic interests come from my interest in environmental problems,” he says. “Part of what I’m trying to do is to show people what is happening in the world as a result of climate change.”

In November 2007, Dublar Island was lashed by Cyclone Sidr. Development organisation Save the Children estimated that between 5,000 and 10,000 people died in the storm. “It was the most severe cyclone on record in the Bay of Bengal,” Dekker says. “Cyclones are becoming more intense and frequent and the timing is different now. One of the fishermen I interviewed and photographed on Dublar Island was wondering why cyclones are coming in winter. He doesn’t know.”

The fisherman’s prospects aren’t good. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has predicted that 22 million people in Bangladesh will become climate refugees by 2050.

But it’s industrialised countries, including Australia, who are responsible for the bulk of historical greenhouse gas emissions. “The poorer countries are the ones who will feel the effects [of climate change] the most, and we’re the cause of it,” Dekker says.

Rodney Dekker travelled to Bangladesh with the help of a grant from the SEARCH Foundation. You can view an eyewitness account of his journey on the Oxfam website.