Some years ago, I was part of a community of homeless people in Fitzroy, a colourful inner suburb of Melbourne. One of our regulars was Johnny Foster. It was said that Johnny had been an officer in the army. Certainly, he often slept out in a slouch hat and army coat; in addition, he was a man who, despite plenty of life’s misfortunes, always carried himself with a military bearing.
There were countless stories about Johnny. One was that in May 1978 the funeral of the late Sir Robert Menzies, Australia’s longest serving prime minister and most eminent being, had started ten minutes late because of Johnny Foster. The Prince of Wales had flown out overnight to read the lesson; that same night, Johnny had been sleeping in one of the many haunts where, in the middle of a big city, people can make themselves invisible. Menzies was being buried from the Scots Church on the corner of Russell and Collins streets; a guard of honour had been posted to lend dignity to the occasion and to keep back the crowds. Just as the cavalcade bearing the Prince of Wales was nearing its destination, Johnny, stately in his great coat, stepped through the guard, took up position in the centre of the intersection and proceeded to direct the official party around the wrong corner. Johnny had such a commanding air that the drivers obeyed. So the cavalcade did another lap of the block and Menzies was laid to rest a bit later than he may have been otherwise.
I have searched newspapers looking for some official record of this moment and have never found any. The papers of the time include an interview with the undertaker, Rob Allison, congratulating him on undertaking the biggest undertaking ‘any director in Australia had ever handled’. Allison had been well schooled in the cliché that comes with his territory. ‘Somebody had to do it,’ he said, sounding like he’d played a football game with a cracked rib. But there’s not a squeak about Johnny.
His story belongs to oral history. It may even belong just to moral history: that slippery record of facts which are true because they teach a lesson. In the community of the homeless, we held this story like a trophy because it told us that a homeless man in a big coat could steer the Prince of Wales and his entourage in the wrong direction. It said that now and again the meek do inherit the earth. We had a few such tales, such as the one about Ken Sellars getting off a charge of throwing half a can of beer at a constable. He produced a string of character references to say that Mr Sellars would never under any circumstances relinquish undrunk beer. He got off. So we believed. It was our faith.
Johnny Foster was inseparable from his coat. Every morning he came back to the community punctually at 6.45 am and would empty the contents of his coat pockets onto the kitchen table: he unearthed everything from bricks to bandaids. Sometimes, it took a lot of time to return the night’s takings to its rightful owners. Other times, the coat pockets revealed mysteries: rosary beads, a police badge, even, on one confusing occasion, cutlery from the salubrious Melbourne Club. Johnny’s coat was his caravan. He both travelled in it and slept in it. Where he slept was not our business. The street is a private address.
Just because you’re homeless, it doesn’t mean you don’t have to sleep. Camping in the bush is one thing. But sleeping out in the city requires special skills. I once knew a man who slept between two shrubs on the median strip in the middle of the busiest road out of Melbourne. He believed that the key to becoming invisible was to make yourself as obvious as possible. Three lanes of traffic sped past in either direction but nobody ever noticed him; he slept here in all seasons for at least eighteen months and then, just as I was starting to tell the story, he vanished. To this day, I have a lurking suspicion that I should have kept his secret but I imagine he’d found another place so public that it offered the privacy he craved. He’d tried plenty of other things before he found this solution; he’d slept in forgotten corners of parks and hidden parts of the under-structure of bridges, but the more out of the way his camp, the sooner either the local thugs or police found him. In the plantation in the middle of a highway, he was safe. The only problem, he said, was getting women to have sex there. But then again, he conceded, he was finding it difficult to get women to have sex anywhere. Last time we spoke, he was considering a change of clothes to improve his chances.
Rubbish bins are another possibility, as long as they are clean and don’t get emptied during the night. I knew another man who slept in a cardboard and paper recycling bin behind a firm of architects in Fitzroy. The cardboard was warm and certainly more comfortable than concrete and he always had papers to read. The first person to arrive at the office every morning had the job of making him a cup of coffee and bringing it out. One year, he was invited to the office Christmas party but declined on the grounds he was a conscientious atheist who had existential objections to celebrating birthdays for gods that don’t exist. The worker who’d made the invitation said that she needed a dictionary to figure out what he meant. The man happened to have a small one in his bag and lent it to her. Indeed, he travelled with English, Greek and Spanish dictionaries. It was a pity he didn’t go to the party as the partners in the firm could have learned from him. He once said his experience of homelessness made him think a lot about architecture.
Twenty years later, I was back in the same neck of the woods. The area had changed several times over in the meantime but there is something stubborn about the House of Welcome, an establishment around the corner from the community of homeless people where I used to live. The House of Welcome, a daytime drop-in centre for the homeless and needy, has stood by while the rest of the street has seen fashions come and go as cafes open, flourish for a while, fade and then get made over, always in the search of the perfect cup of coffee. In all that time, the House of Welcome hasn’t changed its menu because it doesn’t have a menu: the cuisine often includes food donated by local cafes. It’s common enough for breakfast to comprise tepid seafood mornay on toast with Vegemite. And coffee. Buckets of hot, cheap coffee with so much sugar you can stand a spoon in the mug. Every Monday morning, a small number of boys from the school where I teach come to help. They don aprons, put a small cup of cheap coffee powder into a huge pot, add water and do the rounds. Breakfast is free.
The coffee mugs on the tables make interesting reading. Heaven knows what forces of nature conspire to send a mug on its journey through the world, but the House of Welcome has drawn together quite an assortment. Every time we move house, Jenny and I wonder why it’s the ugly mugs that never get broken. They have survival skills which fine china seems to lack. But the darkest recesses of our least visited cupboards can’t compete with the House of Welcome. Here the mugs carry logos from banks, mortgage brokers and financial advisers, none of whose services are in heavy demand in these parts. They carry clichés of love such as world’s best dad and we love you mum which also seem to sit awkwardly in a context of broken lives. There is a mug with a logo from the Australian National University and another from a small primary school up in the country. There is one from a real estate agent in Sydney and another from a car dealer in Perth. A garish mug from a louder-than-loud radio station nestles in the palms of a man who never seems to make a sound. A mug with the name Tina in pink writing wreathed by little hearts finds its way into the hands of an old man who, even at breakfast, looks exhausted. A woman who has arrived on a walking frame holds a mug from a fitness club. The boys seldom drink coffee with the clients; they tend to nip into the Korean grocery next door where they can buy cheap Red Bull in cans covered with Chinese characters. The whole world drinks caffeine but the way we get it divides us every which way.
At one level, the boys come to the House of Welcome to lend a hand. But really the purpose is for them to meet the people they most need to meet, people beyond any network, ones whose lives are so frayed that they have abandoned pretence, people who don’t know where they will sleep tonight. The problem is that with all the serving and washing up, there isn’t always much room for conversation and the people at the House of Welcome aren’t always much good at it anyway. So sometimes the visits just allow us to feel a gap which is always there but mostly hidden: the gap between those who have their own beds and those who don’t.
The increasing prevalence of drugs and mental illness has meant that the homeless are harder to engage than maybe once they were, at least as I seem to recall. In my first few weeks at the school, I went on a street retreat with some senior boys, part of which involved helping a wonderful group of volunteers called Rosie’s at Flinders Street Station. The boys were a little nervous so, being an old veteran, I thought I’d show them how it was done. I moved my shoulders in a ‘watch me, kids’ manner and approached one of the characters who makes up the Rosie’s community.
‘How are you?’ I asked.
‘Fuck off.’
I wasn’t prepared to back down in front of the boys.
‘Have you had a good day?’ I persevered.
He paused, lost in thought, then gave me a look that would cut bone.
‘I thought I told you to fuck off.’
I turned back to the boys.
‘See,’ I said. ‘That’s how it’s done.’