Iris Ray Nunn thought she had a plan B when she had to leave the cottage she was renting because the owner had decided her son would live there. “It was really unexpected that I had to move out. It was a friend,” she explains. Still, she had a coaster bus. “It was like my backup.” She and her daughter had lived and travelled in that bus. “So I was like, no worries,” she says. But on the first hot day last November, the temperature gauge failed and the engine blew. “It was going to cost $9000 to fix it,” she explains. And that was when “my bubble burst. I went, oh sh*t. This is summer.” Iris, 47, has not had a home for eight months. “I’m actually homeless. It’s hard to even say it,” she tells The Weekly.

It takes stamina, courage and resilience. “You need to be fit and have a strong body to live in caravans or buses,” says Deva Kirin, 64, “because it involves a lot of physical challenges.” After living in both for the last five years, Deva was recently able to buy a 21-foot caravan. “It’s like living in a tiny house,” she explains. “It’s only got a bed and a potbelly stove, but it gives me the confidence and the courage to keep doing this in winter because I’ve got a way of keeping myself warm.” The caravan is permanently parked on the property of a “very kind, generous woman” six kilometres outside the town of Mullumbimby.

Charlie Tide has hit a wall of fatigue. She is exhausted from the disorganisation of not having a stable home, and from trying to protect her little girl. In the four years since her daughter was six months old and she broke up with her father, Charlie has moved 23 times. “Six of them were major moves with furniture and everything,” she says, “and the others were sublets, house sits, friends’ couches, various forms of that, and four solid bouts of homelessness. We’ve also been in bell tents – just canvas – so pretty cold.” Charlie is 28. She is a writer, creative designer and designs jewellery. “That has floated us since 2018,” she says. “But I’ve realised I can’t survive selling necklaces at fifty dollars a pop.

It’s the exhaustion, says Cassie Sheppard, that makes it so hard. “I plummeted into a sort of low-grade depression for a while. I would never, ever have imagined in my wildest dreams that I would be in this situation in my forties.” Cassie has a Masters’ degree, has travelled the world and worked in the corporate sector. She didn’t think she was the type of person to fall through the gaps. “I have a stable, permanent job,” she says. “I’ve done all the things that you’re supposed to do to be able to secure permanent housing. And it’s just not enough anymore.” A single mother with a 10-year-old daughter, last year she found herself having to pretend that camping was fun. Through no fault of her own, a succession of rental agreements had collapsed and for a while she was camping in her van.