There’s four of us here at the moment in this van. Us and two of the kids. Before we came here we’d actually been sleeping on the floor, so just having a bed to ourselves is a bit of a bonus.
With no money and a rusty old car, us getting up here was a bit of a struggle. When we got to Melbourne we shacked up in the car for a night out the front of a church waiting for the minister to get up. I went up and asked him for a bit of help and he gave us some money for petrol and helped us on our way and that got us to the next town and the dole came through.
As far as parks are concerned, this is the best one we’ve been in. A lot of people complain about awful people being around here, but we don’t associate with that sort of crowd so we don’t have a hassle with them.
The main reason we came up here was for work. I’m a jack of all trades. I’ve done everything I can think of. At the moment I’m working at Lifeline up here, but that’s more of a work for the dole type project, just getting me to meet people. We just went out and bought ourselves a stereo today. Splurged out. That cost us a couple of hundred dollars, which we just can’t afford at the moment but we need it. We don’t have the other luxuries. Maree’s stuck here on her own and she loves her music so it was a bit of a priority. The next thing will be a phone.
We’re happy to get away from a lot of the people we’d been hanging around with. A lot of people didn’t want us to be together. It caused a lot of ruckus between us so we thought… No, bugger them. We’ll move up and be on our own where no one knows us or nothing. If it means we have to be in a little hut like this at the moment, well it doesn’t matter for now.
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