One cold night in a car

It was the coldest night of the year, and Jeff and I were trying to sleep in our car at The Ranch in Boneo.

We’d barely settled when we heard a thin, high whine and thought a mosquito had got in. It took us a while to realise it wasn’t a mosquito. It was our blow-up mattress, slowly going down. The night was about to get longer and harder than we’d planned.

We were there for the Southern Peninsula SleepOut, the first one, run by The Ranch with Southern Peninsula Community Support. A car site, a food pack like the ones the centre hands out to people doing it rough, some soup and a hot cuppa, and a night to sit with something most of us get to look away from. The organisers were upfront that it wasn’t meant to be comfortable. That was the point.

We had a car site, a food pack like the ones the centre gives to people doing it rough, some soup, a hot cuppa and a night to sit with something most of us get to look away from. The organisers were upfront that it wasn’t meant to be comfortable. That was the point.

But here’s what I keep coming back to. Ours was a night we chose, and we knew it ended in the morning. We had a warm house to drive home to, hot water, a kettle and a Saturday that would carry on as normal. Nobody knocked on the window. Nobody moved us on. We were uncomfortable, but we were never unsafe.

Those two things are not the same. One cold night in a car didn’t show us what homelessness feels like, but it made that difference impossible to ignore.

Lying there, Jeff and I talked about how you would do this if it weren’t a choice. How you would hold down a job, fronting up the next day on no sleep and without a shower, hoping nobody could tell. Or how you would manage if you had got yourself and your children out of a violent home, and a cold car was the safer option.

That’s the part that stays with me. For too many people here, a car isn’t the fundraiser. It’s the plan.

And this is our patch. In one of the most beautiful and sought-after parts of the country, people are sleeping in dunes, reserves and cars. Local support depends on a patchwork of community donations, Shire funding and state-funded outreach. All of it matters. But the people doing the work told us that, together, it still provides less than half of what they need.

That gap won’t be closed by goodwill alone.

I’m glad we did the SleepOut. Not because one cold night gave us any real understanding of what it means to be homeless, and certainly not because it changed anything on its own. I’m glad because, for one night, it made something usually hidden in our community impossible for us to look away from.

I’m Kim Robbins. I live on the Mornington Peninsula and I write about what I see here: how our community works, where it’s let down, and what we can do about it. If this piece struck a chord, share it with someone local, and subscribe to get the next one.