Canvas Town returns to South Melbourne's Homelessness

Last week I wrote that “A Current Affair” was interested in doing a story on my problem of paying rent for 30 people depending on me for health and safety.

ACA isn’t interested anymore. They’ve got Didak and the Shaws, or, even, the Beijing Games to keep the Channel cashed up.

“Today Tonight” may cover the story. That’s the latest. My union mates, thanks to Kevin Bracken, parishioner and Maritime Union State Secretary, have put up a sizeable tent, a symbolic gesture, to depict our willingness to share church land with my 30 dependants.

South Melbourne was called in the early 1850’s, Canvas Town. Eureka happened in 1854. The Eureka tower, with its splash of gold (wealth) and slash of red (labour) looks down on our corner of Dorcas and Montague.

Two Eureka Tower entrepreneurs, Bruno and Nonda, are regular contributors to the care of the poor emanating from our parish precinct.

Our very street, Dorcas, is named for a Christian biblical woman of the 1st century of church history. She was an entrepreneur, too. She wove and dyed cloth to sell to make money to help the poor.

(The local Anglican church was named Dorcas before its current St. Luke.)

It’s time for me and this Catholic parish and our associates of all faiths, all social classes, who’ve cared for the poor for the last 35 years, to proudly present our efforts as a unique, urgent and flexible response to social exclusion, the toxic imprint left by laudable progress.

Beijing will dominate our screens for the next few weeks. We’ll see the Chinese version of socialist capitalism at work. We’ve, already, been taught that the late great Chairman Mao said it was OK for a few Chinese to become the first millionaires (although, surely, the forgotten “culture revolution” must have made a shadowy few millionaires – social engineering always does!) and the rest of the Chinese would become less poor.

As a Confucian wise saying, Mao’s words probably cut the mustard (as a decadent western saying goes). What I’m being forced to say, via this blog, and whatever other outlet I can hijack is what Chris Middendorp of Sacred Heart Mission said last week in The Age:
“Those of us working in the community sector over the past few years have watched the poverty and disadvantage swell and rise along with the property values of our city’s real estate.

Homelessness was a dire problem 10 years ago: it is now scandalously out of control and urgent intervention is now required.” Thanks Chris.

As a catholic, I was both titillated and shocked by the opulence of Catholic World Youth Day in Sydney. Now I’m shocked into agitation, education and organisation, even if the result is “the power of one”, to launch What If Day.

What if someone out there with disposable income, sponsored my/our puny but promising experiment to heal homelessness among 40 men, woman and children who’ve put their trust in me and mine.

R.J.M.

Comments

[~]

Name and shame bob;
Guilt is the mortar that holds the church together.
Surely you've heard enough in the confessional to start a universaly syndicated gossip magazine.

Note- you should call it my '5 cents, news even the chaser wouldn't touch'

[Deb]

I can't help but wonder Father Bob...if the canvas tent you've set up could become more than what you've called a "symbolic gesture"? If there is room there, why not a moveable building instead, so it is genuine emergency accomodation, rather than a publicity tent?

Further to the other commenter, how about a new 'sin tax' to raise the required funds - $5,000 for a mortal sin and $1,000 for a venial sin. Three Hail Marys and two Our Fathers will never stop people sinning anyway. Nobody leaves the confessional box till they cough up.

[~]

Deb, i'm sure bob would let you squat in the tent if you needed shelter.
As for a 'sin tax' why squeeze the middle classes, when you can blackmail the rich? (and call it social justice)