SINGLE, FEMALE AND homeless

Today, there are 49,000 women who are homeless across the nation, with no means or assistance to have a home of their own. Michael Crooks reports on the increasingly fine line between being housed and unhoused for women in Australia

- Michael Crooks

Sitting inside her caravan home in a holiday park in Ballina, New South Wales, single mum Lauren looks at her daughter and beams. Three-year-old Freya is watching the children's television series Gabby's Dollhouse on her mum's laptop, a rare treat for a girl who has no television, and she's soaking up every minute. The pair have been living in the borrowed caravan since the recent flooding of Lismore saw water slosh over the balcony of their second-storey apartment, nearly drowning them. The caravan holds a bed, a little couch with a table for meals, a bar fridge that can hold up to two days' worth of food, and a microwave. It's small, says Lauren, but it's a home.

Among the many drawbacks of their new accommodation are the nights' coldness, the winds that howl off the nearby bay, and the constant thump of music from the raucous local pub, a stone's throw from the caravan's aluminium frame.

Still, the art-obsessed, craft-loving Freya "seems to like it”, says Lauren, 27. “But we've been on this journey so many times she doesn't know any different. She doesn't know what a real home is, because we've never had one for longer than a year.”

Lauren is one of the thousands of women in Australia who don't have a permanent place to call their own. Before the flood, Lauren, a university-educated disability support worker, found herself homeless after leaving a turbulent home life. On a single income and Centrelink benefits, she had only recently persuaded a landlord to rent her the Lismore flat, after couch-surfing at friends' houses for weeks.

$7.6. BILLION IS NEEDED FOR THE LONG-TERM HOUSING OF AUSTRALIA'S HOMELESS WOMEN OVER THE NEXT FOUR YEARS