Three Quick Updates.

First (and most important) Dave is much better. A night in hospital and a couple of nights in temporary accommodation have made the world of difference to his health.
Dave used to have a good ‘squat’ but he went away for a few weeks in June to try to find work. When he came back he found his place had been taken (which isn’t surprising). A few more weeks in more exposed places and he became unwell.

We haven’t managed to find anything more permanent for him. As a temporary solution, we will organise him a tent and a new swag. Some of our regulars have agreed to make space under ‘their’ bridge for him to pitch his tent. It’s not much, but at least he should be able to stay dry and relatively warm.

Now on a slightly worrying note: Io (my middle daughter) has come in this evening and said “There is no sign of the swans on the nest.”
I saw one was sitting on Thursday, but I didn’t go past yesterday. Io said she could see eggs apparently abandoned in the nest.

I am a bit worried. However, taking the optimistic line the cygnets may have hatched and the mother may have taken them elsewhere.
It is dark now so there is no point in going out tonight (black swans are awfully hard to see at night).
I was going down in the morning anyway to snap some photos for my Sunday Swan Watch, so I will have a good look around and see what I can see.

Finally, and finishing on a more positive note: back in July I announced Christine was the winner of my Piccie Give-Away.
Christine decided on her three piccies, which I had printed and duly sent off to the UK.
Christine has now received her piccies and has kindly agreed that I can share her choices.
She said it was a lengthy process choosing as she wanted to pick three from a single theme.

The theme she chose was a water/landscape one.
Christine’s choices were:
Bay of Martyrs, Victoria
Rocks and waves at Bermagui

and a restful waterfall The Toorongo Falls

Down and Out in Melbourne

I have to apologise, but the tone of this post isn’t exactly cheery.

Things have been rough lately for many of the guys who use the homeless services I run. The cold weather is having a real impact. A number of guys have ended up in hospital with conditions like fevers and pneumonia.

About the only saving grace in such situations is the major hospitals in Oz are public and essentially free.
Yet getting a hospital bed is not the end of the guys’ problems. Often their condition will only be stabilised and then there is pressure on them to be discharged.
Once they are discharged it means straight back onto the street, there simply are not enough emergency accommodation beds in the city.

So a good deal of our time over the past little while has been work around this kind of issue.

Yesterday for example, a regular of ours (I’ll call him Dave) showed up at our breakfast service clearly very unwell. Dave had a high fever and could barely move for pain. My offsider Greg and I spent an hour making sure he got to hospital. Then I was on the phone a number of times to try to get Dave’s needs followed up.

Dave was discharged today, he’d been on intravenous anti-biotics overnight and looked quite a bit better. But nothing like well enough to spend a night on the street or under a bridge.

So I spent a good chunk of the morning phoning around to get Dave some emergency accommodation. The best I could organise: two nights of motel accommodation paid for by an accommodation agency.

As you can guess a situation like this is extremely frustrating. We are working in a system that is in my opinion badly broken.

It would be easy to get very down about how little we can achieve. Yet, what I take from an experience like this is essentially uplifting. I have done what I can, I have tried my hardest. Dave has at least a couple of nights of safety. That means something.

And who knows what we might achieve tomorrow.

Now for a change of pace a Pacific Reef Heron I “caught” up on the NSW south coast as he hunted along a wave washed rock shelf.I haven’t seen one of these guys before although they are apparently quite common around our coast.