In 1993 I wrote an article for Arena Magazine (October-November) that described the overwhelmingly negative and disempowering representations of people living on the streets that prevail in Western society and culture, particularly the representation of young homeless people in the fifteen-month period following the release of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission report Our Homeless Children, (Burdekin Report.)

I contended that within popular culture, media representations, the advertising of some welfare agencies and public commentary and reports, there was a tendency to animalise people who live on the streets. The result of this animalisation was the disempowering of homeless people through their representation as incoherent babbling drunks, the wild, drug crazed miscreants and the "feral" runaways. For this special issue of Parity on the representation of homelessness, it is appropriate to return to this discussion to assess whether much has changed over the last decade.

The time of the Burdekin Report remains an extremely useful period to in which to examine images and representations of homelessness. In Melbourne, from the 18th of February 1989 ("Burdekin Report" released 21 February) until the 25th of May 1990, The Age published 13 homeless feature articles that had an accompanying photograph. Of these thirteen photographs nine were taken in laneways or at least gave that impression. The remaining four were set in a deserted railway/factory siding, a squalid looking squat, a derelict hotel, and a suburban backyard complete with a caravan to house "homeless children". The three things that concerned me were the place the photographs were taken, how homeless young people were depicted, and how they are placed in relation to "experts".

That some homeless people may visit, use and sometimes even sleep in laneways is not the concern here, rather it is the frequency with which they are pictorially positioned in them, or more pointedly, that they are seldom depicted anywhere else. This placement erroneously suggests that laneways are the primary space of homeless people, rather than simply being a place to score, inject or piss. Laneways are seldom used by most homeless people for sleeping or hanging out. Anyone who has spent any amount of time in the vicinity of laneways, particularly at night, knows that they are more likely to be confronted by a rat or stray cat than a person. Rather than being photographed in the welfare agency in which they had obviously been interviewed, homeless people were photographically positioned in the domain of animals.

Perhaps as equally important as the laneway as photographic site, is how homeless people are positioned in them. "Homeless" people are usually photographed from above with their entire body showing, dominated by the space that surrounds them. In one of the photographs from this time, a young man was pictured backed into a corner like a cornered rat and from such a height that he seemed like a specimen under a microscope.

In the highly staged photographs, young people were generally pictured alone (and pitiful) or, when in a group, detached from others in the shot (even looking away from each other). Certainly, homelessness can be an extremely isolating and lonely existence but the dominant message here is that homeless people are incapable of meaningful human interaction.

The positioning of homeless "experts" (e.g. Brian Burdekin or agency representatives) lies in stark contrast to homeless people. The "expert" is always in control of the space in which they are positioned. They dominate, and perhaps silence, any of the homeless people with whom they are photographed. In permitting themselves to be represented in this way, the expert, perhaps inadvertently, colludes in the further distancing of people living on the streets who appear incapable of human speech or agency. It is understandable that "experts" may not want to play up the notion of agency because of political and sector funding implications - if a homeless person is in control, then nothing need be done. The point is that negative representations suggest that homeless people are pathologically retarded, lazy or weak and therefore incapable of change

The "homeless" are discussed and depicted in ways that homogenise and universalise the diversity in their lives, the different reasons for their predicament and the variety of ways they cope with it. The consequence of their positioning as biologically or socially inferior is that street people are silenced, distanced or ignored and then placed in the position of needing (expert) mediation or interpretation. In short, through representation, the homeless person is positioned as "other".

Leaving aside the immense signifying power of the photographs, it is not uncommon for homeless people to be described in animalistic terms. They are frequently described as "feral", "wild" or being like a stray cat, mouse or dog - see Footnote 1. Unfortunately, such descriptions still seem to have journalistic currency. In a 1999 article in The Age, John Elder characterised male street dwellers as being like "nightcrawlers" who survive "wandering the wilderness of abandoned dogs... howling in pairs .... walking abreast and barking". Within the homeless sector itself, references to "feral" homeless can be found in some agency's reports. Often their television advertising concentrates on the laneway positioning of homeless people and welfare workers assisting them (even if they do not actually undertake outreach). One agency even depicted machine gun carrying men in the back of a ute driving down laneways searching for "streetkids" to "cull".

It is important to analyse critically the effects of these sorts of representation because they influence the community's capacity to comprehend homelessness. Negative representations provide a strong alibi for the inaction of repressive regulatory and harassing tactics aimed at impeding homeless people's occupation of many of the urban spaces upon which their survival depends.

For example, the idea of the "undesirable" has been employed numerous times in strategies aimed at inhibiting homeless person's access to urban space. The term was effectively employed in St Kilda in 1986 by the local police and the City Council to rationalise the removal of the street seating and for the establishment of a temporary police station ("annex") on Fitzroy Street. Apart from vague references to "drunks and drug dealers", what constituted an "undesirable" was never defined.

The removal of the seating affected many local residents who used the street as their primary social space. Removal of the seats (and their replacement by private café seating) was combined with a greatly increased police presence that had many long-term repercussions. Most notably it contributed to a rise in the harassment of people who socialised on the street. It increased fear of apprehension by those deemed "undesirable" by the mostly junior police officers. The streetscape became hostile to all but those spending money. Without street seating, many frail and elderly locals could no longer shop, walk or socialise on the street. The seats removal occurred despite the City acknowledging that the removal of the seats would not prevent undesirable behaviour. Much to the delight of many developers and retailers, the seat removal policy did however, nicely fit with the closure of many of the area's rooming houses. The effect was to produce homelessness by destroying the low cost housing stock, then demonise and harass people out of the area for being homeless. Using the vague notion of the undesirable, similar attacks on public street seating, toilets and the like, combined with calls for a greater police presence, continue to appear with regular monotony in the public domain.

In the November 2000 Herald Sun's "Clean up the Streets" campaign, the notion of the "undesirable" is no longer quite so nebulous. Instead of vague references to drug dealers and drunks, we find that "the homeless", "loiterers", "beggars" and "the crazies" are now openly pilloried and aligned with "petty thieves", "street thugs", "standover merchants", and, interestingly, "too many people in tracksuits". The nebulous notion of the "undesirable" has shifted into an open hostility and contempt for homeless people. The homeless are now scum that must be "cleaned" from the "dirty old town", the "once proud and gracious city now crumbling into urban decay".

Beggars were one of the main targets of the Herald Sun Campaign. It made numerous references to "professional beggars" who make up to $200 a day, including a Doncaster couple who "allegedly" earned $1000 a week. It even described one "filthy, bare footed" beggar who held up his pants with one hand and later caught a train "home after a good morning's work in the city". It quoted a police source as saying many beggars were found with $40 on them, which was confiscated as proceeds of crime. Since 1995 when it announced that "beggars have arrived", The Age has also written over five articles on the existence of professional beggars including "Fagin" like characters who coerce children into working for them. In one of them, the Superintendent of the Melbourne central police district declared that "99.9 per cent of people begging were not legitimate".

Spatial constraints do nor permit a thorough historical discussion of the long held suspicion of fraudulent beggars that has existed since at least industrialisation, but it would suffice to say that it is alive and well in contemporary Melbourne. The stand taken against begging, as a form of entrepreneurial free enterprise, conflicts with the more commonly accepted forms of economic practice. Whereas begging is seen as an urban ill, the "privatisation" of urban space in the form of privatised (café) street seating and the increasing presence polluting advertising imagery, is not.

In the Herald Sun's cry of "Shame of our city", which like all shame should simply be hidden from view, begging is not seen as an indicator of an extreme poverty that is forced upon many people by today's economic and social climate, or on those with substance abuse problems, the unemployed, or those surviving in a grossly inadequate housing and welfare system. Instead it is seen as the fraudulent action of conniving, pathologically deviant and undeserving trash.

It is interesting to conjecture whether the earlier representations of homeless people, specifically their animalisation following the Burdekin Report, in particular the role played by some "experts" and welfare agencies could be said to have prefigured the outlandish reporting and representation of homeless people that typified the recent Herald Sun's "Clean up our Streets" campaign.

For further information on Project i, contact B.Rossiter@latrobe.edu.au or 03 928 5138.

This article first appeared in Parity (Council to Homeless Persons, Australia), Volume 14, Issue 1, February 2001 http://www.infoxchange.net.au/parity/

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Footnote 1
Describing someone living on the streets as feral is different to a person individually identifying themselves as feral as is often found within new age environmentalism. The disempowering image of the animalised feral street person predated the more confronting cultural appropriation (perhaps even empowering) use of the term by self-styled "ferals".

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