The Forum for Dwelling Justice, held in Naarm (Melbourne) in August 2022, aimed to examine the colonial relations of housing precarity and forge solidarity between sites of resistance. The Forum brought together leaders, activists, community-based practitioners, scholars and film-makers to stage a conversation about precarity, racial violence, incarceration and dispossession and how these dynamics shape the ways we dwell, and fight for dwelling justice, here on stolen land.

In one panel at the Forum, peer-led dwelling justice projects were the theme, with film-makers Jazmine Barzani, Lucie McMahon and documentary radio hosts Kelly Whitworth and Spike Chiappalone (Homeless in Hotels) in conversation with the Secretary of the Renters and Housing Union, Eirene Tsolidis Noyce. Attendees at the event were treated to preview showings of two films documenting dwelling justice struggles—Bendigo Street and Things Will Be Different. The following text is an edited transcript of the discussion that followed.  

Eirene Tsolidis Noyce

My name is Reeni and I’m the secretary of the Renters And Housing Union. We formed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic through the rent strike movement in 2020. We are the largest renter’s union in the country and we are growing every day. Our work takes place in the context of other political projects and creative pursuits for dwelling justice, led by some incredible creative talents, activists and comrades in the struggle, and taking sovereignty as fact. In this conversation, we talk about a number of film and radio works documenting campaigns in Melbourne in a time of intense housing crisis. The Bendigo Street documentary, created by Jasmine Barzani chronicles a squatting campaign in Melbourne and the steps we can take to support the struggle for decolonization. Kelly Whitworth and Spike Chiappalone talk about their radio series Homeless in Hotels, and Lucie McMahon talks about her film Things Will be Different, documenting displacement of families from a public housing estate.

Jasmine Barzani

The Bendigo Street film is an unfinished work that is still yet to incorporate an interview with Uncle Larry Walsh that we did in 2021, where he’ll give the big plot twist, the big revelation, spoiler alert: that we’re on Aboriginal land. The reason the film started incorporating this phrase ‘dwelling justice’ was because we wanted to use a phrase that reached beyond just housing, a phrase that encapsulated First Nations rightful claim to their inheritance, which includes the land, country, a dwelling place, and it includes their stories as well. The Bendigo Street campaign was in large part driven by First Nations people who are experiencing homelessness in their own land. There isn’t any film out there, documentary film, that links decolonial movement and thinking to housing and homelessness and First Nations struggle.

Kelly Whitworth

Spike and I just released a three-part radio series called Homeless in Hotels, that documents the lives of some of the people that were put into emergency hotel accommodation during the pandemic and some of the support workers who worked around their clients. We’re peers ourselves. We have both had lived experience of homelessness. We have both experienced the ups and downs of alcohol and other drug use and mental health issues throughout our lives. The radio series not only gives a platform for homeless peers to share their experience, but also homeless peers who are happy to talk about being substance users or struggling with mental health. It’s important that they were given a voice because of stigma and prohibition and the war on drugs in this country. We were able to offer a space for them to talk without judgement, shame, or censorship. 

Peter “Spike” Chiappalone

I think what’s really important is how the state government makes laws to suit a minority of people. Like in Bendigo Street, where government was going to build a road that was going to assist the transport industry. That same thing happened during the pandemic with vulnerable communities. The truth was that we weren’t all in this together, what people were experiencing in their lounge rooms, other people had to deal with services completely melting away, all their supports, gone overnight. They were basically forced into crisis accommodation, where they had no choice over where they were going, who they were going to be living with. They didn’t know how long they were going to be there and what the outcome was going to be. They lost total control of their lives. Homeless in Hotels gives voice to those experiences of homelessness or addiction. It’s important that people with a lived experience be involved in sharing their stories.

Lucie McMahon

Things Will be Different is a documentary film I made with Celeste de Clario, it is an intimate portrait of two people who were living at the Walker Street public housing estate when it was scheduled for demolition as part of the State Government’s public housing renewal program. We documented a very small picture of the way that this government policy works on people, how it was impacting the lives of two families. I grew up in public housing, and when I heard about this policy, we joined the Save Public Housing Collective. We didn’t really have a plan to make a documentary. But we felt as though this was an important moment to be documenting, where we felt like government was abandoning public housing and abandoning the people who rely on public housing.

Eirene Tsolidis Noyce

What are your personal connections to insecurity, insecurity of housing, insecurity of place and dwelling, in the colony, with capitalism being the driving force of that insecurity?

Peter “Spike” Chiappalone

I went to a talk once where an Irish housing academic came over to a homelessness conference. He said that homelessness was something that is like a ball of wool that starts on rolling the day you were born.  That really hit home for me. Our family wasn’t dirt poor but a working family. There was addiction in my family, mental health issues. Drugs consumed my life as a teenager, I got lost in that whole thing. My home didn’t feel safe and so my relationship to housing is a complicated one. You go from house to house, or you are squatting or rough sleeping at a train station or wherever you can find some peace. If it wasn’t for public housing, I don’t know where I would be. I’ve been here for 18 years now and the five years before that was in a rooming house. Rooming houses take everything from you, they destroys you, dispossess you. That is that the violence of dispossession, a violence that impacts vulnerable communities when they are forced to pay 50% of their income to live in a house and share a toilet with 15 in a room. Housing insecurity is a part of life for vulnerable members of the community, it is not exceptional.

Jasmine Barzani

What Spike just did requires a lot of bravery and courage. A lot of people view talking about lived experience in all sorts of different ways. But he just opened himself up completely to all sorts of stigma, of being boxed into something that then he has to perform and potentially interrogations about his authenticity. It is important for a lot of different reasons, but we also need to acknowledge that the higher the stakes are for you, the harder it is to put your neck out. You literally have the full force of the colonial state coming at you with guns. I think in our organizing and in our political work, we need to think of ways of centering people in their experience that is creative and doesn’t require people with hectic lived experience to stand up in front of a big crowd of people, a lot of whom do not really understand or cannot relate to.

Eirene Tsolidis Noyce

I started getting involved in housing struggle when I had to make sure that my own home was a safe and centered place, that there was some stability. I didn’t realize just how connected that was to having experienced violence myself, or being one of the many women who do regularly. All of this demonstrates the necessity of homes being part of a bigger picture of our needs, including being safe from violence, and including the supports.

Kelly Whitworth

We live in a capitalist society where housing is tied up in the free market. You don’t grow up in this country knowing that housing is embedded into the way that we live and the safety net that we all should have. Access to health care and education is dependent upon access to safe and secure housing. That is not embedded knowledge. When I became homeless, it wasn’t like I could just easily make a phone call to some local authority and be able to easily get into safe housing, my options would have been really limited. It would have been the street or friends’ couches, or in a rooming house, because I could not afford to rent a place by myself. There needs to be a big squatting movement going on. I am absolutely not joking. I have no faith in government, they work for themselves, they work with their mates. It’s up to us to force their hand.

Peter “Spike” Chiappalone

When people who are having a lived experience of homelessness, and they are walking past real estate agents and they see all these houses, seeing all these houses advertised as available and people start to blame themselves. It’s a ‘blame the victim’ culture in Australia. It is your fault for not being able to make it, and there is a real disconnect between what actually happens in the real world and what people experience. It makes people ill, the brutality of colonial capitalism, it makes people really unwell.

Lucie McMahon

This stigma that you are talking about, that gets imposed on people who aren’t able to make it because we are living in a world where there is a neoliberal myth that you should be able to work and then get into the property market and set yourself up, and anyone who has not been able to do that has failed. I think that attitude is also what underpins the state government’s ability to get away with the Public Housing Renewal Program and the Big Housing Build. These policies allow them to sell off these huge areas of land, Crown land, and nobody really blinks an eye because there is a really pervasive mentality that you should be able to take care of yourself.

Jasmine Barzani

Chelsea Watego told us ‘fuck hope’ and I have conflicting feelings. I go back and forth between having hope and then being like, fuck. The reason that we’re saying ‘fuck hope’ is because we know that this system is fundamentally not changeable. It is designed and produced from its inception to create and uphold private property, a concept brought into this place to steal Aboriginal land and to convert land into the possession of white settlers. That’s what is underpinning all of this. Why aren’t things changing? What can we do? How can we change a system that not going to change until we decolonize. They are not going to change until we reckon with the fact that all of our experiences of housing deprivation and housing insecurity and homelessness is because of colonialism. And it continues because of colonialism. Incarceration, housing, patriarchy, white supremacy, the things that intersect with colonialism to maintain the status quo, continue pushing people away from the center towards death. Housing precarity brings you closer to death.

When colonizers first came on this land, they were squatters. They called it a squattocracy, it became a phenomena where white Europeans were invading, taking land that was not theirs and squatting on it. Eventually legislation was developed through liberalism, through the carceral state, police and borders, to facilitate the ability of these invaders to legally squat using European legislation, not customary law. And now squatting is illegal again because it helps to maintain power for a minority of people who can continue to privilege from their positions of power.

Eirene Tsolidis Noyce

A comrade in the Bendigo Street film said, we would be better and stronger standing up, because everyone was sitting down in front of the police on Bendigo Street when things were kicking off towards the end. I think it is a really powerful statement: we’re not going to take it sitting down. Robbie Thrope said it best: between all of us who are invested in seeing a different structure happen, step up.

Peter “Spike” Chiappalone

Robbie’s power is through his storytelling and his ability to communicate a message to people regardless of their background. Jasmine does it with Bendigo Street. We did it with the Homeless in Hotels. Lucie and Celeste did it with Things Will be Different. It is really important to tell our stories because that is how we learn. We learn stuff from each other through stories. If you don’t get the opportunity or the platform to speak your mind, in a safe place, it never happens.

Join the Renters And Housing Union, support campaigns that sit well with your sense of justice. Go to your local library, borrow cameras, just get out there. Community is key. When we experience things individually it is a lot more difficult, but when the strength is community support, there’s power. With colonial capitalism, it draws its strength in its feeling of being overwhelming, because you experience it by yourself. In a group situation, as a collective, we experience it together and there is strength in that.

Story: David Kelly