When first leaving home as a young adult from a home that wasn’t a peaceful home, a place with verbal abuse (“you are not worth pissing on” etc) my Mum’s boyfriend of the time a foul mouthed alcoholic shouting invective. I loaded all I owned at the time into a shopping trolley and pushed it from Randwick to Mascot, lived with a kind young Tongan family of my girlfriend’s sister of the time until I could get government support financially. Then I pushed the trolley from Mascot to Darlinghurst and started my studies of art while living above a gallery in a hovel.

I was happy though, I loved the peace and quiet of those days, although I had my share of anxieties. It was a long road before I achieved wisdom and a more stable peace of mind. Really these things come with age and the challenges rent by trying to get ahead. Hope for peace of mind seems to have diminished collectively further and further as the pressures of a broken system play out against the backdrop of climate collapse and a large-scale war in Europe. There are people who are barely hanging on, those who seem at any moment to lose their grip and become part of the homeless and destitute.

If my issues from the past happened now, I could easily have found myself in a world of trouble. Although governments and banks are happy to lend money to young people as they are then locked into paying back the debt and have the time to eventually do it. I remember once I was waiting for a bus after leaving home to head back to Mascot and a young man thought I was homeless and was about to give me money. My clothes were from charity shops, my shoes were worn down, I looked depressed but really I was living in my safe space, my imagination.