SQUATTERS CALL BLUE-CHIP CBD PROPERTY HOME:
A blue-chip chip property in the heart of Geelong has become home for a small group of opportunistic squatters, who have turned the unoccupied former dental clinic into a home of their own. The new tenants have divided opinions of neighbours, with some welcoming the “friendly” and “respectful” core group while another has raised concerns with drug use and destruction of the building. HARRISON TIPPET speaks to the resourceful residents.
ANYONE can find themselves homeless, Kyle Hocking warns.
For the former jockey, it was a 500kg racehorse falling on him in a mounting yard in 2014, snapping the radius and ulna bones of his forearm.
The career-ending injury resulted in a steady descent into homelessness for the jockey with 1000 starts and almost 100 wins, who is stuck impatiently waiting for workplace compensation.
Now, just four short years since he last piloted a rampaging thorough- bred around a racetra racetrack, the 31-yearold is squatting in an unoccupied former dental surgery in the heart of Geelong.
Kyle sleeps in his van parked behind the Bellerine St house, while two mates and a rotating cast of Geelong’s roughly 1500 homeless make the most of the safety offered by the seemingly abandoned property.
“I started here probably eight months ago, nine months ago,” Kyle explains from the rear porch of the house, next to saw-toothed window frames that once held full panes of glass.
“I’d met a few other people who were homeless in the same situation, and I’d come around here with them.
“I tried to linger on and really help all the other guys who are homeless, because, as you could imagine, it’s pretty hard when you’re on your own and all that, so we all look after each other and help each other out a bit.
“Me, Neil and Scotty are pretty much the main permanent ones. There are a couple of other people who just pop in now and then when they need somewhere to put their head down and that sort of thing.”
The owner of the property is yet to make contact with the squatters, Kyle says, leaving the men free to enjoy the place they call home, at least for now.
Though only 31, he looks older. A wispy black beard straps his chin, with dark hair tucked under a black cap. He still has the frame of a jockey — short and slight, with stringy muscles hanging down his arms.
He’s also relentlessly shadowed by a staffordshire bull terrier named Samson, a wide-smiling pup who has barely left Kyle’s side over the past two years.
Neil Carter, 53, is another of the house regulars. Long grey hair and a bushy beard hide a handsome face, streaked with the creases of a life lived the hard way.
Neil is quieter than Kyle, preferring to let his assertive younger housemate do the talking. He is also old enough to know the dangers of sleeping rough in a Geelong winter, and thankful to have had a roof over his head for this year’s colder months.
“We’ve got a bloke here older than us,” Neil says in a murmur. “Another winter out in the weather and he mightn’t make it.”
“Yeah, he might be stiff,” Kyle adds, meaning dead. “It wouldn’t be the first time someone’s been found out stiff like that, because it’s too cold.”
Living rent-free in the heart of Geelong does not translate to living carefree.
Water and electricity have been cut off to the property, so the men carry water drums to nearby public taps and use the nicer public toilets around town.
There is no bin collection, so completely clearing rubbish is a near impossible task — which does not stop the men from sweeping and
tidying every couple of days.
But, these are largely trivial issues compared with when trouble makes its way into the house.
“It’s the sort of trouble we can’t control,” Kyle says. “It’s people who are wild and silly, and just come running through and breaking things and that.”
“It’s unpredictable what can happen at night. It’s not odd for someone to come here with a broken nose, black eye, blood down them, because they’ve just been robbed or something. Or someone’s bashed them while they were asleep, just because they’re drunken idiots who want something to do.”
The interior of the Bellerine St house bears the scars of this trouble.
Almost every window in the house has been shattered despite being boarded up, including the decorative stained glass strips at the front door and in the hallway; doors and walls are pockmarked with holes and splashed with graffiti; and scorch marks run up the wall of a front bedroom after a short-term occupant decided to set a broom on fire in a broken fireplace.
Kyle, Neil and Scotty still do their best to clean the house, the yellow walls crisscrossed with patches of dull green paint where the graffiti left by visiting trouble is covered up.
Opinions on the squatters are divided among neighbours.
A business owner complained of damage to the building, graffiti and drug use, while some residents have labelled the core group of men “friendly” and “respectful”.
Kirsten Costa, who owns the Medical Health Group two doors up, said some residents and workers felt “unsafe, angry and concerned” with their new neighbours.
“Squatters and drug users have taken over and are destroying what was once a lovely, heritage building in among the medical precinct,” Ms Costa said. “Residents have noticed an increase in drug-affected people, garbage being dumped, graffiti and, of course, the destruction of the building.”
But other residents said the core group of squatters appeared to be working hard to avoid disrupting those living and working nearby, often clearing rubbish from the street and attempting to move on the troublesome “blow-ins”.
“They’re good, they come past, they’re trying to co-ordinate with the local community and trying to be as peaceful as they can. But, of course, some people are immediately prejudiced when they see people down and out,” said one neighbour, requesting to remain anonymous.
“I think in the short time they’ve been here, most of the time it’s been working. Sometimes it’s not, sometimes it’s a lot of swearing and cursing and you can’t sleep . . . I guess probably in about the five months they’ve been here, there’s probably been about four occasions they’ve been a bit loud.”
The neighbour suggested police had visited the squatters a handful of times over a six-month period, but Victoria Police did not respond to the
Geelong Advertiser’s request for details. Another neighbour described the men as “friendly” and “respectful”, and was particularly charmed by a conversation with one young man who could recite poetry.
The neighbour — who also asked to remain anonymous — said it was a “darn shame” to see young men appearing to be stuck in a cycle of homelessness.
“We’re not bad,” Kyle says, when asked what his message to concerned neighbours might be. “We’re not bad people; we’re not what everyone thinks or makes us out to be. We’re general homeless people, and if they put it in perspective they could be us too. It could happen to anyone. But people don’t look at it from that perspective.”
Victorian Legal Aid advice notes squatting is not against the law, but occupiers can be charged by police for trespassing. A property owner can also call police to evict squatters.
If the men squatting on Bellerine St manage the unlikely feat of living in the home for 15 years, they will be entitled to have their names entered on the land title.
Author John Steinbeck once described the vagrant paisanos of his novel Tortilla Flat as men “who merge successfully with their habitat . . . good people of laughter and kindness, of honest lusts and direct eyes”.
It is no stretch of imagination to paint the somewhat permanent inhabitants of this old dental surgery with the same palette.
The Geelong Advertiser was unable to contact the woman understood to own the Bellerine St property.
“We’re not bad people; we’re not what everyone thinks or makes us out to be. We’re general homeless people, and if they put it in perspective they could be us, too.”