Iris Ray Nunn

Iris Ray Nunn thought she had a plan B when she had to leave the cottage she was renting because the owner had decided her son would live there. “It was really unexpected that I had to move out. It was a friend,” she explains.

Still, she had a coaster bus. “It was like my back-up.” She and her daughter had lived and travelled in that bus. “So I was like, no worries,” she says.

But on the first hot day last November, the temperature gauge failed and the engine blew.

“It was going to cost $9000 to fix it,” she explains. And that was when “my bubble burst. I went, oh sh*t. This is summer.”

Iris, 47, has not had a home for eight months.

“I’m actually homeless. It’s hard to even say it,” she tells The Weekly.

She lived in her car through summer, doing Zoom meetings from picnic tables. Then she sold the bus to pay for the repairs and was able to buy a caravan with what was left over. She has recently written a book, Climbing The World’s Tallest Tree, but feels her life is consumed with more basic issues: “Where do I live? Where do I put my laptop? Where do I go to the toilet? I’ve got no electricity, I’ve got no water. I have to make sure my laptop is charged. I can’t actually do more than meet my basic needs right now.”

Iris has lived in the Northern Rivers for 22 years. She once owned a house in a valley, with a partner, but after they split, she sold the house to pay out his share. As a single woman, she couldn’t get finance to buy another house. Yet Iris is resilient.

“I personally am actually okay, living in something really small without too many material things to take care of,” she says. When it gets dark, “I have the little lights that you put batteries in, and I use the light of my phone. I’ll use a head torch. It’s such a dance to live like that. In a way it’s pretty good for the human spirit, that side of things. I’ve got a plan [to move somewhere] where I will have power, and I will have the water on. I will be off the grid, self-sufficient, and I can grow a garden. It’s about working with the elements and rising above it.”