One night I was out on a late walk, weird sounds from the insects and creepy shadows of the trees was worth experiencing. I managed to get to Southbank, where you could easily watch the city lights whilst staying outside of the evening rush.
I was climbing the stairs when I saw a man, at first I got scared a bit, because he was there cosily sitting with all his bags, but I wanted to get down. With "hey there" (so common here) we passed him. He kindly greeted us and said some more trivial phrases. Turned out that most of the local homeless are rather nice people. You shouldn't be as scared of them in the darkness as it is in Riga. They kindly give you a weather forecast on the way, that 5 minutes later turns out to be wrong - it starts raining hard, although the nice guy on the stairs suggested that it won't be raining tonight at all.
I haven't caught on the camera any of the guys wearing cotton pants and boots or dirty shorts and beach flip-flops. Many of them are aborigines, and mostly very educated. Often you see homeless sitting on one of the park benches in a shade reading serious books. Sometimes their big beards and long hair remind you of long ago extinct hippy communes, but they wont ask you for money, and I guess they are very lucky living here, where you shouldn't be concerned about frostbites.
Australians are not very nice towards the free homeless people. There are special metal borders around the plants next to important buildings, where they dont want the homeless to sit down during the night. The idea of the metal thing is not to let anyone sleep on the borders, too narrow to even sit on them.
What makes it even more sarcastic is that the metal borders are on a narrow concrete edges, although just next to it is a very nice place wide enough to rest the tired body.
However I am very sure that these men prefer benches in parks or already mentioned stairs much more than concrete next to some private institution.
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