Uncertain future: Like many others, Sakunthala '’Rita’' Armugam, her husband Sivasegaran, and their three boys are desperate to find a new home after their rental home of six years was damaged in Shepparton floods.
Photo by
Rechelle Zammit
Sakunthala "Rita" Armugam, her husband Sivasegaran, and their three boys aged 10, nine and six, are the reluctant faces of Shepparton’s latest wave of homelessness brought on by the region’s floods.
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“My kids are uncomfortable, they keep asking, ‘We need to go home. I can’t stay here.’ The little one doesn’t understand, the six-year-old, he doesn’t understand,” Ms Armugam said.
“It is a very difficult time. We arrived in Australia with nothing and then we built up everything here, the business, community and all those things, suddenly it’s gone, everything is gone again.
The family arrived in Australia in 2014 from Malaysia on protection visas, moving to Shepparton and starting a commercial and domestic cleaning business, but on October 16, their world was again turned upside down as the flood waters turned up.
The family had been in Melbourne and returned to find water through their home.
“First thing we saved was the puppy,” Ms Armugam said.
“He was on the couch. I saved a few important documents and I saved my puppy.
“I’m doing a cleaning business, all my cleaning stuff, everything is gone. I can’t go to work from Saturday until now.
“All my cleaning stuff is gone and we don’t have a house, we’re staying in the hotel.”
On top of the concern about where they will live, the family’s landlord has given them two weeks to remove all their belongings from the house, and they don’t know where they will store them.
“I’m really stuck. I feel like when we first arrived in Australia, something like that,” she said.
Work to do: (from left to right) Olivia McInnes, CEO Celia Adams and Jess Bardic are part of Beyond Housing’s team working to link people rendered homeless by the floods with safe and secure accommodation.
Photo by
Rechelle Zammit
The family has turned to Beyond Housing to try and find a home in a market that was already in crisis and it is not the only one.
“Beyond Housing staff are located in Tatura, Shepparton and Seymour relief centres,” Beyond Housing CEO Celia Adams said.
“We’ve seen 160 people who have approached us for support, that’s across 74 households and 58 of those 160 people are children, ranging in ages up to the age 16, the youngest is two months old.”
Greater Shepparton City Council said more than 800 people had been to evacuation centres across Shepparton and Tautra during the floods, while on Monday afternoon just 83 people remained.
There’s no indication how much longer the centres will stay open for.
Ms Adams said more people in need were likely to emerge as water in their homes recedes.
“I think there are still people accommodated with family and friends and we all know that the longer people stay with family and friends we outlive our welcome a little bit,” she said.
“We had a homelessness and housing crisis before this emergency and that is exacerbated by an emergency coupled with all things that come with an emergency and not just accommodation.
“They’re the primary health, the mental health, the financial impact. People who aren’t able to get to jobs or their work has been severely impacted.”
Ms Adams said longer-term solutions were in the pipeline, such as Beyond Housing itself having 163 affordable rental properties coming online by December 2024, but a more immediate answer was needed for those with nowhere to go right now.
She said she had been telling the politicians moving through the region as the emergency had unfolded just that.
“My recommendation to them was that we need a here-and-now solution, possibly similar to what we saw post the Black Saturday bushfires of demountables in a space with services and support,” Ms Adams said.
Omeni Ndlovu, who works with the Salvation Army’s homelessness program, also expects more people in need of housing to emerge in coming weeks.
“Remember, we’re talking about Shepparton, which is a multicultural area and some of the people have never experienced this before and some of them obviously won’t even know where to go and who to contact,” he said.
“We have about 50 people we are case managing, who are not in housing, but who are seeking housing. They are staying with relatives and friends, couch surfing.
“We have had quite a few camping in the bush, which is flooded.
“At the present moment, for those in housing, we still do not know how many of those people have had their houses overrun with water, so more people are going to come asking for support in one way or another.”
Mr Ndlovu urged people in need of accommodation to register their need at an emergency relief centre or to contact police.
“Our challenge is at the evacuation centres because if they have not been registered at the evacuation centres they are not in the data system,” he said.
