Inner Sydney is a world of contrasts. The well-heeled, the survivors, the creative, and those who have fallen between the cracks in the social cement all mingle on the same pavement. It doesn’t take much to have those cracks appear. One minute you think you are in charge of your life and then…you’ve fallen through.
I’d noticed her whilst we’d been having our regular Women’s and Girls Emergency Centre Sub-committee meeting at my local pub. The pub is close to a major hospital. There’s a residential hotel next door. She had the look of someone from out of town. From the bush. She was eating dinner alone. After the rest of the committee left with their action plans I asked her if I could join her. She was grateful for the company.
She was a teacher from the central west. Her husband was a farmer. But he was in the city now for a triple-bypass. Her life had been the close-knit community of the country. She was floundering now. She asked about my group and I told her that we were involved with an organization providing support for inner-city women who had nowhere to live. No homes. Seemingly no hope. But, if you could just reach out and offer these women a sense of hope, of community, a chance to reach through the social cracks and get back on their feet…then hope was reborn and life could be seen to flower again.
Our steak and chips came. We ate.
She said how distressed she’d been to see such women as she wandered the streets whilst her husband lay in theatre: his chest open. She’d not seen women reduced to homelessness before. It was foreign, alien, to her conception of a world where people helped each other. It was so hard for her to conceive of a woman living in fear and confusion.
Her own daughters were scattered across the land: having families, having careers. Her own focus kept coming back to the rising generations: children needing a chance to become adults and make a mark in the world. And now seeing women who had tried their best…only to see it all come undone.
“I want to give you something,” she said.
She opened her purse and pulled out her cheque-book and wrote a cheque to WAGEC. She gave it to me. We looked at each other.
“I just want to do something.” she said, “Something for other women.”
We touched cheeks in the way women who don’t really know each other do.
“Thank you,” I said. “Thank you so much. I hope he’ll be fine.”
“He will,” she said. “He’s a survivor.”
We went out into the night together. An ambulance wailed by and swept down to the hospital entrance.
“All the best,” I said.
“And you,” she said. “And your organization.”
“Thank you.”
She smiled and I smiled back and we went our separate ways.
