"We all have a mental picture of a homeless person, usually involving squalor, dirt, addiction, rage, missing teeth, drool, nuclear levels of halitosis, incoherent shouting, and personal hygiene issues. Skin colour or obvious cultural differences are often a factor in our assessments. We tend to think of mental illness, bodily excretions, poor bladder control. Homeless people stink of piss, and we don't. They're ancient too. We think of wretches old before their time wearing clothes we barely recognise as clothes. We are above all duly thankful that we don't belong to the same species, for the homeless have somehow become other, and that's how we'll always think of them. "At this stage of the 21st century fewer than one in six homeless men and women look like this. Most of them look like the rest of us, ordinary suburban Aussies, because that's who they are. There are at least half a million of them out there, and the number swells daily."

This is one man's account of a terrifying journey into the heart of a national tragedy which nobody wants to talk about.