Reaching out to the squatters from down the street laid bare their fragile existence

This article is more than 3 years old

Rose Lane

‘You’re wonderful!’ Beth said. But I didn’t feel wonderful. I felt privileged to have never experienced homelessness

I’ve always made friends with my neighbours. Some have become lifelong friends. We’ve cooked each other meals, minded animals, played music together. Recently I met some new, unusual neighbours.

“Hello?” I called from the temporary fence erected along the front of the old Queenslander. The building is sagging and decaying and looks as though on any day it could collapse into the river below. Sometimes when I passed it on my morning walk, I’d notice a side door open, other times closed. Then one morning I heard voices.

“Hello, squatters?” I called again, feeling foolish. Still no response. So I sucked up my fear, squeezed through a gap in the fence and walked toward the house.

I had wondered for a while whether to say hello. There have always been homeless people in Brisbane but in the last couple of years numbers have exploded. Winter this year was unusually cold. As I holed up in my warm house writing, I’d think about the people in the falling-down house. Should I take them hot food? But what if they were crackheads and tried to kill me? What if they followed me home and robbed me?

In the end I decided to give some money to the cafe around the corner then tell whoever was living there they could go and get whatever they wanted.

“Hello?” I called again as I approach the house. A voice said, “Come on in. You don’t need to be scared.”

Creeping in, I saw a woman and three men sitting on the floor, huddling under blankets. In front of them was a collection not of crack pipes or drug paraphernalia but tubes of paint.

“We’re artists,” the woman told me, as she stood and introduced herself and the others. I’ll call her Beth. “We’ve been decorating this place,” she said, and I saw the walls were covered in rainbow swirls of paint, and ragged prayer flags hung from the panelled ceiling.

There was a grey pall over the scene and the people in it; the grey of things discarded, unwashed, unwanted

In the kitchen, the corrugated iron alcove where a wood stove once sat still clung to the outside wall, empty except for some bits of rubbish. Boards bulged out from the walls, paint peeling. A sash window was hanging crookedly. Old sheets served as curtains. A piece of foam covered with a threadbare mattress protector lay on the floor.

The bathroom door had fallen in and the window opposite it had fallen out, but there was no running water anyway.

“This is my room,” said one of the men, showing me into a room off the kitchen. “It’s a bit of a mess.” There was a mattress on the floor with a thin, grubby-looking blanket. He showed me rocks he had collected along the river. He was chipping the quartz out of them to make jewellery, he said. Graffiti on his bedroom door read, “No family member left behind, we are all one family.” “LOVE” was scrawled above this, with a peace sign for the O.

Sunlight streamed through the trees grown up wild around the house, adding a strange beauty to the decay and desolation. But there was a grey pall over the scene and the people in it; the grey of things discarded, unwashed, unwanted.

“I thought you might need some warm food and drink,” I said.

“Coffee would be wonderful,” Beth replied.

I told them they could get whatever they wanted from the cafe.

“Oh! You’re wonderful!” she said.

I didn’t feel wonderful. I felt privileged to have never experienced homelessness or hunger. How terrifying, degrading, soul-destroying must it be to watch the sun going down, to see other people going to their homes, while knowing you have nowhere safe, warm and dry to live in a country as wealthy as Australia.

In Brisbane there are almost 10,000 people without a home every night and yet in the same street as the derelict Queenslander two other houses have been empty for more than a year.

The latest census report revealed there are about 1m homes sitting empty across Australia. The squatters’ house is in what is known as a demolition control precinct. According to Brisbane city council, “It’s difficult to get approval to demolish a home built before 1947, or even part of an older home, within a DCP.” The old Queenslander was built in 1900. There’s no obligation to maintain such houses, so owners can hang on to them as long as they pay the rates.

Lamb House, a grand two-storey house looking out towards the city at Kangaroo Point, stood empty for years. It was only when the owner’s unpaid rates bills reached $300,000 the council stepped in and sold it.

“Come back and paint with us some time,” Beth said before I left. “But make sure you go to the bathroom first. And bring your own cup!”

When I ran into Beth on my morning walk the next week she said police had shown up the day before and told them the owner wanted them out. They were given 24 hours to leave.

I felt rage at the injustice of kicking people out of a house the owner seemed in no hurry to restore. Later, my in-house legal adviser (husband) told me there could be problems for a property owner who knew people were living in an unsafe house.

“Where will you go?” I asked Beth. “Dunno,” she replied. She told me she’d be OK but was worried about Ben (not his real name). “He’s from New Zealand,” she said, “so he can’t get Centrelink. And,” she added, moving closer, “he’s a bit clueless.”

I phoned some people who run what they call a “house of hospitality”. They provide meals and take in people with nowhere else to go. They told me to give Ben their number as they might have a place for him.

When I went around to the house to tell him there was no one there but it looked as though their stuff was in place. I found a scrap of paper, wrote a note with the number and put it where I thought it was most likely to be seen.

I like to think I could have made friends with the squatters but, even in the short time I knew them, I could see they had issues that I wasn’t equipped to deal with. In the couple of conversations I had with Beth, she alluded to a history of domestic violence and an assault that left her deaf in one ear.

But she also told me she was going to build a new world. She said she was a prophet, that she knew what was really happening. The “1%” were controlling the rest of us and some among them were not from Earth. It was as if we were being farmed by another species. Covid was a convenient cover and more was coming.

I liked Beth because she was strong, feisty and intelligent but I knew I could never be friends with her. There was no knowing how wild her thinking could become and how that might lead her to behave.

After I left the note for Ben, I took a last look around, trying to imagine how it would once have looked when it was a home, before walking back to my own home and closing the door.

Brittney Griner released from Russian custody in prisoner swap with Viktor Bout

By Nandita Bose and Humeyra Pamuk

December 9, 20226:56 PM GMT+7Updated December 9, 2022

• Summary
• Companies

• Basketball star detained in February, got 9-year sentence
• Griner traveled to UAE and then on toward U.S. in swap
• Jailed arms dealer Bout was one of world’s most wanted men

WASHINGTON, Dec 8 (Reuters) – U.S. basketball star Brittney Griner has been released in a prisoner swap with Russia in exchange for arms dealer Viktor Bout and was heading home on Thursday, ending what President Joe Biden called months of “hell” for her and her wife.

The swap was arranged after months of talks during a time of high tension between the two countries after Russia’s February invasion of Ukraine.

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As Griner was on a flight bound for Texas, Bout arrived in Moscow and hugged his mother and wife after stepping onto the tarmac, television images showed.

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Griner, held since a week before the invasion of Ukraine, traveled from a Russian penal colony to Moscow, then to Abu Dhabi airport in the United Arab Emirates where the exchange took place, with the two walking past each other on the tarmac, U.S. officials said.

“She’s safe, she’s on a plane, she’s on her way home after months of being unjustly detained in Russia, held under intolerable circumstances,” Biden told reporters at the White House. “This is a day we’ve worked toward for a long time. We never stopped pushing for her release.”

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Russia rejected Biden’s attempt to gain the freedom of Paul Whelan, a former Marine also held in Russia, forcing Biden to opt to get only Griner out. He said in his announcement, without providing details, that the Russians treated Whelan’s case differently.

“The choice before us was one or none,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told CBS News. “And the president decided that it was important to at least bring Brittney home now and continue to work on getting Paul back, too.”

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Griner, 32, a two-time Olympic gold medalist and star of the Women’s National Basketball Association’s Phoenix Mercury, was arrested on Feb. 17 at a Moscow airport after vape cartridges containing cannabis oil, which is banned in Russia, were found in her luggage.

She had pleaded guilty at her trial saying she used the cartridges to relieve pain from sports injuries and had made an “honest mistake”. Nevertheless, she was sentenced on Aug. 4 to nine years in a penal colony.

Russia’s foreign ministry said it traded Griner for Bout, 55, a Russian citizen who in 2012 was given a 25-year prison sentence by a U.S. court on charges related to his arms-dealing career. For almost two decades, Bout had been the world’s most notorious arms dealer, selling weapons to rogue states, rebels and warlords in Africa, Asia and South America.

“I made it. That’s the main thing,” Bout said on Russian television, adding he had not been told what would happen.

“In the middle of the night they simply woke me up and said ‘Get your things together’,” he said.

The swap was a rare instance of cooperation between the United States and Russia since the invasion of Ukraine. The two countries also swapped prisoners in April when Russia released former U.S. Marine Trevor Reed and the United States released Russian pilot Konstantin Yaroshenko.

The arrangements came together within the past 48 hours after Biden had made the decision to exchange Bout, the White House said. A conditional grant of clemency for Bout was not completed until Thursday, after U.S. officials in the UAE verified Griner had arrived there.

Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris spoke by phone with Griner from the Oval Office, along with Griner’s wife, Cherelle. Biden said Griner was in good spirits and had displayed “grit and incredible dignity” throughout the ordeal.

“These past few months have been hell for Brittney,” and for her wife, family and teammates, Biden said.

The UAE president and Saudi crown prince led mediation efforts that secured Griner’s release, a UAE-Saudi joint statement said.

Item 1 of 14 Tokyo 2020 Olympics – Basketball – Women – Quarterfinal – Australia v United States – August 4, 2021. Brittney Griner of the United States reacts REUTERS/Brian Snyder//File Photo

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White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre expressed gratitude that Saudi Arabia and other countries had raised the issue but said the talks were between Russia and the United States. “There was no mediation involved,” she said.

‘UNPATRIOTIC EMBARRASSMENT’

Some Republicans criticized the Democratic president for making the swap.

Former President Donald Trump derided the exchange without Whelan.

“What a ‘stupid’ and unpatriotic embarrassment for the USA!!!” Trump wrote on social media.

“This is a gift to Vladimir Putin, and it endangers American lives,” House of Representatives Republican leader Kevin McCarthy wrote on social media, referring to Russia’s president.

Biden said it was his job as president “to make the hard calls and protect American citizens everywhere.”

Griner was one of a number of American women’s basketball stars who had played for professional teams in Russia. Griner’s teammates and other WNBA players cheered her release.

Last month, she was taken to a penal colony in the Russian region of Mordovia to serve her prison sentence.

Cherelle Griner, who said she was “overwhelmed with emotions,” thanked Biden and his administration.

“Today my family is whole. BG and I will remain committed to the work of getting every American home,” she added, using her wife’s initials.

Griner’s flight is expected to arrive in San Antonio, Texas.

In a written statement, Griner’s family extended their “sincere gratitude” to Biden, and said they were praying for Whelan’s release. They also thanked former New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, who traveled to Moscow in an effort to win the release of Griner and Whelan, but who did not act on behalf of the government.

Biden lamented that the United States was unable to win Whelan’s release. “We are not giving up. We will never give up,” he said.

A Biden administration official said the United States had proposed different options for Whelan’s release and that Russia’s “sham espionage” charges against him were the reason it treated his case differently. U.S. officials spoke to him on Thursday about the Griner deal.

Whelan told CNN in an interview: “I am greatly disappointed that more has not been done to secure my release, especially as the four-year anniversary of my arrest is coming up. I was arrested for a crime that never occurred.”

Bout was one of the world’s most wanted men before his arrest in 2008 in Thailand in a sting operation by U.S. agents who recorded him offering to sell missiles to people he believed were Colombian guerrillas. Bout was variously dubbed “the merchant of death” and “the sanctions buster” for his ability to get around arms embargoes.

For experts on the Russian security services, Moscow’s lasting interest in Bout hint strongly at Russian intelligence ties.

Reporting by Nandita Bose and Humeyra Pamuk; Additional reporting by Doina Chiacu and Moira Warburton; Writing by Jeff Mason and Steve Holland; Editing by Will Dunham, Heather Timmons, Frances Kerry, Nick Macfie and Daniel Wallis