Two dramas recently showing in Australian cinemas, 99 Homes and Time Out of Mind, vividly chronicle life in post-GFC America. Each, in its own way, is an essay on the decline of the American dream as it pertains to one of its core tenets: home ownership. But where, I found myself wondering after the credits had rolled, was Black America in all this?

Until last Friday, around twenty homeless people had set up camp in Melbourne’s City Square, creating shelter where it elsewhere eluded them, as a public petition for more secure, affordable housing in Australia’s second most populous city. The presence of the camp was also a visceral risposte to claims, which appeared in the mainstream media last week, that homeless people had been behaving unpalatably, including asking passers-by for money in an aggressive fashion.

The definition of homelessness itself is more complex than most of us would realise. This point was passionately articulated to an audience attending a forum on homelessness at the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne in early 2013, when a former homeless man who advocates for people in the predicament he endured for many years explained the difference between being provided with shelter rather than a home: ‘I want to close my own door of a night. The door to my home, not someone else’s.’