Kate Young had just spent a week in Bali and she was quite literally glowing with health and happiness.
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The Albury hairdresser was toasty warm driving home through Lavington on Sunday night, August 27.
Outside the temperature was plummeting to its minus-two forecast and her darling dogs would soon be lounging cosily by the fire with her.
As she passed through The Five Ways intersection in North Albury, Kate noticed a small white bundle huddled under a street lamp.
It was so very cold outside.
She drove on but something made her stop and turn the car around.
“Mate, are you all right?" she called to the motionless figure.
A little face peeped out from a mountain of blankets, pinched and cold.
A trolley with worldly possessions was parked nearby.
“Buddy, it’s going to be cold tonight, have you got some place to go? Can I shout you a Chinese meal from up the road or something …?”
At first Leslie couldn’t believe what he was hearing.
A complete stranger had just stopped to offer him food and then to put him up in a motel for the night .
Wary and hunched in his black hoodie, a smile suddenly lights the young man’s face as he describes Kate’s random act of kindness.
“It was hard to comprehend that she wanted to help me,” he said.
“It makes a big difference knowing someone isn’t judging you; just giving.”
No one, including Leslie, is going to pretend he doesn’t have a checkered history.
The snippets he shares, haltingly at first and then in a rush of haunted words, point to a revolving door of foster care, haphazard mental health intervention and, yes, time in jail.
Leslie’s father died when he was just seven and from there he was shuffled through the foster system until he first fled to the relative safety of the streets.
There is only a tiny hint of the horror he suffered in “care”.
“I’ve been sinking from the age of nine years old to now,” the 24-year-old said.
“Wherever I’ve gone hasn’t worked out; I’m not comfortable in supported services.
“Sydney is chaos – the amount of money you need just to survive …
“It’s an endless cycle and I don’t know what else to be.”
Leslie’s story is not unique.
A broken person with a broken life who, for any number of reasons, ends up under a lamp post in Lavington.
On any given night in Australia one in 200 people are homeless and 56 per cent of them are men.
A 2016 Homelessness Australia report revealed a projected shortage of more than 500,000 homes that are affordable and available to people in the bottom 40 percent of income earners.
Leslie, 24, longs for an “ordinary life” – a roof over his head, a job and some control over his future.
How do you get up off the pavement in the morning and go and get yourself a job?
- Albury hairdresser Kate Young
Kate is knocking on doors and calling in favours to try and make that happen.
Anyone who knows the bubbly owner of The Last Tangle salon is aware she’s a woman of action when it comes to a cause.
For many years Kate has helped sponsor victims of sex trafficking in Nepal to attend hairdressing college and start a new life.
She knows – and Leslie knows – it’s a long shot.
“How do you get up off the pavement in the morning and go and get yourself a job?” she stated.
Kate is the first to admit she doesn’t have the answers to fixing a system where so many broken people fall through the cracks.
“But isn’t one person worth it?” she asked.
“I think as human beings we really don’t have a choice NOT to help each other.”
Kate is frustrated with government inability to make inroads in areas that speak to the heart of our humanity – homelessness, mental health and suicide.
Elected politicians’ focus needs to be re-directed from “burqa stunts in Question Time” and “the millions wasted on a gay marriage vote”.
But really Kate believes a truly caring community can make the biggest difference.
“There are avenues – through private enterprise, businesses, the local men’s shed – where we could take displaced people under our wing and offer support around official services,” she said.
The night she came to Leslie’s rescue, Kate posted about her “new young friend” on Facebook and her hopes for making a difference to his life.
Overwhelmingly the response was positive but predictably her good samaritan efforts also drew the derisive detractors:
“Oh wow. Just hope he isn't a junkie taking you for a ride,” one woman wrote.
“Why was he sleeping on the footpath one would have to ask?”
Such comments completely miss the point, according to Kate.
“If we all take a head-in-the-sand approach to our homeless problem and do nothing to help those less fortunate than ourselves, then nothing will change,” was her response.
“As a race we are becoming bankrupt of human kindness towards each other.”
Helen Jeffery, a volunteer for Share the Dignity, praised Kate for her efforts and starting the conversation.
“Try not to tar them all with one brush. Everyone has a different story,” she wrote on Facebook.
Leslie said he’s more hopeful this week than he has been in years.
He dreams of working in the food industry.
Right now that doesn’t seem so impossibly out of reach thanks to the hairdresser with a big heart who didn’t turn a blind eye.
