The first time Clinton Ragatt slept on the streets, he was 10 years old. He had run away from home, trying to escape some of its problems; poverty, exposure to alcohol abuse, neglect and later-violence. “It was really scary, I ended up going home – crying,” he said. “As a kid I had lived in caravans all over the place, I was dragged around pubs. “And from the age of six, we were living off sugar, eating sugar – because there wasn’t much else around.”
Mr Raggatt, now 45, said he had been disciplined with a “hard hand,” and had become violent himself. He had worked. He had made mistakes.
He had been in and out of prison. In and out of addiction.
About seven years ago (written in 2019) he started sleeping rough in Sydney, Tasmania and Newcastle. “You tend to find behind everyone’s story, they’ve had some happenings in their life where they can’t resolve things,” he said.
