Bikram Lama had a morning ritual.<\/p>\n
The rough sleepers of Hyde Park remember it well.<\/p>\n
The young Nepali man would emerge from his sleeping bag, perched in the bushes near the bustling tunnel entrance to Sydney\u2019s St James station.<\/p>\n
Throngs of office workers would stream past, eyes fixed to phones or dead ahead \u2013 anywhere but the dishevelled young man in front of them.<\/p>\n
Lama paid them no mind. He\u2019d return from breakfast, a bag of breadcrumbs in hand, and head straight to the flock of pigeons that also called the St James tunnel home.<\/p>\n
The routine was so ingrained that Joe Trueman, a former rough sleeper who now busks at the tunnel, coined a nickname for Lama: the birdman.<\/p>\n
\u201cI knew he was on his way back because the birds would start to congregate outside on the steps and some would come into the tunnel and wait,\u201d Trueman says.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe would greet them like his children. As he arrived, they\u2019d all fly in.\u201d<\/p>\n
One day last December, as Sydney sweltered through its interminable heatwave, the ritual stopped.<\/p>\n
The pigeons waited in vain. Their birdman did not emerge.<\/p>\n
In one of Australia\u2019s busiest public parks, he had died a lonely death.<\/p>\n
No one noticed.<\/p>\n
For almost a week, thousands streamed past his corpse, making their way along the busy thoroughfare from the City Circle train line. Roughly 100,000 people went in or out of St James station during the time Lama lay there, Opal data suggests<\/a>.<\/p>\n Erin Longbottom of St Vincent\u2019s homelessness health service at the station entrance: \u2018It\u2019s like he\u2019s an invisible person.\u2019 Photograph: Blake Sharp-Wiggins\/The Guardian<\/p>\n When he was eventually found by station staff just before noon on 7 December, his body had decomposed to such a degree that police were unable to visually identify him.<\/p>\n Erin Longbottom, the nursing unit manager of St Vincent\u2019s homelessness health service, says it feels as though Lama\u2019s death has been \u201ccompletely unacknowledged\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cHe was just somebody who fell through all the cracks, and was obviously scared and didn\u2019t have any support \u2026<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s like he\u2019s an invisible person and that\u2019s just completely devastating.\u201d<\/p>\n Guardian Australia has spent months tracing the life of Bikram Lama, seeking to understand how a young man who came to Australia to study computer science came to die a needless death on the doorstep of Australia\u2019s busiest central business district.<\/p>\n The investigation has stretched to the remote village where Lama grew up, to his grieving family who are still without answers, and to those who knew him while he slept rough on Sydney\u2019s streets.<\/p>\n Sign up for the Breaking News Australia email<\/a><\/p>\n It exposes a glaring gap in federal and state responses to homelessness, which makes it impossible for support services to deliver housing, healthcare and financial assistance to people like Lama who came to Australia legally but lost their visa status or never obtained permanent residency.<\/p>\n Experts say non-residents are a growing cohort, trapped in homelessness because they cannot be given temporary or social housing, cannot legally work but also cannot get Centrelink payments or, in most cases, access public healthcare.<\/p>\n \u201cNo matter who you are or how you came to Australia or what happened to you, you\u2019re actually still a human being and your life is valuable,\u201d Longbottom says. \u201cIt made me really sad actually to think that this man \u2026 in his eyes he had no way out of the situation he was in.\u201d<\/p>\n Lama\u2019s family home in Makwanpur, a remote village in Nepal. Photograph: Arun Karki\/The Guardian\u2018The pain is constant\u2019<\/p>\n In 2013, in an impoverished and remote hillside village in Makwanpur, south of Kathmandu, Lama\u2019s family were preparing for a life-changing decision.<\/p>\n They had limited means and, like many in their region, depended on agriculture to survive.<\/p>\n But the young Bikram presented them with hope.<\/p>\n He had studied science up to his final year of high school and was able to travel abroad for university.<\/p>\n Australia, he told them, offered the chance of a good income and a quality education.<\/p>\n \u201cWe had no money,\u201d his sister-in-law, Usha Lama, tells the Guardian from Makwanpur. \u201cSo we sold nine kattha [about 3,000 sq m] of farmland and sent him abroad to study.\u201d<\/p>\n Sometime after he began studying computer science, Lama fell out of contact with his family.<\/p>\n \u201cFor a while, we used to receive a phone call once every two or three years,\u201d says his nephew, Milan Rumba. \u201cBut in recent years, it had been a long time since there was any contact with home, probably around seven years.\u201d<\/p>\n The family are still waiting for authorities to tell them the results of a DNA test. Photograph: Arun Karki\/The Guardian<\/p>\n About a month ago, the family received a strange message out of the blue. It was from Nepal\u2019s ministry of foreign affairs.<\/p>\n The Nepali embassy in Australia had been contacted by local police. They wanted Lama\u2019s elderly mother, Seti Maya Lama, to travel to a police laboratory in Kathmandu for a DNA test.<\/p>\n Documents seen by the Guardian show New South Wales<\/a> police were struggling to identify Lama, prompting them to request dental records or fingerprints from the embassy.<\/p>\n \u201cWe initially thought of not taking the elderly mother all the way to Kathmandu to avoid troubling her,\u201d Usha Lama says.<\/p>\n \u201cBut recently, we went to Kathmandu and gave the sample. Still, there has been no information about whether it matched or not.\u201d<\/p>\n The family have learned little since. They don\u2019t know how Lama, who was just 32, died. They haven\u2019t been told why he was in a park, or whether the DNA sample provided a match.<\/p>\n Lama\u2019s mother Seti Maya Lama. Photograph: Arun Karki\/The Guardian<\/p>\n \u201cSince hearing the news, I haven\u2019t been able to eat properly,\u201d his mother says from her home in Nepal. \u201cThey said the truth will be confirmed after the DNA report comes. If that comes, it would be easier to perform the last rites.<\/p>\n \u201cRight now, the pain is constant. Even now, I still feel like my son might come back.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2018How come everyone else is getting help and I can\u2019t?\u2019<\/p>\n One day in 2024, Joe Trueman pulled up a milk crate, unslung his guitar and got to work.<\/p>\n Despite finding housing, he often returned to the places he slept rough, like St James tunnel, to busk for passing commuters.<\/p>\n It was there he noticed Lama for the first time.<\/p>\n double quotation markWe just had this group of people left on the street that weren\u2019t eligible for support. And I was so ashamedErin Longbottom<\/p>\n The pair had a similar history. Trueman also came to Australia from abroad, lost his visa status and was forced to live on the streets.<\/p>\n He arrived in Australia almost 25 years ago at the age of 14 from New Zealand. He was supposed to meet his birth mother for the first time at Sydney airport but she never turned up.<\/p>\n Without government support to help him survive, he found himself on the streets.<\/p>\n Trueman lived in three homeless camps across Sydney, at Woodchips \u2013 the Kent Street underpass in Sydney\u2019s CBD \u2013 Woolloomooloo and St James. At each camp, public pressure would eventually force the state government to blitz the camps in an effort to move people out.<\/p>\n Everyone around him was given housing and health support.<\/p>\n A hedged area above St James station near where Lama\u2019s body was found. Photograph: Blake Sharp-Wiggins\/The Guardian<\/p>\n \u201cAnd I was there with the ball and chain at the end \u2013 I wasn\u2019t able to get any help because I wasn\u2019t a resident, I wasn\u2019t a citizen,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n \u201cSo I\u2019d move on to the next camp. St James was the last camp. That was the third camp I\u2019d been to and the third camp where everyone ended up in housing.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd I was there at the end going, \u2018What the hell? I\u2019m still on the street. I\u2019m 40 years of age. How come everyone else is getting help and I can\u2019t?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Lama was similarly deemed a non-resident and could not access housing support. His student visa had expired and his Nepali passport was not renewed when it fell due in 2023, records seen by Guardian Australia show.<\/p>\n The City of Sydney council estimates about one in five rough sleepers are not Australian residents.<\/p>\n The scale of the problem was revealed in the first months of the Covid crisis when governments urgently moved to house rough sleepers using hotels left vacant by absent tourists.<\/p>\n \u201cEverybody got put into hotels and then we just had this group of people left on the street that weren\u2019t eligible for support,\u201d Longbottom says. \u201cAnd I was so ashamed, to be honest, that I didn\u2019t even see it, because I work in this space.\u201d<\/p>\n Eligibility differs from state to state but generally non-residents can be provided with homelessness outreach services but are not eligible for temporary accommodation, crisis accommodation or social housing. They are also largely ineligible for public healthcare and Centrelink.<\/p>\n The council and St Vincent\u2019s have repeatedly lobbied state and federal governments to review their homelessness policies to address this gap but say their efforts have been largely unsuccessful.<\/p>\n Sydney\u2019s lord mayor, Clover Moore, says: \u201cWhile housing and responding to homelessness are the responsibility of the NSW Government, we do everything in our power to get people who are sleeping on the streets the help they need. We continue to call on the NSW Government to fund specialist homelessness services to provide temporary accommodation and housing pathways to those facing hidden or invisible homelessness and people who do not have residency status and so slip through the cracks.\u201d<\/p>\n International students are considered particularly at risk, as are New Zealanders who came to Australia before a 2023 citizenship pathway was introduced to give easier access to Australian citizenship after four years of residency.<\/p>\n St Patrick\u2019s Community Support Centre, a homelessness service in Perth, says it is helping one New Zealander who does not hold permanent residency and so has no clear pathway to stable housing or income support.<\/p>\n double quotation markThese guys were all non-residents and they\u2019d fallen off or fallen through loopholes of their visasJoe Trueman<\/p>\n \u201cThe lack of entitlement to services has made it extremely difficult for her to stabilise her situation, even though she is actively seeking help,\u201d says Traci Cascioli, the service\u2019s chief operating officer.<\/p>\n \u201cSituations like this highlight the vulnerability of people who fall outside the eligibility criteria for key support systems.\u201d<\/p>\n Asylum seekers are also restricted in their ability to access mainstream supports.<\/p>\n The Refugee Council of Australia estimates that about 5,000 people seeking asylum across Australia are living either in crisis or destitution, though exact figures on homelessness are not readily available.<\/p>\n The Centre for Asylum Seekers, Refugees and Detainees, a support service, says it is increasingly fielding requests for help from asylum seekers at risk of homelessness.<\/p>\n The centre\u2019s chief executive, Suha Ali, says the situation is \u201chugely unjust\u201d.<\/p>\n