It took Rikki three years to get her forever home. She counts herself lucky

Warning: This story contains graphic content.

When Rikki James’ ex-partner smashed her head into a concrete floor, not even her life-threatening brain aneurysm and surviving brain surgery could stop the barrage of abuse and gaslighting that came afterwards.

Chants of “you’re useless, you’re stupid, you’ve got a brain injury, you need me”, while painful, left a searing impression on James and solidified her resolve to leave.

In 2012, she fled Cairns for NSW’s South Coast and hasn’t shed a single tear or looked back once.

“I thought, well, stuff you. I don’t need you. I don’t want you. I just disappeared, I changed my name, I just vanished. And that was it. And [he said] the usual thing, that ‘you’ll never find anyone like me’. Well, that’s the idea, mate!”

James, who agreed to this masthead publishing her new name, was homeless for a while and lived out of her car with her dog, before moving in and out of different social housing blocks over the years. After a three-year wait, the 60-year-old moved into her forever home in December.

Now, she is surrounded by neighbours who feel more like family than acquaintances, and Kobe, a seven-month-old munchkin kitten she calls her everything.

While it has taken more than a decade for James to get where she is now, she feels lucky because thousands of women and children fleeing domestic violence may wait even longer for a home, or never even receive the keys. As of August, there were 71,000 people on the waitlist for social housing in NSW, up from 59,000 in August 2024.

Statewide data shows the median time it took to house people who made general applications for social housing was 15.2 months, and this period is shorter for priority fast-track applications, at 4.6 months. But the government’s guide says 90 per cent of those on the waitlist for a one-bedroom home in inner-city Sydney will need to wait two to five years to be housed.

This number stretches to five to 10 years in the inner west, the eastern suburbs, the northern beaches, Blacktown, Penrith, and Bankstown. Some areas face an even longer wait of more than 10 years: The northern suburbs, Sutherland, St George and Liverpool.

Domestic violence rates continue to rise even as governments increase funding for prevention services and introduce harsher criminal penalties.

The state government has built 5175 social, affordable, and key worker homes since coming into office in March 2023. Their overarching goal is to deliver 8400 public homes, with half of these dedicated to women and children fleeing domestic violence.

Housing Minister Rose Jackson said: “For too long, public housing was allowed to deteriorate while demand continued to grow. We’re not just building new homes; we’re upgrading thousands of existing properties and investing in the people and communities who depend on them.”

Homes NSW has promised to build 1000 homes that are in the planning pipeline, and another 1000 are under construction. Jackson said the government had made “significant progress”, but acknowledged there was more work to address the state’s housing shortage.

“I want everyone who is currently on the waitlist to know that we have literally thousands more homes in the pipeline,” Jackson said.

For James, moving to a bigger town on the South Coast with better hospitals was crucial to support the regular brain scans and MRIs she needed. She was “lucky” to have been in secure housing while she was on the waitlist for three years, as she knew this wasn’t the case for countless others.

“They’ve come from other housing blocks with graffiti and junkies everywhere, so they were too scared to come out of the unit,” James said. “Unless you’ve actually gone through it, you’ve got no idea how hard it is.”

Despite everything, James remains upbeat. In her words, “if you’re so far down, you can only go up”.

One song that got her through some of her most difficult days was Helen Reddy’s 1972 hit I Am Woman. “I am woman, hear me roar,” she chants to herself like a mantra.

She maintains a good-natured outlook even after her doctor told James she was diagnosed with blood cancer and osteoporosis, and instead beckons to fate: “Just throw something else at me, will you?”

“What am I going to do? Sit down and cry? Can’t stamp your feet, your bones might break,” she jested. “That’s my attitude. I joke, I find a lot of good things in humour. I’m not an evil, cranky person. I laugh, and I laugh at myself.

“All through all this crap in life, it just makes me think, ‘What’s next? No, actually I don’t even want to know what’s next. Surprise me’, and you just move on.”

Support is available from the National Sexual Assault, Domestic Family Violence Counselling Service at 1800RESPECT (1800 737 732), the Men’s Referral Service on 1300 766 491, Lifeline on 13 11 14 or Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636.

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