It's an all too familiar occurrence, Naomi* is a mother who has fled a domestic violence situation and now needs a roof over her family's head for a few days while she attempts to find a home.
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But it's a Friday afternoon and her caseworker is struggling to find somewhere that will accept someone from Catholic Care, or any places where Naomi and her three children, aged 10 and twins 11 can sleep.
Naomi is warned if she sleeps in her car, she might lose her children.
So once again, Naomi takes money out of her savings to pay for her accommodation for a few nights - money she had put aside for rent once she eventually gets a place.
Naomi has worked since she was 15 years old, but now in her 40s has found herself homeless and struggling to find a roof to put over her and her three children.
She has been homeless for two and a half years since she fled her domestically abusive partner in South Australia, she said she left thinking she wouldn't be able to get out alive.
Naomi spent time in Queensland before needing to relocate again, so she moved back to her home state thinking she'd find support.
"I thought by going to Tassie we're finally safe, there is a bit of water that might stop him, and we've got family," she said.
"We get here and there is no housing. I just want a bit of peace for us. Just to have a home, so we feel we have somewhere to go. When you live like this you don't feel safe, never knowing where you are going in the next couple of days is the worst feeling."
For Naomi, her only hope is to find stability for her young children.
"They've gone to seven schools in two and a half years," she said.
"They ask me when am I going to get my mum back?"
Naomi speaks with weary intelligence, she is fully qualified as a chef and has worked her entire life.
She said she can't believe she's gone from being a homeowner to spending years looking for a home.
"I don't know what else to do, I have done absolutely everything," Naomi said.
"How do you keep working when you don't have a home? How do you get up and have a shower when you don't have a shower? How do you keep normalcy going when every time you get settled, their father finds us and we have to move again?"
Now in Tasmania since late 2021, Naomi is tired from the constant moving and inability to find a rental.
"It just gets really, really exhausting," she said. "Where do you go when you've got no one and nowhere to go? The mental part of that you can't even put into words."
Naomi said she has applied to 150 places in Tasmania in six months.
"I have a perfect tenant history, but no one is letting me through the door," she said.
Real estate agents give minimal feedback when Naomi is passed over for properties.
"What are they looking at? Income, suitability?," she asked. "I can't seem to get an answer."
"What I want to see change is the help women get who come from DV situations. You are already traumatised. You don't need to be retraumatised all over again. I always question myself on what am I doing wrong, but I'm not doing anything wrong. "When does it actually end for people like me?"
Naomi said the two and a half years of homelessness has taken a massive chunk out of her savings. She can spend over $1000 in a fortnight for short-term accommodation for her and her children.
"Up to $200 a night to fit all of us, how do you pay that?"
Naomi struggles to keep herself together some days but needs to for her children.
"You're fighting everybody all the time. That's how I feel. It feels like this constant fight just to have a normal life," she said.
"I don't want a big house, I don't want a nice car, and I don't want nice clothes, I just want somewhere to call home for me and my kids where we feel safe, where we can have some peace and quiet."
Naomi has been asked if she ever wanted to be anything other than a victim.
"I'm just about broken but I will never actually break," she said. "I'm not a victim. I'm a survivor and I will always be. I will never give up doing the right thing for me.
"I will show my daughters that you don't have to accept this. This is not what life is about in 2022."
Naomi admits she didn't recognise the issue of housing until now.
"I, like the rest of Australia, got into that bubble, where I was renting and I didn't realise, because I wasn't in that situation, the level of the issue," she said. "There is a blow out in public housing in Tasmania that should have been recognised a long time ago."
*Naomi's name has been changed at her request.
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