This isn’t the retirement that Mary had dreamed of.

The former midwife spent years living on a cattle station with her husband on the north-western edge of Australia - outside her window, the vast and ruggedly beautiful Kimberley region.

Now, though, the frail 71-year-old spends most of her days and nights in her battered car. Her current view is the public toilet block of a Perth shopping centre.

Mary is not her real name. She does not want people she knows to find out she is living like this.

She is one of the roughly 122,000 people who are homeless in Australia on any given night, according to data from the country’s bureau of statistics.

A recent government report says that 40% of renters on low income are now at risk of joining that cohort.

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In recent years, record house prices, underinvestment in social housing, a general shortage of homes and drastically climbing rents, have left much of the nation’s growing population struggling to find a place to live.