The strange and lonely death of Bikram Lama, a young Nepali man who slept rough near Sydney's St James station, has exposed a glaring gap in homelessness services for non-residents. Known as 'the birdman' for feeding pigeons daily, Lama's body lay in a busy park for nearly a week before being discovered by station staff on 7 December. Roughly 100,000 people passed through the station during that time, according to Opal data.
Lama came to Australia in 2013 to study computer science, after his family sold farmland to fund his education. He eventually lost contact with them and fell into homelessness. Experts say non-residents like Lama cannot access temporary housing, social housing, legal work, Centrelink payments, or most public healthcare, trapping them in homelessness.
Erin Longbottom, nursing unit manager at St Vincent's homeless health service, said Lama's death felt 'completely unacknowledged'. 'He was just somebody who fell through all the cracks,' she said. His family in Nepal only learned of his death when the Nepali embassy contacted them for a DNA test, as police struggled to identify his decomposed body.
Former rough sleeper Joe Trueman, who busks at the tunnel, recalled Lama's daily routine: 'He would greet [the pigeons] like his children. As he arrived, they'd all fly in.' Lama's nephew, Milan Rumba, said the family had not heard from him in about seven years. 'No matter who you are or how you came to Australia, you're actually still a human being and your life is valuable,' Longbottom added.
