Bikram Lama had a morning ritual.
The rough sleepers of Hyde Park remember it well.
The young Nepali man would emerge from his sleeping bag, perched in the bushes near the bustling tunnel entrance to Sydney’s St James station.
Throngs of office workers would stream past, eyes fixed to phones or dead ahead – anywhere but the dishevelled young man in front of them.
Lama paid them no mind. He’d 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.
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.
“I 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,” Trueman says.
“He would greet them like his children. As he arrived, they’d all fly in.”
One day last December, as Sydney sweltered through its interminable heatwave, the ritual stopped.
The pigeons waited in vain. Their birdman did not emerge.
In one of Australia’s busiest public parks, he had died a lonely death.
No one noticed.
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.
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.
Erin Longbottom, the nursing unit manager of St Vincent’s homelessness health service, says it feels as though Lama’s death has been “completely unacknowledged”.
“He was just somebody who fell through all the cracks, and was obviously scared and didn’t have any support …
“It’s like he’s an invisible person and that’s just completely devastating.”
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’s busiest central business district.
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’s streets.
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.
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.
“No matter who you are or how you came to Australia or what happened to you, you’re actually still a human being and your life is valuable,” Longbottom says. “It made me really sad actually to think that this man … in his eyes he had no way out of the situation he was in.”
‘The pain is constant’
In 2013, in an impoverished and remote hillside village in Makwanpur, south of Kathmandu, Lama’s family were preparing for a life-changing decision.
They had limited means and, like many in their region, depended on agriculture to survive.
But the young Bikram presented them with hope.
He had studied science up to his final year of high school and was able to travel abroad for university.
Australia, he told them, offered the chance of a good income and a quality education.
“We had no money,” his sister-in-law, Usha Lama, tells the Guardian from Makwanpur. “So we sold nine kattha [about 3,000 sq m] of farmland and sent him abroad to study.”
Sometime after he began studying computer science, Lama fell out of contact with his family.
“For a while, we used to receive a phone call once every two or three years,” says his nephew, Milan Rumba. “But in recent years, it had been a long time since there was any contact with home, probably around seven years.”
About a month ago, the family received a strange message out of the blue. It was from Nepal’s ministry of foreign affairs.
The Nepali embassy in Australia had been contacted by local police. They wanted Lama’s elderly mother, Seti Maya Lama, to travel to a police laboratory in Kathmandu for a DNA test.
Documents seen by the Guardian show New South Wales police were struggling to identify Lama, prompting them to request dental records or fingerprints from the embassy.
“We initially thought of not taking the elderly mother all the way to Kathmandu to avoid troubling her,” Usha Lama says.
“But recently, we went to Kathmandu and gave the sample. Still, there has been no information about whether it matched or not.”
The family have learned little since. They don’t know how Lama, who was just 32, died. They haven’t been told why he was in a park, or whether the DNA sample provided a match.
“Since hearing the news, I haven’t been able to eat properly,” his mother says from her home in Nepal. “They said the truth will be confirmed after the DNA report comes. If that comes, it would be easier to perform the last rites.
“Right now, the pain is constant. Even now, I still feel like my son might come back.”
‘How come everyone else is getting help and I can’t?’
One day in 2024, Joe Trueman pulled up a milk crate, unslung his guitar and got to work.
Despite finding housing, he often returned to the places he slept rough, like St James tunnel, to busk for passing commuters.
It was there he noticed Lama for the first time.
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.
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.
Without government support to help him survive, he found himself on the streets.
Trueman lived in three homeless camps across Sydney, at Woodchips – the Kent Street underpass in Sydney’s CBD – 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.
Everyone around him was given housing and health support.
“And I was there with the ball and chain at the end – I wasn’t able to get any help because I wasn’t a resident, I wasn’t a citizen,” he says.
“So I’d move on to the next camp. St James was the last camp. That was the third camp I’d been to and the third camp where everyone ended up in housing.
“And I was there at the end going, ‘What the hell? I’m still on the street. I’m 40 years of age. How come everyone else is getting help and I can’t?’”
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.
The City of Sydney council estimates about one in five rough sleepers are not Australian residents.
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.
“Everybody got put into hotels and then we just had this group of people left on the street that weren’t eligible for support,” Longbottom says. “And I was so ashamed, to be honest, that I didn’t even see it, because I work in this space.”
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.
The council and St Vincent’s have repeatedly lobbied state and federal governments to review their homelessness policies to address this gap but say their efforts have been largely unsuccessful.
Sydney’s lord mayor, Clover Moore, says: “While 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.”
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.
St Patrick’s 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.
“The lack of entitlement to services has made it extremely difficult for her to stabilise her situation, even though she is actively seeking help,” says Traci Cascioli, the service’s chief operating officer.
“Situations like this highlight the vulnerability of people who fall outside the eligibility criteria for key support systems.”
Asylum seekers are also restricted in their ability to access mainstream supports.
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.
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.
The centre’s chief executive, Suha Ali, says the situation is “hugely unjust”.
In Western Australia, the centre successfully lobbied the state government to let asylum seekers access hospital emergency departments without a Medicare card but that gap still exists in other states.
Trueman has come out the other side of homelessness. He has rehabilitated, is in stable housing and is making a career from music, putting money to the side from his busking to pay for new equipment.
He still watches out for the rough sleepers at St James station and the other spots he frequented.
“A lot of these guys – and I got to talking to them, they all got to know me and I’d shout them coffees and chat to them – and what I found out is that these guys were all non-residents and they’d fallen off or fallen through loopholes of their visas, of their rights to stay, and they ended up on the streets.”
Many were from Nepal, India and Pakistan, he says. “What I realised is a lot of these people that were the next wave of homeless in the CBD were non-residents,” he says.
In 2024 Guardian Australia published a major investigation of more than 600 homelessness deaths, using hidden coronial reports and interviews with rough sleepers, families, frontline workers and experts. It revealed shocking systemic failures that were contributing to premature deaths, creating a life expectancy gap of 30 years.
More disturbing cases have since come to light. In one, the skeletal remains of a homeless man were discovered in a cave south of Sydney, where he’d been living for years.
In another, a homeless man died of a heart attack while he slept in the shrubbery outside Hawthorn library in Melbourne, prompting a coroner to urge for housing to be treated as a human right.
‘We would like to bring his body back’
Back in Makwanpur, Bikram’s family are desperate for answers.
Police say the death has initially been deemed non-suspicious but are limited in what they can say because it has been referred to the coroner.
The Nepali consul to NSW, Sanjeev Kumar Sharma, says the DNA testing coordinated by Nepal’s government had confirmed Lama’s identity.
“Based on the condition of the body, it was estimated that about a week had passed,” Sharma says.
The family say they have been told nothing about the results of the DNA testing and are desperate to get Bikram home.
“We would like to bring his body back to the village and perform the last rites according to Nepali traditions,” his nephew Rumba says. “But the family does not have the money required to bring the body back.
“If the cost is very high, how can we manage it?”