Cameron Daddo goes homeless on the streets of Sydney in social experiment
FROM living amid the glamour of LA to the streets of Sydney, radio host and actor Cameron Daddo learned what it means to be homeless in 2018.
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ACTOR and radio presenter Cameron Daddo had never watched the SBS show Filthy Rich and Homeless when the producers called him to take part in the second season.
But it took him only minutes to say yes and jump on board the social experiment which puts five prominent Australians on the streets for 10 days, stripped of their belongings.
Living in Los Angeles for decades with wife, former model Alison Brahe, and their three children, Daddo is no stranger to the plight of the homeless. But it took a trip back to Australia in 2015 to make him sit up and take notice.
And when SBS came knocking, he was primed to take to the streets.
“When I returned to Australia to do Sound of Music in Melbourne it was a particularly cold winter and I couldn’t believe the amount of homeless people on the streets,” he tells BW Magazine.
“Between shows one Saturday night I was walking to dinner with a few castmates and there was a homeless guy with no shoes on and it was freezing.
“So I went and brought him socks but when I returned he had gone and that just really stayed with me and it was a bit of an eye-opener because although I’d had a wonderful childhood, I now saw I’d been wearing rose-coloured glasses and that the problems of the world were in Australia too.”
Despite his eagerness to take part in the groundbreaking television show, which sparked serious debate about the plight of the country’s 116,000 homeless when series one aired, Daddo admits he was also apprehensive and a little scared.
On the night his 10-day experiment began, he was stripped of all his possessions, including his wallet, ID, watch, glasses, money and clothes and given a few items of old second-hand clothing and a sleeping bag and dropped on the streets of Bondi at night.
“The very first thing I noticed was how often I’d look at my watch, that I didn’t have my glasses which I rely on to read and that you can’t use public toilets after hours when they are closed,” he says.
“Then I realised I couldn’t go anywhere because I didn’t want the few things I had to be pinched and that my new environment was very hard, lots of steel and concrete.
“Initially, my major concern was honestly how I was going to relieve myself, then I thought about how much harder that would be for pre-menopausal women on the streets.”
The experiment is led by presenter and passionate homelessness advocate Indira Naidoo and social researcher Dr Catherine Robinson.
After the first season aired, homeless groups reported a rise in donations and volunteers. The show’s creators, Blackfella Films, hope this new season will raise awareness again and spark new debate.
Daddo says his time on Sydney’s streets was always uncomfortable, often frightening and rarely relaxing. But overall he rates the experience as a positive one because it highlighted, not humanity’s shortcomings, but their strengths.
“Most of my experience was positive because I saw human resilience and human compassion from people who had far less than me,” he says.
“There were people who encouraged me to join in with them and I experienced a lot of human-ness. I feel if we had more of that in the community, homelessness wouldn’t be such a big issue.
“That was my takeaway from the experience.”
Although Daddo says he had a charmed childhood growing up in Melbourne’s wealthy suburbs with his three brothers and a sister, the global financial crisis made him realise how easy it would be to lose everything when scant work prospects spiralled into debt and he lost his LA home in 2008.
“It was my version of rock bottom,” Daddo says. “I had three kids and a wife and no idea when work would come. I couldn’t afford to pay the bills and the only work around was $100-a-day sad, ultra-low-budget movies. A lot of pressures arose from that and how I was treating my wife and kids.”
Rather than hide his shame and keep up a front in a city many consider the most superficial place in the world, Daddo reached out to others.
In 2010 he sent an email to a bunch of dads at his children’s school and told them how he felt and asked if anyone else was feeling the same. More than 20 men responded and they met in his garage to share stories and offer support to each other over several sessions.
Earlier this year Daddo established Men’s Team, which offers men a blueprint to set up their own “team”.
“There was no formula in these early meetings, I didn’t even know what we were going to do or talk about,” he says. “But we did our best to listen to each other, which is what we all needed.”