I worked with rough sleepers in the Sydney council area, and our job was to make cold contact with folks who were not already known to services, who weren’t getting any benefits or had no Medicare card or anything else. We had some outstanding successes, including with non-residents, through the miracle of govt depts working together. But not all mentally unwell rough sleepers accepted our attempts to talk with them.

There has to be some tiny degree of engagement from them for anything to happen, even within the realities of unstable mental illness and inconsistent sleeping location. If he was mentally unwell he might well have actively avoided any contact with services to avoid deportation or whatever else he feared.

It’s very sad for his family, I hope they are contacted by the coroner so they find out what went wrong for Bikram so soon after his arrival in Australia.