ABSTRACT
This chapter presents certain research from Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom to demonstrate how people experiencing homelessness have been represented or how the homeless person has been made. It shows how the language and ideas used to represent people who are homeless have changed throughout the twentieth century and during the first two decades of the twenty-first century. The economic upheavals of the 1930s and the Great Depression, the seasonal labouring that many of the hobos relied upon dried up. Rather than the seasonal labourer or even the frontier traveller, Hopper shows that by the 1960s and 1970s, homeless people were depicted as disreputable and dangerous; they went from tramps and hobos to bums and derelicts. Without access to employment, stigma and a characterisation of the homeless as problematic began to prevail. The negative portrayals of homeless people had a spatial and collective tone.
