VIOLENCE, fear and desperation - two of our reporters discover the worrying reality of Adelaide after dark.

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TORY SHEPHERD TRIES SLEEPING ROUGH

WHERE would you go if you had to sleep rough?

Would you choose to sleep in a cemetery, a doorway, a drain, an abandoned building?

People who work with the homeless see and hear some amazing, dark stories. One of the oddest they tell is that desperate people have been known to sleep in cemeteries, even climbing into graves to find shelter and safety.

An Adelaide homeless man was found living in a drain a few years back. They worked out he'd been there for six years.

Thursday night was the Vinnies' CEO Sleepout, a fantastic initiative where the nation's rich and powerful step into the shoes of the nation's poor and vulnerable for a night.

It's a great exercise in empathy and awareness-raising and I decided to take it to a somewhat illogical conclusion and do my own sleepout, which happily coincided with Adelaide's wettest June day in six years.

Lessons learned:

1. It's really hard to find a place outside that feels safe at night.

2. Concrete gets progressively harder as the night gets colder.

3. It's really lonely.

4. An old, thin blanket does not cut it.

5. Sleeping out makes time slow to an imperceptible crawl.

6. Using the word "sleep" in this context is misleading.

Before hunkering down, I met up some people who work with the homeless, walking past endless warm windows in the cold wind to help out wherever they can.

The Aboriginal Sobriety Group runs the Mobile Assistance Patrol bus. They ferry Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people around from the streets to the services, from the city to relatives' houses, from where they find them to wherever they can find a bed. Major Sumner, a prominent Ngarrindjeri elder who is on the Group's board, has seen generations of people follow each other on to the street and into the grog. He was one of them, once, 40 years ago, until the Group saved him.

He and MAP Bus program manager Nermin Sabanovic take me on a tour of the hot spots - the city squares, the parklands, the dark streets.

They say they see kids as young as five hanging around, they see hungry children next to unconscious adults, they see plenty of violence and the women can be worse than the men.

On a Saturday night they can't keep up with the people who need their help. - There is no more room at the various inns; the detox centres, the shelters. The only option sometimes is to drop them at the hospital.

Homeless statistics are slippery. The 2006 Census found there were about 105,000 homeless Australians, with more than 16,000 of those sleeping rough. They later revised this figure down by almost 40 per cent after a barney over definitions of homelessness.

Most people I speak to think things are getting worse. About one in three of the homeless are aged 18 or younger.

Mission Australia's Youth Beat covers the same territory as the MAP Bus, but they work specifically with young people. Team Leader Shaun Stevens says young people - some very young - are often drawn to the bright lights of the nightclub strips.

They write themselves off, get drunk or high on whatever they can find, then lurk in alleyways near the clubs they're too young to get into.

Youth Beat works closely with Mission Australia's sobering up unit at Hindmarsh, a small and friendly place that can give people a bed to straighten up in, and hopefully a gentle nudge in the right direction the next morning.

These workers are full of energy and banter, enthusiasm and graveyard humour. They all have their regular clients, their regular routes, and they see the same people come back again and again. They work at the odd hours when most of us are unwinding, inside, bellies full of food, wine uncorked, maybe the electric blanket on. It's the odd double life of the city, the invisible army helping the invisible vulnerable.

In the end, I sleep out at the university, a CBD spot where homeless people do occasionally try to sleep. A security guard points out an area where homeless people would sleep if they let them.

12.35am: Tried a few spots. Dirt soft but unsurprisingly dirty. Bench comfy but wet. End up in doorway. Have back against a building, the area's well lit and sheltered. So tired I might actually sleep.

This could be OK.

12.40am: This is not OK. I can feel every lump in the ground, my extremities are frozen, I'm wet from earlier in the night, and things are going bump in the night. People walk past every now and then and either they frighten me or I frighten them. This is going to be a long night.

1.40am: Still cold, awake, anxious.

2.40am: Still cold, awake, anxious. Wait for dawn.

6.00am: People are waking up cold and stiff in their corners of the city, to start the cycle again. Some will never break that cycle.

Many die homeless, cold and alone. Meanwhile, I'm off to a bright, warm, clean office and then, home.

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BERNARD HUMPHREYS EXPERIENCES ADELAIDE'S UGLY SIDE

CONTRARY to popular belief, the city centre is not dead at night. Oh, it's no throbbing beast, no New York, London or even Melbourne, but it's full of life, even if it's mostly fairly peaceful and quiet.

Beyond the party strips of Hindley St and the much milder East Side, there are thousands of people living and, like me, working through the dark hours in and around the CBD.

We haven't come into town to eat, drink and kick up our heels, we're just living our daily lives, nightly. In my case, I work at The Advertiser/adelaidenow as an online news producer, and my equivalent of most peoples' lunch break is around 9pm.

Like most people, I like to get out of the office for a while and I particularly like to go for a walk and get a decent cup of coffee, just as so many of you do in the daylight hours. On my way to my nearest barista I wander down Leigh St.

I like Leigh St at 9pm. It has a nice vibe. Its little restaurants are overflowing with dessert and conversation and Casablabla adds a funky soundtrack. On Wednesday night, though, I was reminded that you don't have to bump into a bogan with a guts full of bourbon at 4am to get into trouble on the dark streets of our city.

Not even on nice, friendly Leigh St not long after tea time.

For legal reasons, I can't go into much detail about what hap- pened to me.

An incident occurred and, thanks to the brilliantly swift work of the officers of the Hindley St police station, three people have been arrested and face charges.

Of course, I can tell you what it's like to be punched in the head without warning while just walking down the street. The shock and confusion is the worst of it, at least in my case because I was fortunate to escape with concussion and a sore neck.

The pain came later and I'm still suffering it but the sudden jolt from just walking and looking forward to a coffee to a head-to-toe numbness, a loss of vision and hearing, and a complete lack of awareness of where you are and what's going on is terrifying.

Again, I was fortunate, or maybe I was able to keep my feet, barely, and consciousness long enough for the cloud to start to clear. But that's when it got scary.

Through the haze, I could see several figures standing in front of me - the young men or boys I had barely noticed a second earlier as I'd passed them by. There were words said to me, but I couldn't make them out.

I can't help think that what might have saved me was the dumb luck of being so stunned that I just stood there and stared at them.

Whatever the case, I'm glad the first moment of clarity that came to me was the realisation that the police station was just around the corner.

I decided to get my own gang, the Hindley St cop shop mob, and the suspects were quickly behind bars.

Cities at night are filled with dark corners hiding nasty people, but we've got to keep working at filling the place with light.

Every Adelaide street should be like Leigh St is supposed to be at around 9pm.

Originally published as The reality of Adelaide after dark hits hard