"Booney" comes from Cherbourg. He did schooling to grade 10, but decided that was enough and didn't want to do any more. After rows with his family came to a head in 1991, he left home for the bright lights of Brisbane. He was 16. He slept where he could and survived on the dole and by stealing. He and his mates used to steal clothes, especially jumpers, to stay warm at night.
He's now off the streets, staying at his cousin's place in Chermside. He reckons his life has changed because he has found his Aboriginal identity. He now dances with the Wacca Wacca Aboriginal dance group.
Black Community Housing Service president Mervyn Riley says an increasing number of Aboriginal and Islander kids are homeless in Brisbane.
"The majority of the kids that are out here on the streets now come from the missions. A lot of them come from Cherbourg."
He says the missions don't have much to offer teenagers, and many find the attraction of life in the city too great.
Born Free Club hostel manager Selwyn Johnson says he's seen children as young as 8 and 9 homeless.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander youth program officer Lewis Orcher says many run away from home because of problems with their families.
The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Youth Program is a community-based organisation that runs a shelter for homeless youth, Dundalli House, at Windsor. It also operates an outreach service for street kids, when it can according to Lewis, and tries to help them get off the streets and into education programs.
Lewis says family problems and tension are caused by the difficulties that Aboriginal and Islander people face in a dominant European society.
Aborigines and Islanders are still discriminated against when they go for jobs. The result is that many give up and are drawn into a spirit-breaking life of dependency on social welfare payments. He says these payments are not enough and that many Aboriginal families live in poverty.
"Unemployment and a lack of finances put a helluva strain on families."
The victims are the children.
"One child told me the other day he'd dropped out of school because it was too much of a strain for his mother to pay for his school uniform and his books. So he decided to make it easy on his mother and he dropped out of school."
Sharlin Fisher, 16, left home after "me mum bashed me up". She slept for a while in the Brunswick Mall in Fortitude Valley. But she's now staying at the eight-bed Bahloo Woman's Youth Shelter in Woolloongabba.
Mervyn Riley also blames the education system. "That's why they go out. There's nothing for them when they leave school. And they know it. And the teachers know it."
He says teachers treat Aboriginal and Islander children as dumb and tend to give them up as a waste of time. The result is that Aboriginal and Islander children give up school and wander onto the street. The streets replace school as a place of learning.
"Our kids go from school to the jail. The people you see now in prison are the homeless kids of the 80s."
Aboriginal and Torres Islander Child Care Agency President Norm Brown agrees. "The young person now is a desperate young person. He'll do anything. And when I say young person, that's black or white or any colour. That's simply because there isn't anything there for them to do."
Norm says life on the street offers the illusion
of excitement. But street kids also feel sold out, that they are in the predicament they're in because society offers them nothing else.
Norm Brown says that aggravating the problems for young people on the streets is constant police harassment.
Craig Fisher, 13, and Shannon Craig 15, tell of how, a few weeks ago, they were arrested by Woolloongabba police officers for a crime they didn't commit.
"One fellow broke into a house and they [the police] blamed me and Shannon. They grabbed us by the shirt and took us to Woolloongabba Police Station."
There they were charged, and then questioned, fingerprinted, photographed and locked in a cell. The charges were later dropped.
Sharlin Fisher said the police harassed her all the time when she was on the streets. "They used to call me 'black trollop'. Once they were going to arrest me for jaywalking in the Valley."
Mervyn Riley says because the amount of money kids receive in social welfare is small, many are forced to survive by breaking into houses and shops and stealing what they need.
"If they have to break into a home, it's to have a feed or to take money to buy a feed."
A child under 16 gets a young homeless allowance of $129 a fortnight. From 16 to 17, it's $214 a fortnight.
Selwyn Johnson from the Born Free Club says the street kids wander form hostel to hostel. Like most of the Aboriginal and Islander hostels in the Kurilpa area, the Born Free Club puts up Aboriginal and Islander street kids. But all these hostels are designed to help adults and are not specialised to deal with the problems that street kids have.
"They come and go. They get around. Sometimes they're at Born Free. Sometimes at Musgrave Park Hostel. They got the youth shelter (Dundalli House) and they go over there. But they come back this way to roam around."