Evicted and dying of cancer, Tammie spent her final months desperately house-hunting in Brisbane

I’m suffering from as much rage as I am grief, because for so long I had managed to keep her in her own home,’ her mother says

A month before she died of cancer, Tammie Thrower was evicted and thrust into homelessness.

The mother of three had battled stage-four bowel cancer since 2023, undergoing round after round of chemotherapy. But in January of this year it spread to her brain.

Six months later she was kicked out of her home in Manly in Brisbane’s south. She spent her last months house-hunting in vain.

Tammie’s 77-year-old mother, Coral Clarke, slept on the two-seat couch of her one-bedroom retirement home apartment to give her daughter a bed.

Even while dying, one of Tammie’s main worries was finding somewhere to live.

“Those last couple of weeks in [palliative care at] St Vincent’s, every so often she’d say to me, you know, ‘I wonder if this or that would give me a better chance at finding a house,’” Coral said.

Tammie died on 23 August.

Though shocking, her story is common. Homeless outreach service, Micah Projects, has records of 21 people who died of diagnosed terminal illnesses while homeless in 2025 in Brisbane alone. The youngest was 27 and oldest 83. Several of them spent their last days sleeping rough before being taken to hospital to die.

That number does not include homeless people who died suddenly. Three homeless people died on the streets of Brisbane in a single week in October, two of them at the doors of a homeless drop-in service.

“I’m suffering from as much rage as I am grief, because for so long I had managed to keep her in her own home,” Coral said.

“I’m on a pension, so I’m not particularly financially flush. But I always managed to make sure her rent got paid no matter what and that she had everything she needed to be as happy as she could be. And I wasn’t able to give her that at the end.”

There are 53,874 people on Queensland’s social housing waiting list, a record high. At 0.7%, the city’s rental vacancy rate is at a near-record low, which means people facing eviction have fewer options, forcing thousands into homelessness.

The fruitless search

Her mother remembers Tammie as both practical and compassionate. A dental nurse and swimming instructor for kids with special needs, who even on chemotherapy days put others before herself and never complained about the intense pain.

Chemotherapy took her teeth, her hair, much of her hearing and her strength.

In January she was involved in a serious car accident, flipping the vehicle with her mother in the passenger’s seat. Coral’s heart stopped twice and Tammie broke multiple bones. While she was in hospital the doctors detected that her cancer had spread.

In June, her lease ran out. Despite pleading for a reprieve, the landlord gave Tammie a no-fault eviction notice in order to do repairs, though they were able to convince her to allow Tammie to stay an extra month.

Tammie and her carer searched for months, inspecting dozens of homes. Due to the housing shortage, she was always losing out to someone making a better offer, Coral said.