The Aboriginal Housing Office (AHO) has funded the development of the three comics and three storybooks as part of its Tenant Support and Education Program, through the National Partnership Agreement on Remote Indigenous Housing.

The comics series, which was launched at Bourke, Enngonia and Walgett earlier this month, focused on what it meant to be a responsible tenant, covering issues such as the importance of paying rent, how to deal with repairs and maintenance and problems arising from overcrowding.

In the books, housing issues are woven into stories written by the community for the community.

AHO chief executive officer Shane Hamilton said the aim of the initiative was to help Indigenous people maintain their tenancies and to protect investments in capital upgrades.

"If we do upgrade something, we should be able to say, this should last this long, for instance, before we need to replace it," he said.

"We conducted workshops to find out where support was needed, and issues that came up were not being able to pay their rent, the expectations and obligations of tenancies and the importance of looking after properties.

"We could have gone in there and said, 'this is what you should do' but we wanted to get tenants involved early to give them a sense of ownership."

Overcrowding was an issue that had a particular impact on maintaining tenancies in remote Indigenous communities, Mr Hamilton said.

"Aboriginal people in those areas can be reluctant to put their name on a waitlist for years on end to go into public housing.?The process can be cumbersome and when they get an application form 30 pages long they think it's all too hard and so are less likely to put their name on the list," he said.

"So then they may go and live with family or friends, and there is a cultural obligation whereby 'if we don't let them stay, they'll have to sleep rough'.

"So families do then allow extended family and friends to live with them and so there is actually this hidden demand. If we just look at the waitlist, it's not a true indication of housing need.

"We know Aboriginal people exit public housing at a rate one-and-a-half times greater than non-Aboriginal tenants.

"This includes evictions but it can be the case that someone falls behind in rent or has people living at the residence who are not on the lease, and they get an inkling that someone's going to follow it up.

"Rather than sit down and working this through with a housing officer, discussing options such as paying back a bit at a time, they might just up and leave and go and live with someone else. They don't always wait for a court order.

"But this program is about education. We will know if it's a success because more tenancies will be sustained."