Amnesty International Australia - Victorian Activism & Leadership Committee

14/10/2026

Melbourne Polytechnic Collingwood campus for Belonging Fest o

14/10/2026

11/10/2026

Naarm Palestine 🇵🇸 Rally today
Some estimates at 20,000

10/10/2026

Blackburn Market Stall on a busy day
Lots of petition signing

03/10/2026

A great celebration today for the Bendigo Groups 50 year Anniversary with former State Premier and founding member, John Brumby in attendance.

27/09/2026

27/09/2026

Maya Angelou spent years refusing to speak.

Then her voice became one of the most recognizable in American literature.

Angelou endured sexual abuse as a child. After the man who assaulted her was killed following his release from jail, the young Maya believed that speaking his name had somehow caused his death.

She stopped speaking to almost everyone for years.

But she kept reading.

She absorbed poetry and literature until a teacher, Bertha Flowers, encouraged her to understand that poetry had to be spoken aloud to truly come alive.

Eventually, Angelou found her voice again.

And she used it.

Before becoming internationally famous as a writer, her life crossed extraordinary boundaries. She worked as a streetcar conductor in San Francisco, performed professionally as a singer and dancer, lived abroad and became involved in the civil-rights movement.

Then, in 1969, she published *I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings*.

The memoir confronted childhood, racism, sexual violence, identity and survival with a directness that helped make Angelou internationally known.

But perhaps no work captured her defiance more powerfully than her 1978 poem *Still I Rise*.

“You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies…”

Then came the answer:

“But still, like dust, I’ll rise.”

The poem doesn't pretend suffering never happened.

That's precisely why it hits so hard.

Angelou writes about being pushed down, hated, wounded and burdened by history, then repeatedly returns to the same declaration:

“I rise.”

That distinction matters when sharing quotes attributed to her.

“You can't scare a woman who's already walked through fire” sounds like something Angelou might have written.

But I couldn't find reliable evidence that she actually did.

Her real words don't need improving.

Maya Angelou knew what it meant to have her voice taken by trauma.

She also knew what it meant to reclaim it.

The frightened child who stopped speaking grew into a woman whose words would be read around the world.

They tried to push her into the dirt.

She had already written the answer.

She would rise.

24/09/2026

While Israel continues its genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and persists with imposing its unlawful occupation and system of apartheid against Palestinians, PM Benjamin Netanyahu, wanted by the ICC for war crimes and crimes against humanity, is set to address the UN General Assembly in New York instead of standing trial at The Hague.

It is doubly shameful that the US government continues to ignore the arrest warrant against Netanyahu - while denying Palestinian representatives visas to attend the UNGA.

Nearly two years since the ICC issued arrest warrants against Netanyahu, impunity continues to reign - and Palestinians are paying the price. Continuing to undermine the ICC sends a cruel message to all victims of international crimes that prospects for justice remain elusive while the USA and other powerful states deliberately erode the universal value of international law.

All states, including the USA, should enforce the Court’s arrest warrants and hand over Netanyahu to the ICC. International law must be upheld and international justice mechanisms supported to end impunity for international crimes and ensure respect for human rights for all.

14/09/2026

In August, the ABC revealed the Albanese Government was considering stripping work rights from people seeking asylum as they move through lengthy appeals processes, to ‘encourage them to leave the country’ once their applications are rejected by the Department of Home Affairs. But this is a trie...