From the Principal – Issue #11, 2025

Acknowledgement of Country

Dear parents/Carers,

For this final newsletter for Term 2, I want to share a speech from one of our Year 11 students who reached the Rostrum Voice of Youth State Final this term. Mariya presented the speech below at Parliament House on Saturday 21 June. She was one of four finalists from across the state, and her powerful words made a huge impact on everyone present. I would like to acknowledge staff members Lucy Combe and Elena Koulianos, who supported Mariya in developing her public speaking skills this year. The topic Mariya chose is The writing is on the wall, and she spoke with confidence and passion. Congratulations Mariya!

Ms Paddy McEvoy
Principal

The Writing is on the Wall

Ejak el door ya doctor. It’s your turn, Doctor. Four words Spray painted onto a school wall in Daraa, Syria. Four words that would ignite a revolution. The writer? A 14-year-old boy named Mouawiya Syasneh. His target? Bashar al-Assad, the country’s president and once, a doctor.

It was March 2011. The Arab Spring was spreading like wildfire. Across Egypt, Tunisia, Libya ordinary people were rising up against extraordinary repression. Over 60 million people across the Arab world joined protests demanding democracy, dignity, and an end to decades of authoritarian rule. In Tunisia, protests toppled a government that had ruled for over 20 years. In Egypt, millions filled Tahrir Square in one of the largest demonstrations in history.

But in Syria, that cry began with a sentence on a wall. Instead of listening, the regime retaliated with brutal force. Mouawiya and his classmates were arrested by Syria’s secret police, the Mukhabarat.

They were just children. Yet for 45 days, they were detained, interrogated, and tortured.
Not for wielding weapons. Not for inciting war. But for wielding words.

A lot can happen in 45 days. You can heal a broken bone. Learn to play a song. Fall in love.
But these children didn’t come out healed. They came out broken, shattered, and changed. They were no longer children, no that was taken from them. They became symbols of how dangerous, and how powerful, truth can be when written on a wall.

Traditionally, the phrase “writing on the wall” means a warning of something inevitable.
But under oppression, writing on the wall becomes something far more dangerous.
Not a warning, a weapon. A non-violent one, but no less powerful.

Twelve years later, over half a million Syrians have been killed in the conflict, and more than 13 million, that’s more than half the country’s population, have been displaced. The United Nations calls it the worst humanitarian crisis of our time. After this incident, Assad remains in power, but the graffiti remains till today. Not physically, most has been scrubbed away or bombed into dust. But graffiti doesn’t need to survive on walls to survive in memory. Because once truth is seen, it can’t be unseen. And once shared? Who knows where it might go. Globally, nonviolent resistance through graffiti and street art has been a vital tool for oppressed peoples, from South Africa under apartheid, to Chile’s protests in 2019, to Hong Kong’s democracy movement. But expressing dissent visually comes with enormous risk as in many countries, writers face imprisonment, torture, or worse.

Let’s be honest: many of us, me included, once believed resistance had to be loud.
Protests. Megaphones. Crowds. Even public speeches like this. And yes, sometimes it is but in places where dissent is met with bullets, silence becomes strategy. Resistance becomes quiet. A word. A phrase. A message scratched into concrete when no one’s watching.

In The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood imagined a dystopian future where women are forbidden from reading or writing.
And yet, etched into the hidden corner of a wardrobe was one phrase. Don’t let the bastards grind you down. That message spread, fictionally and in real life, just like Mouawiya’s did. Because when you silence a voice, you amplify its echo. When you try to erase resistance, you turn it into mythology. And I’ve seen this firsthand.

In Libya, my home country, graffiti bloomed across Tripoli during the 2011 revolution, whether it was crude drawings of the dictator or a single word, حرية freedom. And that writing too, risked death. But still, people wrote. Because when everything else is censored, a wall becomes the last canvas left for truth.

What Mouawiya spray-painted wasn’t just political, it was poetic! Four words were able to crack open decades of silence. Four words revealed the regime’s weakness, that a sentence could scare them more than a sword ever has or will. In that way, writing on the wall is resistance in its purest form.

A rebellion not of arms, but of ideas.
A fight not for destruction, but for dignity.

Because in places where speech is punished, writing isn’t just on the wall. It is the wall. The last space left to speak. And the first place truth is seen.

But I know what it’s like to be quieted. To be overlooked. To wonder if my voice matters. And I know I’m not the only one. Because we all have our own walls. Some made of bricks. Others made of fear, doubt, or pain. But no matter their shape, each of us eventually faces the same question. Do I stay silent, or do I write? Because writing, any form of it, is an act of power. An act of presence. A refusal to disappear.

That’s what Mouawiya taught us.
That’s what Offred discovered.
That’s what the people of my country showed me.

That truth, once expressed, becomes contagious.

So, I’ll leave you with this. If you had one wall. One message. One chance to speak a truth the world might remember, what would you write? And most importantly, would you dare to let it be read? Would you? Because someone, somewhere, will read it. And maybe, just maybe, they’ll write back.

Mariya
Year 11 Student

Left to right: Year 11 student, Mariya, pictured with her family and Ms Elena Koulianos at the Rostrum Voice of Youth State Final on Saturday 21st of June; Mariya with fellow student Alice at the Evatt Model UN Competition last year.

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