She didn’t choose to gather her children in the dark and run: from war, from persecution, from a government that wanted her family dead, from militias that burned villages, from bombs that fell on schools, from the kind of danger that makes a leaking boat in open water seem like the safer option.
She didn’t choose to have her children ostracised, attacked and forced to flee home and family because of their sexuality.
She didn’t choose years of living in limbo… in camps, in temporary shelters, in bureaucratic purgatory… while the UNHCR processes and defers, while her children grow up without permanence, without a future they can count on, without a place to call home, or a community to call village or family.
She didn’t choose to have her case ignored, delayed, or denied by nations that speak of compassion and practise indifference.
She didn’t choose to flee to countries in Europe or Australia, only to be met with suspicion, hostility, and hatred… told she is a burden, a threat, an inconvenience… by people who have never had to choose between danger and dignity.
She didn’t choose to live under the shadow of forced deportation: to watch governments like the current United States administration tear families apart and send people back to the very dangers they escaped, caring nothing for what awaits them there.
She didn’t choose to watch her children go hungry in refugee camps stripped of funding, camps where foreign aid was cancelled, where food ran out, where clean water became unavailable, where medicines disappeared, because powerful men in powerful countries decided her children’s lives were unimportant.
She didn’t choose any of this.
She chose only to fight against all odds to keep her children alive; to keep going when everything said stop.
She chose to love fiercely in conditions designed to break her.
On Mother’s Day, we celebrate the mothers we know and love. But let’s also hold space for the mothers we never see: the ones at the edges of our world, carrying the unbearable with grace we will never be asked to find.
There’s an old line from Melbourne’s labour movement that still calls us today:
Eight hours work,
Eight hours play,
Eight hours sleep,
Eight bob a day.
The National Museum of Australia documents that this verse was part of a popular slogan: “A fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay”.
Eight-hour day banner, Melbourne, 1856 (Wikimedia Commons). Public domain in the USA, believed public domain elsewhere.
It began here in 1856, when stonemasons walked off the job and insisted that a human life should be divided into thirds: one for labour, one for rest, and one for living. It wasn’t a radical demand so much as a human one, a recognition that dignity begins with each of us and that a society reveals its values in how it treats the people whose work keeps everything standing.
Art by CoPilot AI
You don’t have to go far in Melbourne to find where the whole eight hour idea took shape. There’s a statue up on the corner of Russell and Victoria Streets, the big 8‑8‑8, that most people breeze past on their way to the pub or the museum. That’s the spot where the stonemasons basically said, “Yeah nah, fourteen hour days can get stuffed,” and walked off the job. Their pitch was simple enough to fit on a pub coaster: eight hours to work, eight hours to play, eight hours to sleep, get paid eight bob a day. The point wasn’t the exact amount. It was the principle that a fair day’s work deserved fair pay. And somehow, from that little corner of Melbourne, the idea went everywhere.
There’s a temptation on days like this to talk about labour as if it were only an economic category: hours exchanged for wages, productivity measured. But human beings don’t experience work that way. We feel it in our bodies, in the ache of a long shift, in the quiet pride of doing something well even when nobody is watching. We make it part of our identity almost without noticing: we introduce ourselves by name and then by occupation, as if the job were the second half of who we are. But inequity exists. As George Orwell put it, “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.” The hierarchy shifts with time and industry, but the bias stays the same: some labour is celebrated, but some is quietly dismissed, even when the dismissed work is the work that keeps everything running.
Meiji‑era silk workers ,the disciplined origins of Japan’s modern overwork (Art by CoPilot AI).
There is a word in Japanese — karoshi — that has no real English equivalent. It means death from overwork. Not burnout but actual death, from working too hard for too long. Japan had to coin the term because the phenomenon became too common to leave unnamed. It tells us something important about what happens when the idea that work defines us goes all the way to its conclusion.
Humanism begins with the recognition that every person’s labour is an expression of their humanity, not a resource to be mined. And while much is being said about AI transforming the future of work, for most of the world, the struggle is still for the basics: safety, rest, fair pay, and the right to a life outside work.
Of course, May Day isn’t just about history. It’s also about the places where the eight hour promise never arrived, or arrived and was quietly taken back. People whose labour stays hidden because that’s convenient: migrant workers without protections, and women providing unpaid care that still doesn’t count as real work. Entire communities where dignity is optional.
Even in this country, the promise was never universal. For much of the 20th century, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander workers were legally required to have their wages paid into government trust accounts that many could never access, and from which money simply disappeared. The eight-hour day was being celebrated in the streets while, out of sight, an entire people’s labour was being taken without even the pretence of fairness. The 8-8-8 monument stands a short walk from where that happened. That proximity matters.
A quiet refusal: tǎng píng rendered in a classical Chinese fashion (art by CoPilot AI)
The resistance takes quiet forms. In China, a movement called tang ping — lying flat — has spread among young workers exhausted by the 996 culture: nine in the morning until nine at night, six days a week, the schedule that much of the tech industry simply assumed was reasonable. To lie flat is to refuse, to just stop performing for a system that has decided their time is worth very little. In South Korea, the government proposed extending the maximum working week to 69 hours. The backlash was swift enough that the proposal was shelved.
Some work has always been pushed to the margins. Sweatshops still operate in the twenty first century, hidden in supply chains that rely on people being too desperate to refuse the terms. The work that keeps households and whole communities functioning (cleaning, caring, domestic labour) is still maligned in no small part because it has traditionally been seen as women’s work. The stigma lingers even when the labour is essential, and the distinction has nothing to do with effort or skill. It has everything to do with who has historically done the work and who has had the power to define its value.
Then there’s the labour that isn’t paid at all: the volunteer work that keeps communities functioning but never makes it into the national accounts. Unwaged and unrecognised, treated as optional decoration rather than the skeleton that holds things together. Other countries track and value this work. Here it’s still framed as charity rather than labour, which is convenient, because it hides just how much of the structure depends on people giving their time for nothing.
Beyond our own borders, the inequity runs deeper. People in the developing world are often denied the stable, fairly paid work that wealthier nations take for granted. Even when they migrate, their qualifications and experience are dismissed as if knowledge only counts when it is earned in the West. The global economy is built to reward some lives more than others, and most people never chose the side of that equation they were born into.
The Philippines has become one of the world’s largest exporters of nurses and carers: people who leave their own children to raise the children of wealthier families, who tend to the elderly parents of people who can’t afford to do so. The work and care are real, but the arrangement depends on a global hierarchy within which one family’s needs are simply worth more than another’s, and on the willingness of people to carry that cost quietly, across oceans, away from home.
In some parts of the world the abuses are blatant: forced labour, unsafe factories, people trapped by debt or coercion. In others they are disguised as flexibility or the price of staying competitive. Different language, same harm. The body knows the truth long before the policy does.
Other species work too. Ants build, bees organise, beavers shape rivers, primates forage with remarkable coordination — but their labour is only for survival. Humans are the only species that turned work into meaning. We attach identity to it, pride, aspiration, even morality, and we build whole systems around deciding whose time matters. A hive optimises for efficiency, but it cannot ask whether the bees flourish. Human societies can — and are judged by whether they do. The point of a society is not to function like a hive or an economy, but to recognise that a life is more than its output. Rest, connection, creativity, and time that belongs to no one else are not luxuries; they are the conditions under which a human life becomes fully human.
And then there are the stories that remind us it doesn’t have to be problematic. Sidney Myer arrived in Australia as a refugee, fleeing persecution with almost nothing but his skills and determination. He built a business empire from a market stall and became one of the country’s wealthiest men, yet he never forgot what it meant to be poor or to be a stranger in a new land. He treated his workers with respect and compassion, paid them fairly and kept people on during the Depression when other employers were cutting staff to the bone. His philanthropy is well known, but his everyday decency as an employer mattered just as much. It shows that the problem isn’t migration or ambition or difference. The problem is a system that chooses to undervalue some people while elevating others, even though dignity costs far less than exploitation.
Humanism asks us to look at all of this without flinching. To remember that the eight hour day wasn’t a gift from above, it was won by ordinary people who refused to accept that exhaustion was the natural state of things. The question now is the same as it was in 1856: what kind of life, or indeed what kind of world, do we believe people deserve, and what are we willing to do to make that real?
And maybe that’s the point of May Day, not the marches or the slogans, but the reminder that rights are only ever secure when people insist on them. The stonemasons didn’t wait for permission. They didn’t wait for the perfect moment. They simply decided that a human life needed room for more than work and exploitation, and they acted as if that were already true.
We can do the same. In our workplaces, in our communities, in the quiet everyday ways we choose to treat one another. The world we live in is made by human hands, and it can be remade by them too. Not through grand declarations, but through the steady, patient work of insisting that people matter and behaving as if that’s the baseline, not the aspiration.
The ancient Greeks had a word for what the stonemasons were really fighting for: skholē — leisure. Not idleness, but free time used for its highest purpose: philosophy, friendship, civic life, the examined life. It’s where we get the word school, which tells you something about how they valued it. They believed leisure wasn’t the opposite of work, it was the point of work. The stonemasons in 1856 would have understood that instinctively, even without the Greek.
Art by CoPilot AI
Come back to that corner of Russell and Victoria Streets. The big 8-8-8. Eight hours to work, eight hours to play, eight hours to sleep. What the stonecutters were really asking for was not just a shorter shift, it was the right to be human outside of work. To have a life that didn’t belong to someone else for most of its waking hours. We are still asking, and we are still, slowly, imperfectly, remaking the answer.
For many refugees, displacement is already a story of loss, survival, and hope. But for LGBTQ refugees, it is often a story of double persecution — fleeing danger in their home countries only to face new threats in the very places meant to protect them.
I know this reality not from reports or headlines, but from lived experience.
In 2022, I was arrested in Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya alongside three other transgender women. Our only “crime” was existing openly as who we are. Life in the camp was marked by constant fear. Transphobic individuals targeted us regularly — through threats, harassment, and violence.
Despite reporting these incidents, our voices were often ignored within systems that were supposed to protect us.
We were told, directly and indirectly, to stay silent. But silence was never an option.
We chose to speak out, to organize, and to demand visibility. Our advocacy grew stronger, and so did the backlash. At one point, a Kenyan senator initiated a committee to investigate why LGBTQ refugees were in the camp. Instead of addressing the violence we faced, we were accused of “spreading homosexuality,” as if our existence was a threat.
Still, we refused to disappear.
Threats from the Senator in 2023 (photo supplied)
We organized a Pride event in the camp — a bold act of resilience and visibility. For a moment, it felt like we were reclaiming our dignity. But that moment was short-lived. Police officers arrived and dismantled our celebration, reinforcing the message that we were not welcome, even in spaces we tried to create for ourselves.
Months later, the situation escalated further. The camp manager issued a directive ordering all LGBTQ individuals to leave Kakuma or face arrest. When we requested legal documentation to leave safely, it was denied. Instead, arrests began.
We were trapped — told to leave, but denied the means to do so.
In a desperate search for safety, we made a difficult decision during a community meeting: to flee. South Sudan was the closest option, and despite the risks, we crossed the border hoping for protection.
But the challenges followed us.
Discrimination, insecurity, and lack of protection persisted.
Yet, even in the face of repeated hardship, we did not give up.
Through continued advocacy and the support of international allies, I was eventually relocated to Canada. Today, I live in safety — but my journey is far from over. My voice carries the stories of many who are still left behind.
In places like Gorom Refugee Camp in South Sudan, LGBTQ refugees continue to endure violence, exclusion, and neglect. They remain invisible in policies, unheard in systems, and unprotected in spaces meant to offer refuge. Many are still waiting for resettlement, for recognition, and for the basic dignity every human being deserves.
This is why I continue to speak out.
(Remembering LGBT+ refugees whose voice is often silenced)
International Priorities
Resettlement countries such as Canada should urgently prioritize LGBTQ refugees in refugee camps because they face layered and life-threatening vulnerabilities that go far beyond the general hardships of displacement. Unlike other refugee groups, LGBTQ individuals are often exposed to targeted violence, discrimination, and social exclusion both from within refugee communities and sometimes from local authorities, leaving them without meaningful protection or safe living conditions.
In many camps, there are limited or no specialized services such as safe housing, mental health support, protection mechanisms, or confidential reporting systems that address their specific needs. As a result, LGBTQ refugees are frequently forced to live in constant fear, isolation, and invisibility, where even accessing basic humanitarian assistance can expose them to further harm. Prioritizing their resettlement is therefore not about preference, but about protection of the most at-risk individuals within already vulnerable populations.
Countries like Canada, which have strong human rights commitments, have both the capacity and moral responsibility to ensure that LGBTQ refugees are given urgent pathways to safety, dignity, and long-term protection.
The international community must act urgently to protect LGBTQ refugees. This includes ensuring safe and inclusive asylum systems, addressing discrimination within refugee camps, and accelerating resettlement processes for those at risk.
Silence and inaction only deepen the suffering.
We are not asking for special treatment — we are asking for safety, dignity, and the right to exist.
Our resilience should not be mistaken for acceptance of injustice. We have endured, resisted, and survived. But survival is not enough.
It is time for the world to listen. It is time for change.
*Charity is an activist and refugee advocate who has previously written articles from Kakuma and Gorom.
NASA’s Orion spacecraft with Artemis II crewmembers NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, commander; Victor Glover, pilot; Christina Koch, mission specialist; and CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Jeremy Hansen, mission specialist aboard is seen as it lands in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California, Friday, April 10, 2026. NASA’s Artemis II mission took Wiseman, Glover, Koch, and Hansen on a nearly 10-day journey around the Moon and back to Earth. Following a splashdown at 8:07p.m. EDT, NASA, U.S. Navy, and U.S. Air Force teams are working to bring the crewmembers and Orion spacecraft aboard USS John P. Murtha. Photo Credit: (NASA/Bill Ingalls)
“As we surpass the furthest distance humans have ever traveled from planet Earth, we do so in honoring the extraordinary efforts and feats of our predecessors in human space exploration. We will continue our journey even further into space before Mother Earth succeeds in pulling us back to everything that we hold dear.”
Ten days out there — more than 405,000 kilometres from Earth — and then the long fall back, the capsule wrapped in red‑hot plasma and that awful radio silence where everyone just has to sit and wait. Six minutes of nothing. Families anxious. Mission Control trying not to breathe too loudly. It was the kind of moment people recognise from the climax of the Apollo 13 movie — that suspended breath while the world waits for a voice to break through the radio static. And then, almost quietly, the signal returned. Parachutes opened. Orion dropped into the Pacific off San Diego as if it had always meant to land exactly there. NASA called it a bull’s‑eye.
The crew walked across the deck of the recovery ship on their own legs. Worn out, yes, but steady. A bit knocked around, but that’s what real work looks like. They’d seen the far side of the Moon and watched a total solar eclipse from deep space. They had experienced a kind of quiet you can’t find on Earth anymore, and pondered the stillness of the cosmos.
And back here, it was school holidays — kids running feral in shopping centres, teenagers sleeping until noon, parents doing that tired half‑laugh that says I love them, but please send them back soon. People grabbing hot chips at the shopping centre or finally doing the Bunnings run they’d been putting off. Just the usual Australian chaos. And still, there was that small tug in the chest when the news came through that the crew had made it home. Not pride, exactly, and absolutely not flag‑waving. Perhaps a hint of curiosity that belongs to all of us, and not just to people in spacesuits.
And honestly, looking outward has saved us before.
It was satellites — not politicians — that spotted the ozone hole ripping open over Antarctica. Space‑based instruments proved it was real, proved it was dangerous, and forced the world to act. And because we listened, the Ozone Layer is slowly healing. One of the rare moments when humanity actually stepped back from the edge instead of tumbling over it.
That’s the quiet part of space work people forget: the things built for skyborne wonder often end up protecting the ground beneath our feet.
(April 6, 2026) – Earthset captured through the Orion spacecraft window at 6:41 p.m. EDT, April 6, 2026, during the Artemis II crew’s flyby of the Moon. A muted blue Earth with bright white clouds sets behind the cratered lunar surface. The dark portion of Earth is experiencing nighttime. On Earth’s day side, swirling clouds are visible over the Australia and Oceania region. In the foreground, Ohm crater has terraced edges and a flat floor interrupted by central peaks. Central peaks form in complex craters when the lunar surface, liquefied on impact, splashes upwards during the crater’s formation. NASA Photo.
“The Needs of the Many…”
And it’s not just wealthy countries that benefit. In many places, satellites are the only reason people in poverty can connect to the outside world at all. Whole communities that never had landlines or fibre suddenly have a way to talk to family, get weather warnings, or call for help to the outside world. A cheap mobile phone and a bit of sky — that’s the entire infrastructure. Space makes that possible. It’s uneven, imperfect, and still astonishing. It’s the closest we’ve ever come to a global village that might actually include everyone, not just the people living near the big cables.
And the more people connect across those old economic and geographic divides, the harder it becomes for anyone in affluent nations to pretend they don’t see what’s happening elsewhere. Peter Singer has been arguing this for decades — that it shouldn’t matter whether someone lives next door or on the other side of the world; if you can help, you should. And now space‑driven technology is making that idea feel less like philosophy and more like daily life. Once you’ve heard someone’s voice or seen their messages arrive on the same apps your friends use, distance stops feeling like an excuse. And once you’re connected, it’s harder to dodge the responsibility that comes with it. It nudges people in wealthy countries toward a new kind of loving their neighbours — not in a religious or sentimental way, just being human. Space didn’t set out to create that moral obligation, but it’s doing it anyway, one impulse signal at a time.
Carl Sagan warned that knowledge locked away is a tragedy. Artemis shows the opposite — that when knowledge leaves the lab and the launchpad, it can reshape lives in places that will never see a rocket. It’s a long way from the outback dishes that still listen for whispers from deep space, but the principle’s the same — knowledge only matters when it reaches the people on the ground.
It might even be the only real example of a trickle‑down effect that’s ever actually worked: space technology built for the few quietly improving life for the many. You can see it clearly in parts of rural Africa, for example, where the same deep‑space communications tech that keeps Orion talking to Earth is what lets whole communities run their businesses, or network beyond the village, on a cheap phone with nothing but sky for infrastructure. In Gaza, satellite‑based mapping tools — built from the imaging and navigation systems refined for lunar missions — help aid workers find safe routes when the roads on the ground don’t exist anymore. And across India and Southeast Asia, farmers check satellite‑fed crop and weather data, descended from Artemis‑era sensors, to decide when to plant or irrigate. Space might aim for the Moon, but its benefits keep falling back to Earth in the places that are used to being last in line.
(April 4, 2026) – NASA astronaut and Artemis II Commander Reid Wiseman peers out of one of the Orion spacecraft’s main cabin windows, looking back at Earth, as the crew travels towards the Moon. (NASA Photo)
The Overview Effect
Even the astronauts talk about this shift, which in the 1980s was labelled by author Frank White as the Overview Effect. Frank Borman from Apollo 8 said they went all the way to the Moon and ended up discovering Earth instead, and Bill Anders said the most important thing they found out there was us — that seeing Earth rise over the lunar horizon “changed him forever.” And the Artemis II crew have echoed the same thing in their own way. Reid Wiseman spoke about glimpsing Earth’s atmosphere from deep space. Victor Glover said the view of Earth “changes you,” because you suddenly see that, “We’ve gotta get through this together.” Christina Koch noted that although we are compelled to explore, “ultimately, we will always choose Earth. We will always choose each other” and Jeremy Hansen said the mission reminded him that “we all share this one planet”. Different missions, different decades, same revelation: you go out there, and what strikes you most is Earth.
Philosophically, the Overview Effect feels like something we should have learned long ago. It could change us culturally and socially more than many of the stories we’ve told ourselves for aeons. A space age perspective may help us to become more of a global village than ever before. And we all know that it takes a village…
NASA astronaut and Artemis II Commander Reid Wiseman took this picture of Earth from the Orion spacecraft’s window on April 2, 2026, after completing the translunar injection burn. Image Credit: NASA/Reid Wiseman
Technologically, every mission still spills into everyday life: refining cleaner energy systems, building materials that don’t buckle in the heat, and medical imaging that actually works in regional hospitals. And people can feel confident that if communications work smoothly between Houston and the Far Side of the Moon, then our mobiles should work between Melbourne and Koolgardie. All the things that matter in a place like Australia, where distance is practically its own weather system.
Space doesn’t solve everything, but it gives us a better place to begin than we had before. It hands us new tools, new knowledge, and new ways of seeing ourselves. And sometimes — when the evidence is clear and the world chooses to listen — it doesn’t just help us cope; it pulls us back from danger entirely. We’ve seen that once already, and there’s no reason it can’t happen again.
The four astronauts ventured around the Moon on Artemis II, the first crewed mission on NASA’s path to establishing a long-term presence at the Moon for science and exploration through Artemis. The 10-day flight helped confirm systems and hardware needed for early human lunar exploration missions. NASA Photo
Artemis II didn’t just loop around the Moon. It reminded us that humans can still do difficult things together, even in a world that feels increasingly fragmented and conflicted. And the things we learn out there don’t stay out there, they come home with the crew, merged into the technologies and quiet improvements that shape our everyday life. The space program has changed our world in ways most people barely notice — a sturdier roof here, a better phone network there — and its most profound contributions may still be waiting for us, just beyond the horizon of what we can currently imagine.
