Introducing Flat Out’s first Life Members

At Flat Out’s AGM on 11 December 2025, we were proud to unveil our first Life Members – 5 individuals who have made outstanding contributions to Flat Out and our mission of ending incarceration of women, trans and gender diverse people.  

We are so proud and grateful that Aunty Vickie Roach, our founders Amanda George and Jude McCulloch, and our long and dear friends Billi Clarke and Doris Jarvies are now Flat Out members for life! 

Flat Out’s inaugural Life Members, at the Annual General Meeting, 11 December 2025. (Back L-R: Doris, Billi, Jude, Front L-R: Aunty Vickie, Amanda)

Aunty Vickie Roach

Aunty Vickie is a proud Yuin woman, accomplished writer/poet and leading campaigner for First Nations sovereignty, ending violence against women and prison abolition. Her life’s work has achieved significant gains for these interlinked movements. 

At the age of 2, Aunt was charged by NSW police with ‘neglect by way of destitution’ and removed from her mother. At 13, Aunt fled foster care to take her chances on the streets of Kings Cross in Sydney. As a teenager she was repeatedly arrested for ‘crimes’ of survival. She was imprisoned before she turned 18 and then repeatedly as an adult.   

In 2007, while in the Dame Phyllis Frost women’s prison (DPFC) in Victoria, Aunt fought a successful High Court challenge, Roach v Electoral Commissioner, against a Commonwealth law banning people in prison from voting. (We note that Aunt does still say she is not sold on the idea of voting in this colony).  

Aunty Vickie also completed a Swinburne University Masters of Writing by distance education. In 2018, she campaigned to expunge the criminal records of state wards in NSW and for redress for survivors of abuse in state ‘care’. In December 2022, she gave groundbreaking evidence to the Yoorrook Justice Commission that should be compulsory reading for everyone in so-called Australia. Read Aunty Vickie’s submission to Yoorrook. 

Aunty Vickie is a respected Aboriginal elder, and a treasured mentor across Flat Out, and feminist and abolitionist movements. She is a founding member of the National Network of Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls (Australia) and the Homes Not Prisons campaign against the expansion of DPFC.  

 Flat Out has been privileged to work alongside Aunty Vickie for over 20 years now. This piece of advice she gave to the many young women she supported when she was in prison remains helpful to us every single day: ‍ 

‘Keep your shit together, don’t let the bastards grind you down’ .

Amanda George

In the early 1980s, Amanda was a founding member of Flat Out’s precursor, the Women’s Legal Resource Group. The group set up an advice line, funded by Fitzroy Legal Service, to provide free legal advice for women organising political demonstrations and women in prison.  

In 1983 they got together with the Women’s Council on Homelessness and Addiction (a group of women with lived experience of drug use, formerly called the ‘Drug Club’) and some formerly incarcerated women and formed Women Against Prison (WAP).

In 1987 Amanda worked with Jude McCulloch at Fitzroy Legal Service on a submission arguing that putting women in prison was an act of violence. In 1988 it was published as Women and Imprisonment: A Report, complete with iconic Judy Horacek cartoons. It was launched with a Greenham Common-style mass encirclement of Fairlea Women’s Prison, the first ‘Wring Out’.  

1988 was also the year Jude and Amanda applied for funding for Flat Out and, to everyone’s astonishment, the funding came through! In 1990 they Wrung Out Fairlea again. In 1993, in coalition with Somebody’s Daughter Theatre Company and a throng of people Amanda calls ‘fiercely dedicated, innovative, relentless and increasingly well informed’, they held a seven month 24/7 vigil outside the prison to stop the Kennett Government’s proposal to move women and children to Jika Jika maximum security men’s prison and build a private women’s prison. They won that fight… but there were so many others to come!  

She’s posed as a bride so she could protest on the steps of Parliament. She’s been strip searched in front of a national Corrections conference. She’s stood for Parliament against ALP Prisons Minister Andre Haermeyer. 

But most importantly to us, Amanda’s been on the Flat Out Board for more than 37 years. We love her and she loves us and that’s an important reason Flat Out is still here. Despite everything. Now she’s stuck with us for life.  

Jude McCulloch

Forty years ago Jude who was in the Women’s Council on Homelessness and Addiction, a fancy name for a pretty motley crew (PR rule number one) met with women from the Women’s Legal Resource Group to create Women Against Prison. 

Jude had worked at St Kilda legal service. Much of their work was focused around police abuses of sex workers and their complete lack of regard for violences perpetrated against them. Jude’s refuge work underlined the same police attitudes to women experiencing family violence and the critical role that housing has in creating safe communities. Jude wrote Flat Out’s first submission for funding which – much to our shock – was successful, with Flat Out opening in 1988.  

In 1988, Jude co-wrote the Fitzroy Legal Service report, Women and Imprisonment which was the launchpad for the first major media and community action campaign on women in prison in Victoria. This was the start of the Wring Out Fairleas which over the years, brought thousands of people to community actions outside the prison. In 2009, Jude co-edited an international collection called the Violence of Incarceration.   

In the early 1990s, Jude’s work with families of 11 men killed by police in the Flemington-Kensington area over 15 months resulted in 10 Victorian police being charged with homicide. Since then Jude’s focus has been on the militarisation of policing and the lack of accountability that exists around police shootings, particularly of Aboriginal people.  

Flat Out exists today because Jude’s application won us our first recurrent funding – which we still have, 37 years later.  

Billi Clarke

Billi’s life start in the Pines, Frankston, equipped her with the nous and smarts to be an extraordinarily effective community worker and advocate.   

For many years Billi had contact with probably every woman and trans person who went through Fairlea and the Dame Phyllis Frost Centre through her work in emergency accommodation, refuges and housing. She never took ‘no’ from service providers and was always relentless in getting them to ‘find a way’.  

She is respected and loved by thousands in the community, the sector and government. Billi’s motto is be bold and brave when dealing with people with power. She is one ‘cheeky fulla’ with those in uniforms and suits.  

In the late 1980s, her band Nice Girls Don’t Spit approached Fairlea and Pentridge Prisons to go in and play to people inside. They did this for years, paying for the privilege. The band were also a feature of the Wring Out actions; her remake of Folsom Prison Blues into the Fairlea Prison Blues was always a hit.  

Billi worked at Flat Out as manager and collective member and was the Santa at Flat Out’s kid Christmases. She always got staff to dress up and sing a song or 2 together.  

Billi personifies what Flat Out aspires to be – direct, creative, hard working and no bull****.

Doris Jarvies

Doris probably developed her grit and determination from years in a Glaswegian hospital as a child with polio. She started working at Fairlea in 1990 as a nurse and over the years of the Wring Out campaigns was responsible for much information and material moving in and out of the walls. There was a communication diary that magically moved between women inside and the Save Fairlea 8-month vigil camp. This diary, photos and other vigil ephemera will soon be available in Melbourne Uni archives.  

Doris was loved by women inside because she and Marg Gow at the education centre provided a refuge and a safe and silly place from the dehumanising life of prison.   

Doris was a courageous and principled public servant who subverted rules. She was responsible for exposing the practice at the time of women being given crushed up pills for medications which destroyed the protective coating on them, designed to protect gut linings. Doris was also responsible for providing the written evidence about the extraordinary high levels of anti-psychotropic medication and heavy tranquilisers being used at the prison.   

Doris is a long and dear friend of Flat Out.