Kategori: News in English

When the invitation for artist Khaled Sabsabi and curator Michael Dagostino to represent Australia at the 2026 Venice Biennale was rescinded, the statement from Creative Australia’s board said their selection now posed “an unacceptable risk” and “could undermine our goal of bringing Australians together”.

This is at odds with the 2023 cultural policy Revive, which stresses inclusion, cultural diversity and increased participation from under-represented voices.

Sabsabi had been criticised for two works.

You (2007) features a sophisticated manipulation of images – loaded with ambiguity – of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, well before the organistion was proscribed as terrorist.

Thank You Very Much (2006) is an equally ironical work consisting in 18-second video montage of the 9/11 World Trade Centre attacks overlaid with imagery of George W Bush thanking the American public prior to launching devastating attacks on the Middle East.

These are nuanced works, produced 20 years ago in differing political circumstances, and previously shown without critique. They have been taken out of context and misunderstood.

At the same time as this controversy unfolded, it was revealed the National Gallery of Australia requested permission from curator Rosanna Raymond and the Indigenous SaVAge K’lub art collective to cover up the Palestinian flags in their larger tapestry on display. Raymond is still shocked that such a step was taken.

Surely this runs counter to the imperative in the nation’s cultural policy Revive, to provide “a place for every story”.

Australian artists have long featured political figures or political statements in their work. Who gets to be political in Australian art?

‘Pragmatism of cruelty’

Civil society is built on freedom of expression. At certain times artists, steeped in ideas of the avant-garde but with a contemporary inflection, feel an urgency to respond to cultural fissures.

The Vietnam war was one such fissure.

In the early 1970s Australian society was divided over participation in this American-led war, and Moratorium marches were held across the nation.

Ann Newmarch, a member of the radical Progressive Art Movement (PAM) opposed to American imperialism, focused on the Vietnamese women caught up in the conflict.

In her evocative Vietnam Madonna (1975), she portrays a mother trying to protect her children.

This was a PAM poster, produced to be widely distributed. Its anti-American message merged with feminist statements about motherhood was easily understood. It was hung in students’ quarters, artists’ studios and factory canteens.

Ann Newmarch, Vietnam Madonna , 1975, screenprint, ink on paper, 67.0 x 42.0 cm (image), 76.1 x 56.2 cm (sheet).
Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program by Amanda Martin, collection of Flinders University Museum of Art 5012, © the estate of the artist

Another fissure in Australian society is our treatment of asylum seekers and refugees.

Alex Seton’s moving memorial Someone died trying to have a life like mine (2013), showing 28 life jackets carved in marble, refers to the lives lost in May 2013 when a boatload of men, women and children washed up against the rocks at Cocos Island, and 28 empty life jackets were found on the beach.

Installation view: 2014 Biennial of Australian Art: Dark Heart, featuring Someone died trying to have a life like mine by Alex Seton, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide.
Photo: Mark Pokorny.

Setons’ installation evokes a shared humanity – people hoping for a better life. It was shown in Nick Mitzevich’s 2014 Adelaide Biennial exhibition, Dark Heart, in which his operating premise was that the open generosity of the Australian psyche had been replaced by a dark uncaring national soul.

Joanna Mendelssohn in her exhibition review called it “the terrible pragmatism of cruelty”.

Speaking out

Artists are the conscience of the nation, often giving visual form to beliefs and ideas ahead of their more widespread acceptance.

Ben Quilty’s highly emotive series depicting traumatised and psychologically wounded soldiers who had fought in Afghanistan shone a light on a subject no-one wanted to touch.

Ben Quilty, Captain S, after Afghanistan, 2012.
© Australian War Memorial, CC BY-NC

Quilty’s in-your-face expressive canvases of 2012 moved audiences and politicians profoundly. Not only was post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) real, governments had to deal with it. PTSD is now talked about more openly as an issue veterans live with.

Hoda Afshar works in a similar vein. Her moving photographic portraits in Agonistes (2020) show men and women who chose to speak out about wrong-doing in the military, intelligence, and other government agencies. They live with devastating consequences.

Hoda Afshar, Agonistes, 2021, Installation view at the Ramsay Art Prize 2021, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide.
Photo: Saul Steed. Image courtesy the artist and Milani Gallery, Meeanjin/Brisbane.

Her whistleblowers are shown with chiselled features, white faced and immobile: they are warriors for the truth. For Afshar it is “the essence of tragedy”.

For many, her portraits are a call for action for injustice. Afshar’s moving work was shown to much acclaim in a recent Art Gallery of New South Wales solo exhibition, A Curve in a Broken Line.

Erasures of history

Glass artist Yhonnie Scarce, of the Kokotha and Nakuna people, employs her medium to draw attention to the erasure of history about our nation’s First Peoples. None more powerfully than in her moving Thunder raining poison (2015) commissioned for the Tarnanthi Festival of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art at the Art Gallery of South Australia.

This five-metre high installation consisting of 2,000 opaque glass yams symbolically recreates the mushroom cloud released by British atomic tests at Maralinga, South Australia. It led to poisonous chemicals raining down on nearby Aboriginal people and destroying their land.

The disjuncture between the glistening presence of the glass and the shocking reality it evokes brings a shameful history alive. This important work was rapidly acquired by the National Gallery of Australia, while a related work, Death Zephyr (2017), features a hovering mist of poisonous clouds over Aboriginal lands. It is in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

The war on Gaza

The current cultural fissure, the war in Gaza, has had a profound effect on the lives of many including Mike Parr. Parr is a celebrated performance artist, who has been creating work on a variety of political issues for decades.

In December 2023, he was dropped by his gallerist, Anna Schwartz, after he painted words including “Palestine”, “Israel” and “apartheid”, and the sentence “Hamas raped women and cut off the heads of babies” on the walls of her gallery during an artwork.

Australian artist Mike Parr performs Towards an Amazonian Black Square in 2019.
AAP Image/Dan Himbrechts

Despite this, Parr’s commitment to this political cause has continued. In a blind painting durational performance at the 2024 Adelaide Festival, he inscribed the words “Gaza is a Warsaw Ghetto” and “Free Palestine” as under-painting in his black square homage to the Russian artist Kazimir Malevich.

Thought-provoking encounters

Australia has a rich history of artists actively engaging in political issues, and of such work being shown without timidity in state and national galleries, arts festivals and biennials.

All the artworks discussed here have been shown in such spaces. Galleries provide mediated, safe environments in which curatorial expertise is employed to display artworks in ways that promote meaningful and thought-provoking encounters between the viewing public and the work on display.

They are there to promote debate, to advance thought and to navigate cultural fissures. Läs mer…

In the Miles Franklin archive in the State Library of New South Wales there are two brown, cloth-bound volumes, titled, “When I was Mary-Anne, A Slavey”. The thick, handwritten pages are amended with glued paper inserts copied from the missing diary the author of My Brilliant Career kept for roughly a year between April 1903 and April 1904.

In an accompanying summary, on which Franklin based her 1904 letter to the Bulletin about the experience, she wrote:

Some people wonder what domestic servants have to complain about […] No one could understand the depth of the silent feud between mistress and maid without, in their own person, testing the matter …

There is a picture of Franklin in the archive too, dressed in her “get up”: a black-and-white tunic and apron, with a lacy parlour cap pinned atop her piled-up brunette hair. The photograph, taken in a studio in Melbourne, is captioned “yr little mary-anne”. She beckons you into her impersonation.

Miles with very long hair.
State Library of New South Wales

Along with the letters Franklin wrote or received during the year, the summary and photo authenticate her little known upstairs–downstairs experiment in Sydney and Melbourne, which she details in the manuscript. She cooked in flammable kitchens, plunged her hands into steaming washing up, and swept the dust that scattered behind her employers’ shoes.

In today’s Instagram culture, it is improbable that a celebrity like Franklin could work incognito and not be recognised. But this was the Edwardian era of the early 1900s, when a photograph was a special occasion and names were known more widely than faces. Franklin loved that a lady she’d once met at a government reception unknowingly flung her coat at her when she opened the door, and that she stoked the fire while guests discussed My Brilliant Career.

Bronte of the bush

Aged 21, Franklin dazzled Australia with her debut novel. Published in 1901, My Brilliant Career inspired young women to write to her about their own frustrations and dreams. She denied her novel was autobiographical, to little effect. She was compared to novelist Charlotte Bronte and to Marie Bashkirtseff, the Russian–Parisian teen artist who declared in her memoir, “I am my own heroine”.

Russian–Parisian teen artist Marie Bashkirtseff, who Miles was compared to.
Musee d’Orsay

Despite Franklin’s later fervent wish that My Brilliant Career’s heroine, Sybylla Melvyn, would be forgotten, the book endured. It became a feminist literary classic, and in 1979 a film, produced by Margaret Fink and directed by Gillian Armstrong. Today, her cultural touchstone continues with her bequest of the Miles Franklin Literary Award and recent stage adaptations of My Brilliant Career. The Stella literary prize is named in her honour, after her first given name, Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin.

Franklin’s iconic success is, however, misleading. Like many authors, she experienced fame and acclaim, but minimal royalties, in part due to an unfair contract for colonial authors with her Edinburgh publisher, William Blackwood and Sons. Books were also a luxury during the punishing Federation drought, which lasted from 1895 to 1902.

Franklin could have married. Her grandmother took every opportunity to remind her she was expected to wed. “Have you found anyone you like better than yourself?” she archly asked.

Instead, she disappeared into undercover journalism.

Stunt girl reporters

Franklin was likely inspired by the “gonzo” women journalists known as “girl stunt reporters”, who disrupted male-dominated journalism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

To prove their journalistic chops, they risked their safety and health to go undercover and expose factory exploitation and illegal abortion clinics. Most famously, New York reporter Nellie Bly feigned hysteria to gain admission to the city’s public women’s mental health institution for ten days in 1887. Their stories captivated audiences, as much as their daring.

American journalist Elizabeth Banks transported the trend to London, where she worked as a servant, leaving her poodle, Judge, with a friend. Her reports in “In Cap and Apron” for the Weekly Sun caused a sensation, and Banks’ memoir Autobiography of a Newspaper Girl was reviewed in Australia in late 1902 and early 1903.

Apart from Catherine Hay Thomson’s investigation of Kew Asylum and Melbourne Hospital in 1886, the “stunt girl reporter” only noticeably appeared in Australia in 1903.

That year, the fledgling New Idea magazine published a series of undercover articles, including about experiences such as working in a tobacco factory and applying for domestic service at an employment agency. Unlike Franklin, the New Idea journalist stopped there, while Franklin spent a full, gruelling year as a servant.

The “servant question” was an ideal local investigation. The newly federated Australia was growing due to the wool industry – “on the sheep’s back”. But in the cities, factories were an alternative engine for young women’s employment rather than domestic service. Fretting “mistresses” complained about the dearth of remaining girls available.

Servants retorted that if they were treated better, perhaps they would stay. One suggested scandalously that mistresses should give references about how they treat servants to prospective hires, pre-dating contemporary suggestions that owners and agencies should prove their fitness as landlords to tenants.

The debate around “the servant question” exposed Australia’s myth of equality. Franklin’s family was no exception. While drought drove her parents off their farm, Stillwater, to a plot in Penrith (then a rural town outside Sydney), they were cultured and educated. Franklin’s wealthy grandmother ran a station in the Snowy Mountains, on which Franklin based the elegant homestead, Caddagat, in My Brilliant Career. A governess or nurse was acceptable, she wrote in her accompanying summary to her manuscript, but “a servant raised considerable horror among my circle”.

Franklin was undeterred. As well as a new writing project, she needed money and a roof if she wanted to live in the city rather than at home. Suffragette Rose Scott, who called Franklin her “spirit child”, invited her to stay. But while Franklin appreciated the support, at times Rose was suffocating.

Revealing the independent streak that would define her life, Franklin wrote, “it was imperative I get work to sustain myself”.

Sufragette Rose Scott called Miles her ‘spirit child’.
State Library of New South Wales

‘This suppression!’

Franklin’s real servant pseudonym was “Sarah Frankling”, a play on her middle name and her surname. “Mary-Anne”, at the time a well known slang name for servants, was only used for the manuscript, to hide identities.

Franklin’s live-in domestic servant positions included kitchen maid, parlour maid and “general” servant. She worked in a terrace she dubbed a “cubby house”, an upmarket boarding house, a harbourside villa, a wealthy merchant home, and mansions in Sydney and Melbourne. Franklin stayed a maximum of two months at each post for a year in total, after which she planned to write.

Senator and High Court judge Richard Edward O’Connor and his large family were her most high-profile employer. Their mansion, Keston, which is close to the prime minister’s Sydney residence, Kirribilli House, and the boarding house around the corner survive, as does the terrace, near Bronte in the city’s eastern suburbs. All are now apartment buildings.

Keston House, Kirribilli, was home to Miles’ most high-profile employer.
City of Sydney Archives

In the manuscript, Franklin recounts that she rapidly lost weight and felt her spirit become “suppressed” by the monotony and tiring nature of servant work. Depending on the number of staff and her duties, she hand-rolled heavy, wet clothes through a washing mangle; served pre-breakfast tea and toast in bed, which she thought was an obscene indulgence; cooked and served full hot breakfasts and dinners daily; waited on guests in the boarding house’s dining room, nicknamed “the zoo”; cleaned the guest rooms and parlours; and helped at high-society balls. She kept fires burning in winter and sweated through heavy housework and cooking in summer.

The hours were brutal. She usually woke at dawn, and only finished after the evening dinners were served, or if she was a kitchen maid, after she cleaned the mess away. Not all her employers offered a luxurious whole afternoon off per week. She worked through burns sustained on the job, and was brought to tears by a mistress who ordered her to change her carefully arranged hair. The house’s Irish cook opined that the mistress was threatened by Franklin’s “toy figure” and “fairy face”.

As the months passed at different employers, fatigue turned to anger, and loneliness to friendships with fellow servants. It is heartening to see a snobby young Franklin mature and change as she rubbed tired elbows with those she previously saw as beneath her status. She cheekily flirted with a lovestruck tradie, just as she traded Shakespearian quips with an intrigued young naval officer staying at the posh boarding house.

When Scott learned Franklin was working as a servant, she chided her for not refusing the conditions as an example to others. However, Franklin knew any insolence or objection meant instant dismissal, ruining her research and current livelihood.

Scott also misread Franklin’s long-term goal – writing the servant book. In her diary, Franklin recorded what she could not say out loud. She cynically noted that “to be sensitive would be unfortunate” for a servant. “The maid must not want for pleasure,” Franklin warned, “because she will have no time to gratify it”. Be presentable but not too pretty, she advised; be polite but not so fancy or fussy to refuse tiny, “ill-aired” servant quarters next to the laundry.

The servant year confirmed her lifelong views of marriage as stifling. Echoing My Brilliant Career, Franklin vented her feminist frustration in the diary entries. She wrote of the terrace’s “Mistress”: “sooth, when a woman of ordinary intelligence gives the whole of her time, brain and energy to the running of a miniature establishment”.

As for the husband, an irritated Franklin wrote that he was “boss of his own backyard and lord of his little suburban dining room”.

Miles as a servant. The servant name she used in her manuscript was ‘Mary Anne’.
State Library of New South Wales

Biographers brush over servant year

Biographies of Miles Franklin have largely followed the traditional “cradle to grave” of her life, in which the critical servant year has been brushed over like a quick sweep of the biographical floor. One of Franklin’s first biographers, Marjorie Barnard, dismissed Mary-Anne as of little interest.

Jill Roe, author of the epic biography Stella Miles Franklin, read the existing Mary-Anne draft manuscript, describing it in her book as Franklin’s “social experiment”. Yet even Roe is succinct about Mary-Anne, compared to other years in Franklin’s eventful life. Roe lists Franklin’s known servant employers, admires her pluck and commiserates over it not being published due to concerns she had defamed her employers. (Franklin’s pseudonyms for her employers were chiffon thin, so easily identifiable.)

There were other intractable problems too with the manuscript, though Franklin may have edited another draft before submitting it for publication. The existing draft is overlong, unwieldy and inconsistent in its point of view. Franklin switches between “I” and later, “Mary-Anne”, as if she fully collapses into her servant life.

Despite her failure to find a publisher for her manuscript, Franklin continued her journalism. She began writing for the Sydney Morning Herald, which suited her fast writing style, and helped her earn money with a pen.

In 1908, Franklin joined the women’s trade union movement and advocated for working women, all the while working on her own novel, writing and resisting the status quo of the Edwardian era. She finally returned to literary acclaim with the award-winning All That Swagger in 1936, a colonial saga of a pioneering family, and another historical series she wrote under the pseudonym “Brent of Bin Bin”.

Upon her death in 1954, tributes reported that “Australian literature lost one of its great figures”.

The ‘servant question’ remains

Franklin’s investigation of the servant question now seems quaint. Appliances have changed from washing mangles and melting iceboxes to sleek stainless steel and glossy white machines that beep and hum in the background.

Yet demand for service remains. “Servants” are still in our lives; they just answer to an app rather than a bell. They clean our houses while we are out, or they are chefs on call who cook meals delivered by mobile waiters on electric bikes and scooters who brave traffic as they dash to door to door. Uber and Dido chauffeurs compete to pick us up from wherever we happen to be.

The exploitation remains, too. At the extreme, the Sri Lankan Embassy in Canberra has been ordered to pay $117,000 in back wages to its domestic servant, paid 90 cents an hour. More broadly, Fair Work last year moved to protect gig workers in the share economy, recognising its endemic lack of rights and risks.

Since Franklin’s Mary-Anne, low-wage service work has been revisited periodically by writers interested in social justice. In 1933, inspired by Jack London, George Orwell chronicled the months he spent impoverished and doing menial jobs in Down and Out in Paris and London.

In 2001, Barbara Ehrenreich published the acclaimed Nickel and Dimed, about working and living on minimum wage. Elisabeth Wynhausen wrote an Australian version, Dirt Cheap: Life at the wrong end of the job market in 2005. Alexandrea J. Ravenelle brought the history full circle in 2019 with her collected stories of 80 gig economy workers in her book, Hustle and Gig. All these authors had similar conclusions to Franklin: low-wage service work is grinding and exploitative.

At its core, the servant question hasn’t changed at all since Franklin’s investigation over a hundred years ago.

Miles Franklin Undercover by Kerrie Davies is published by Allen & Unwin Läs mer…

Since the start of this year, all New Zealand schools have been required to use structured literacy to teach reading and writing – including the country’s 310 primary and intermediate Māori-medium kura (schools that teach in te reo Māori).

This curriculum change was part of the National-led government’s plan to lift educational achievement. At the heart of the new policy appears to be the desire to apply structured literacy across the board – regardless of the educational context – in an explicit on-size-fits-all approach.

While work has been done to develop the new literacy resources in te reo Māori, and they will undoubtedly be welcomed by kura, the blanket application of structured literacy could cause more problems than it actually solves.

Is structured literacy needed?

Structured literacy focuses on teaching children to read words by following a progression from simple to more complex phonics – the practice of matching the sounds with individual letters or groups of letters.

However, unlike English, te reo Māori is a transparent language – the written form is completely phonetic with a 100% consistent match between symbol and sound. This makes learning to read and write in te reo Māori a different and easier task than in English.

There is no extensive research showing a general reading and writing problem in Māori-medium schools that requires a structured literacy approach to “fix”.

Instead, pushing structured literacy into Māori-medium schools seems to be driven by an ideological commitment to this teaching approach rather than an actual need.

In Febraury, Education Minister Erica Stanford announced structured literacy resources for all primary and intermediate Māori-medium kura.
Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images

Te Tiriti o Waitangi and consultation

There is also no indication that genuine consultation with Māori took place before the government made the announcement. In 2024, there was a trial with a small number of teachers and facilitators. But this falls far short of genuine involvement of Māori as the Treaty partner.

Further work by the Ministry of Education continues to be limited, with a focus on testing and validating imposed literacy assessments and getting feedback from Māori teachers as “end-users”. This is not consultation. It is using Māori teachers to provide data with which to refine an existing product.

According to a 1986 report from the Waitangi Tribunal, te reo Māori is a taonga (treasure) that Māori must have control of. It’s for Māori to decide on changes and innovations in the teaching and learning of the language.

The government’s introduction of structured literacy without full Māori involvement takes the language away from its guardians.

More than words

Language is simultaneously many things. For example it is both a “code” and an inherent part of cultural identity.

The code view of language positions it as a tool to carry information you wish to communicate.

However, seeing te reo Māori as part of a way of understanding the world places value not just on words, but also on the way the language is inherent in Māori thinking, history, experience and actions.

It is clear the government prioritises a code view of language in which literacy is a technical competence needed to achieve the outcomes set through the national curriculum.

For example, according to Education Minister Erica Stanford, the literacy packs were designed for children “learning through te reo Māori”.

The word “through” positions te reo Māori as a code that carries the “learning”. It is the national curriculum that is being learned and te reo Māori is reduced to the instrument carrying it.

This view means the cultural importance of te reo Māori in terms of whakapapa and being Māori could be pushed further into the background by a focus on structured literacy.

Learning as a performance

The promise of phonics checks at 20, 40 and 55 weeks of schooling could also over-emphasise the need for technical competence over the broader view of language.

For example, the ministry website supporting structured literacy offers this video of a student completing a phonics check.

Despite instructions and discussion between teacher and student clearly showing the student hears all the sounds of te reo Māori well enough to have a conversation, the phonics check reduces te reo Māori to a performance in which sounds must be classified as the same or different.

Teaching and testing this way risks reducing competence in te reo Māori to a set of standardised performances.

Missing the richness of te reo

While schools are important in the revitalisation of Indigenous languages, they are just one component and cannot achieve this goal alone. If language development happens entirely within a school system, without being an integral part of a larger community of language development, a “school version” of the language can develop.

This could end up being more aligned with the government’s aims for students than language revitalisation and Indigenous emancipation.

Te reo Māori is an endangered heritage language according to statistical modeling. The most important purpose of working in te reo Māori is not simply to develop reading and writing skills, but to be part of a full language revitalisation.

The aim is for te reo Māori to be living and flourishing within communities, passed within whānau from generation to generation and ensuring te reo itself is a central element in being Māori.

Te reo Māori is not an instrument to be used by the government to achieve curriculum outcomes. It is, above all, an inherent part of mātauranga and whakaaro Māori (Māori knowledge and thought), and vital for Māori emancipation.

This places a responsibility on the government to ensure any innovation in kura Māori is driven by Māori. Läs mer…

In response to President Donald Trump’s declaration of a “national energy emergency,” the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers recently listed hundreds of energy and infrastructure projects that would be eligible for fast-track permitting.

The projects, which include oil pipelines, natural gas power plants and mining projects, were already under review. But the possibility of accelerated permitting raised concerns that without effective oversight, the projects might be allowed to alter or destroy hundreds of acres of wetlands or risk contamination of drinking water sources.

Facing a backlash from environmental groups, the Corps removed the list and said it would follow up with a refined version.

But based on my experience as an environmental law professor and former government lawyer, it’s not clear that the claimed emergency conditions warrant fast-tracking major projects with minimal environmental review or public scrutiny.

Dealing with emergencies under the law

To be sure, swift action is often necessary in an actual emergency to prevent loss of life or property damage. A levee breach during a storm may require emergency repairs, including placing rocks, dirt or sand to contain flooding. An advancing inferno may call for hasty felling of trees to create firebreaks. Or a bridge collapse may necessitate prompt debris removal and reconstruction.

Work to prevent imminent flooding qualifies as an emergency under U.S. Army Corps of Engineers rules.
Citizen of the Planet/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Existing environmental laws and regulations largely account for such circumstances. For instance, the National Environmental Policy Act generally requires federal agencies to analyze and publicly disclose the environmental impacts of their actions. In emergencies, however, agencies may comply with this requirement through “alternative arrangements” such as a shortened public comment period or a report on environmental impacts after the fact.

Similarly, the Endangered Species Act bars federal actions that jeopardize protected species. But there are limited exceptions for emergency circumstances. When there is a federally declared disaster, for example, the Endangered Species Act allows the president to exempt projects to repair or replace public facilities when necessary to prevent the disaster from recurring. Examples of such projects include rebuilding a highway, bridge or railway.

President Trump’s declaration

President Trump’s declaration of a national energy emergency invokes the National Emergencies Act, which allows the president to follow emergency procedures that have been spelled out in other federal laws. For instance, the Stafford Act enables federal support in an emergency for services to protect lives, property, public health and safety, or to lessen the threat of a catastrophe.

But a declaration of an emergency does not allow a president to waive or ignore all other legal requirements. The declaration must specify the law or laws whose emergency provisions are being activated.

In this situation, the declaration calls on the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers “to identify planned or potential actions to facilitate the (n)ation’s energy supply that may be subject to emergency treatment” under the Corps’ permitting process. That process is governed by Section 404 of the Clean Water Act and related statutes.

How the Corps’ regulations handle emergencies

Section 404 of the Clean Water Act requires project developers to apply to the Corps for a permit to discharge dredged material or other dirt or soil into “waters of the United States.” This term encompasses relatively permanent bodies of water as well as wetlands connected at the surface to those permanent waters. Many construction projects, such as pipelines or housing developments, require a Section 404 permit because they cross water bodies or involve the fill of adjoining wetlands. The standard procedure for processing a permit application includes public notice, a public comment period and preparation of environmental documentation, followed by the agency’s decision.

In emergency situations, the Corps’ regulations allow the use of “special procedures” for processing applications – which the regulations do not specifically spell out. Instead, agency officials must tailor the process to the circumstances of each case. According to the Corps, in some situations an appropriate response to the emergency might include “a public notice to clarify permitting procedures for dealing with the clean up and repair caused by these events.” Immediate approvals may be appropriate for work to prevent flood damage from an approaching storm, but inappropriate for reconstruction after that storm.

The October 2024 collision of a cargo ship with a bridge in Baltimore constituted an emergency allowing adjustments of environmental protection regulations.
AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein

The “national energy emergency” declared by the president does not qualify as an emergency under the Corps’ regulations. Those regulations define an emergency as “a situation which would result in an unacceptable hazard to life, a significant loss of property, or an immediate, unforeseen, and significant economic hardship” if the standard permitting procedures were followed.

Guidance from the Corps suggests flooding and hurricanes as “example(s) of emergency situations caused by a natural disaster.” A further example includes “a catastrophic … failure … due to an external cause,” such as “a bridge collapse after being struck by a barge.”

Even if a situation qualifies as an emergency under the Corps’ regulations, the agency must make reasonable efforts to take comments from other agencies and the public.

Furthermore, neither these regulations nor the emergency declaration excuses the Corps from its duty to comply with other laws. Under the National Environmental Policy Act, the Corps would still have to analyze and publicly disclose the environmental impacts of federal actions, though it perhaps could use those “alternative arrangements” like a shortened comment period. And under the Endangered Species Act, the Corps still can’t harm endangered species unless a permitted project would repair or replace public facilities in a declared disaster area.

If the Corps’ promised revisions to the list of emergency projects look anything like the original version, expect a flood of lawsuits – which will seek to challenge any permits granted under emergency procedures. Läs mer…

US president Donald Trump thrust Greenland to the centre of global politics when he proposed to buy the vast, icebound island at the start of the year. With the world watching, Greenlandic voters went to the polls on March 11 2025 and delivered a landslide victory for a party that told Trump, “We are not for sale.”

Greenland is an autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark and its struggle for independence is a major political battleground. Both the right-wing Demokraatit (Democrats), now the largest party, and the socialist Inuit Ataqatigiit (IA) that they recently decimated are pro-independence. However, they also want a slower independence process than the populist-nationalist Naleraq, which also did well in the election.

While foreign observers may have had their attention drawn to Greenland by Trump, they shouldn’t look away now. The outcome of this election has made a fossil-fuelled future for Greenland more likely, just when the escalating climate crisis demands an urgent global transition to renewable energy.

Crucial to Greenland’s future is its base of economic production. Greenland is estimated to have some of the world’s largest untapped oil and gas resources.

According to the US Geological Survey, the basin off Greenland’s east coast alone contains 31 billion barrels of oil equivalent and west Greenland about half of that. If this was all recoverable, Greenland could become one of the world’s largest fossil fuel producers.

But these fossil fuels are extremely difficult to extract. The unwelcoming terrain – a vast ice sheet on land, icebergs at sea – led successive fossil fuel companies to give up their hunt for oil and gas. At the moment, Greenland’s fossil fuels simply are not technically and commercially viable to get out of the ground.

Against this backdrop, IA passed a ban on all fossil fuel exploration and extraction when it came to power after the 2021 election. It was justified by the negative impacts a fossil fuel industry would have on the country’s fragile environment and the global climate, as well as domestic fisheries, which total 98% of Greenland’s export value.

The ban fits within a global movement to cut not just the use of fossil fuels, but also their supply. The rationale is that extraction of fossil fuels must end to stop them from further increasing climate change. After the ban, Greenland joined a group of like-minded countries known as the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance, which have all implemented similar legislation.

Other members include Costa Rica, France and Sweden. Most impressive is Denmark – the first significant oil and gas producer to commit to a phaseout of fossil fuel production, albeit by the late year of 2050. Nevertheless, global efforts to end fossil fuel supply continue to gain pace, even if major producers like the US are going in the opposite direction.

No oil until after independence

Oil was not a major theme in the 2025 election campaign. Indeed, a new party proposing an independent Greenland energised by fossil fuel extraction called Qulleq (literally “oil”, a reference to Inuit oil lamps) failed to win a single seat in the 31-seat parliament, the Inatsisartut.

Chairman of Demokraatit, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, celebrated his party winning 30% of the vote.
EPA-EFE/Mads Claus Rasmussen

Despite Qulleq’s failure, the dramatically remade political landscape will allow significant changes to the future of fossil fuel production. Five of six parties support reconsidering the fossil fuel ban, with only IA maintaining strong opposition. More than ever before, oil must be understood in relation to the prevailing independence sentiment.

Greenland’s resources are not owned by Denmark. This ended with legislation in 2009 and 2020 which granted the Greenlandic state full control of the territory’s subsurface. However, as Denmark continues to pay an annual block grant to support the Greenlandic economy, currently around €600 million (£503 million), Denmark is entitled to half of any profits from natural resources up to the block grant value.

Based on pre-election statements by the parties, there will be no parliamentary majority to begin oil exploration, let alone extraction, for now. Naleraq and the centre-left Siumut are both open to pumping oil, but only once Greenland is able to retain 100% of the revenues, which means once the Danish block grant is abolished following independence.

Faced with the difficult prospect of building a post-colonial nation, fossil fuels are a tempting but dangerous way to secure the economic foundation of an independent Greenland. Yet, in the long shadow of Denmark’s colonial role, only the people of Greenland can determine the future of the world’s largest island.

What happens to Greenland’s oil and gas will have major implications not just for the Greenlandic people, but for the rest of the world. As one of the places most vulnerable to the consequences of the climate crisis, Greenland is already feeling the effects of a fossil-fuelled world. If the new government chooses to use extraction as its path to political and economic independence, it will have a devastating impact on the entire planet.

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December 2025 will mark the 10th anniversary of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s final report and its Calls to Action. Other forms of reconciliation are also happening among Indigenous communities that had previously been unconnected but share common experiences of systemic removal at the hands of powerful institutions.

This new reconciliation includes two Indigenous groups that narrowly missed one another at a very specific and dark time in Canadian history now coming back together under new terms — their own.

In southern Ontario, the similar yet distinct experiences of two groups of Indigenous people, both displaced from their homes and families and compelled to live in colonial institutions, played out separately, just 40 kilometres apart: First Nations children sent to the Mohawk Institute and Inuit patients sent to the Hamilton Mountain Sanatorium.

Indigenous survivors and organizations have been working for decades towards local and national forms of truth-telling. As a result, these chapters in the centuries-long saga of Indigenous resistance and resurgence continue to be more deeply understood in terms of historical and contemporary realities in Indigenous communities — as well as to the history of Canada.

A team of scholars and organizations, of which I am proud to be a member, is working to pull as much information as possible about these events into the daylight and use it to understand and advance the ongoing recovery from these experiences.

Children’s shoes placed on the steps leading up to the site of the former residential school, the Mohawk Institute, in Brantford, Ont., in November 2021.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Nick Iwanyshyn

Two colonial institutions

The Mohawk Institute — a residential school remembered as the “Mush Hole” for the poor quality of its food — operated in Brantford, Ont., from 1831 to 1970.

During that time, more than 4,600 schoolchildren, most of them Haudenosaunee people from the Six Nations of the Grand River and nearby communities, were separated from their families and made to live at the school.

There, they were forced to learn English and to provide unpaid labour for the institute’s own operation and for neighbouring farms, all while enduring efforts to assimilate them into colonial society. Many were abused.

The last decades of the Mush Hole overlapped with the period when the nearby Hamilton Mountain Sanatorium, perched above the city’s west end on the edge of the Niagara Escarpment, treated more than 1,200 Inuit tuberculosis patients.

Between 1948 and 1963, Inuit were sent south from communities thousands of kilometres away in Nunavut. For a period, the “San,” as it was called, represented the largest year-round settlement of Inuit in all of Canada. Some Inuit patients never saw their families or homes again.

Between 1958 and 1962, 1,272 Inuit were treated at the Mountain Sanatorium for tuberculosis.
(Black Mount Collection, Hamilton Public Library, Local History & Archives)

‘Re-neighbouring’ communities

Our multi-year project, called Re-Neighbouring as Reconciliation: Indigenous Stories of Resistance, is now in full swing. It aims to improve access to records and artifacts, to gather and share information with all who are interested and to facilitate progress and healing through research, cultural exchanges and education that will introduce people from Six Nations to their counterparts from Nunavut in a concept we call “re-neighbouring.”

However, our team faces political and logistical challenges in doing this work. Some records from the San, for example, are not yet accessible to surviving patients, their families and their communities. We are advocating to correct that, especially in view of the TRC’s Calls to Action advocating for greater openness from museums and archives.

Even finding a way to connect this history to the present is complicated — is something really an artifact if it has cultural value to a living community?

In collaboration with the Art Gallery of Hamilton, we are working to bring a collection of soapstone carvings created by recovering tuberculosis patients during their long convalescence in Hamilton back to their communities to be seen by the descendants of the people who sculpted them.

Together, we are taking a meaningful look at repatriating what rightfully belongs to these communities, including the records of their experiences and the products of those experiences.

The Cross of Lorraine erected in 1953 along the road leading to the old Hamilton sanitorium. The cross was erected as a reminder of the threat of tuberculosis.
(Vanessa Watts)

Healing and justice

The goal is for survivors and those impacted inter-generationally within their communities to get to know one another across these two territories. We want to show how they are interacting with one another through their independent diplomatic and sovereign relations on their own terms.

The best outcome would be for those who were directly impacted to see themselves reflected in a way that gives them a feeling of connection, and for young people whose families and communities were affected by these institutions to know that history and to feel empowered to guide the future of their own lives and their children’s lives.

This work is about more than gathering information and publishing research. Our guiding principles are healing and justice. Our hope is to recover Indigenous knowledge, and to build new connections and understanding among and between the affected communities.

It’s important that everyone should witness distinct Indigenous communities coming together and understand there is not one broad Indigenous entity, but many. All of them are reclaiming their pasts and charting new futures for themselves. Läs mer…

Beavers, those iron-toothed rodents with a talent for hydraulic engineering, can legally return to English river catchments after an absence of 500 years.

Castor fiber has been on the way back for the last two decades thanks to unauthorised reintroductions. But until a few weeks ago, an enclosure was the only home these semi-aquatic mammals could legally find in the UK.

Successive governments have hesitated to issue release licenses for beavers, given their ability to transform the environment in unpredictable ways. When it comes to mitigating and adapting to climate change, however, that’s their biggest asset.

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When the reign of Tyrannosaurus rex abruptly ended 66 million years ago, a “prehistoric beaver” was on the ascendancy according to Stephen Brusatte, a palaeontologist at the University of Edinburgh.

“It wasn’t a good time to be alive,” he says. An asteroid had smashed into Earth with the equivalent fury of several million nuclear bombs. But Kimbetopsalis simmonsae, with its buck-toothed incisors and appetite for leaves and branches, survived.

Within a few hundred thousand years, lush forests had returned. Filling the vacant niches left by vanished dinosaurs were mammals like Kimbetopsalis.

“This burst of evolution led to primates, which eventually led to us,” Brusatte says.

Beaver-like ancestors braved a mass extinction event to help mammals rise from the ashes. What could modern beavers do during another era of planetary crisis?

Read more:
How we found ’prehistoric beaver’ that helped mammals inherit Earth after dinosaurs were wiped out

Dam the carbon

Legal protections and synthetic materials that reduced demand for warm fur have allowed beavers to regain their former haunts in Europe and North America.

The famously industrious rodents have wasted no time in picking up where they left off: damming streams to create ponds in which they build their dome-like lodges, safe from predators that might prowl the banks opposite.

A beaver lodge on a lake near Bad Freienwalde, north-eastern Germany.
Ebenart/Shutterstock

This behaviour has a stunning effect on the surrounding environment – perhaps even the climate. That’s because beaver dams trap vast quantities of sediment rich in carbon that might otherwise heat the atmosphere, says Christine E. Hatch, a professor of geosciences at UMass Amherst.

Read more:
Beavers offer lessons about managing water in a changing climate, whether the challenge is drought or floods

You should take this good news with a pinch of silt, however. CO₂ emissions from human activity were probably well over 40 billion tonnes last year – another annual high. Expecting beavers to offset our emissions is unrealistic, not to mention unreasonable.

Beavers may be skilled at stowing carbon in the wetlands they create, but this advantage is being undone by feedback mechanisms kickstarted by climate change. For example, the warming Arctic is inviting beavers to expand northwards. Here, their antics threaten to speed up the thawing of permafrost that has kept world-warming methane locked up says Helen Wheeler, a lecturer in wildlife ecology at Anglia Ruskin University.

Read more:
Arctic heatwave: what warmer summers mean for the region’s wildlife

Shelter from the storm

Where beavers really shine is in their knack for soothing damaged landscapes.

“Renowned engineers, beavers seem able to dam any stream, building structures with logs and mud that can flood large areas,” Hatch says.

“As climate change causes extreme storms in some areas and intense drought in others, scientists are finding that beavers’ small-scale natural interventions are valuable.”

The changes beavers make can help land hold onto water and release it slowly, which eases flooding and stalls drought. Compare this with human design innovations like tarmac, which radiates heat and allows storm water to slough off in torrents.

While the concrete dams that people construct bar the way for migratory freshwater fish, some of Earth’s most threatened animals, beaver dams present no such obstacle.

“One reason may be that the fish can rest in slow pools and cool pond complexes after navigating the tallest parts of the dams,” Hatch says.

Beaver wetlands do excel in blocking one thing, however: wildfires.

“Recent studies in the western US have found that vegetation in beaver-dammed river corridors is more fire-resistant than in areas without beavers because it is well watered and lush, so it doesn’t burn as easily,” Hatch says.

All of these qualities make beaver wetlands a fantastic refuge for a range of wildlife, particularly as ecosystems nearby are wracked and warped by rising temperatures and extreme weather. Even our towns and cities could be made more liveable with their help, as water evaporating from these ponds cools the air during heatwaves and absorbs flood water during a deluge.

Geographers Joshua Larsen (University of Birmingham), Annegret Larsen (Wageningen University) and Matthew Dennis (University of Manchester) are slightly more cautious.

“Unless the water bodies are very large, or high in number, this [effect] tends to diminish rapidly with distance from the water. This would make it difficult to rely upon beaver ponds for cooling benefits for human settlements,” they say.

Read more:
Beavers can do wonders for nature – but we should be realistic about these benefits extending to people

Nonetheless, allowing beavers to recover a fraction of their former abundance will make the effects of global heating less severe.

“Beavers are showing that their impacts can offer added levels of ecosystem resilience to a changing climate that we would be wise to embrace,” they add. Läs mer…

Approximately one quarter of hospital beds in acute wards – wards for patients who need close care for a sudden or severe medical conditions – are occupied by someone living with dementia in the UK.

The sights, sounds and smells of a hospital environment, and the lack of familiar carers, can be a significant challenge for people with dementia. Many healthcare staff feel that they do not have sufficient training to care well for them.

This can lead to some staff using less effective communication methods to reduce distress and anxiety in dementia patients. Some carers, for example, might try to “correct” patients with dementia who seem confused about their surroundings or may use therapeutic lying – when lies are told to alleviate the distress of a patient with dementia – to avoid upsetting patients further. Our research shows that there are two approaches that are more effective.

Managing competing realities

Dementia affects people’s abilities to use language, to understand other people’s use of language and to remember things. One common challenge is the presence of competing realities, where the person with dementia is oriented to a different time or place. These competing realities are often grounded in the person’s previous experience of a career or family role. For example, they may believe a parent is coming to take them home, or that they need to leave urgently to pick up their own child from school.

Managing these competing realities can be difficult for carers in any setting. It is particularly difficult in an acute ward, where staff may know little about the background of a patient admitted for treatment for an urgent medical need such as a fracture or infection. Competing realities can be a major source of distress for a person with dementia, who might not recognise where they are or that they have any medical need, and can’t understand why they are not simply able to leave when they ask.

Over recent years, my colleagues and I have been using video recordings of everyday ward interactions to identify the communication challenges that occur when caring for people with dementia.

We have developed training in communication skills focused on specific challenges. For example, dealing with refusals of medically necessary care, responding to talk that is hard to understand and closing interactions effectively. Most recently, we have focused on dealing with competing realities and the distress that these can cause.

Responding effectively

We found there are four ways in which staff tend to respond, but that only two of these are effective in addressing distress.

The first way is to confront or challenge the patient’s reality. For example, telling a person who believes they are at home that they are actually in hospital. It is understandable why staff might do this, but we found that it does not usually lead to agreement, and instead can make distress worse.

The second way is to go along with the patient’s reality. For example, by agreeing that a deceased family member such as a parent or spouse will be coming to visit or collect the patient later. While this might work as a short-term strategy, it is time-limited because the promised event will never happen. This can ultimately make distress worse. Wider debates on “therapeutic lying” to people with dementia suggest it should only be done if carefully thought out and planned, and only then as a last resort.

Read more:
Is it OK to lie to someone with dementia?

The third way is to find some aspect of the patient’s reality that is shareable, without fully entering into it. For example, if a patient says their (deceased) father is coming to collect them, a member of healthcare staff might ask “Do you miss your dad?” This avoids lying, but responds to the emotional tone of the patient and enables a sharing of feelings.

For a person worried they have left a child or a pet alone at home, a healthcare professional might say “Your neighbour is looking after everything at home”. This provides general reassurance without confirming or challenging the specifics. For a patient who repeatedly asks to go home because they do not recognise their medical need, asking “What would you be doing if you were at home?” can identify a need or desire – such as having a cup of tea, a walk, or watching the TV – which could be met in the hospital environment.

Redirecting a Dementia Sufferer | Louis Theroux: Extreme Love – Dementia | BBC Studios.

Alternatively, staff used diversions. The topic of conversation can be shifted away from the issue that was causing distress, towards something else they could engage the person with.

This sometimes drew on the immediate environment – the view out of the window, for example. Sometimes they proposed an alternative activity, such as walking to a day room, or getting a drink. When no other possibilities were available, they sometimes asked the person with dementia a question that could lead into a different conversation.

These approaches are relevant for carers in any setting. Even in the context of a busy, pressured environment where carers may know very little about a person, the small differences in the way they communicate can have a profound effect on the care and wellbeing of those living with dementia. Läs mer…

What is the point of a Labour government? This is a question traditionally asked after Labour governments lose office. But it’s also a question asked while Labour governments are in office. And, sometimes, even when they still only recently arrived in office.

For a Labour prime minister to announce cuts in aid and development spending to increase spending on the military is one of those “Nixon in China” moments. Only a Labour prime minister could get away with so illiberal a move.

Yet for some it questions the very purpose of the Labour party, which, Harold Wilson told it in 1962, is “a moral crusade or it is nothing”. Two years later Prime Minister Wilson created a Department of Overseas Development.

Starmer’s decision to pull funding from international development to increase defence spending may ultimately prove to be an inflection point for the government.

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The prime minister had made his (unfashionable) enthusiasm for Wilson known. Yet Starmer has presided over the evisceration of an already diminished aid budget. Cuts have taken spending down from 0.5% of GDP to 0.3%. Starmer had once attacked Boris Johnson’s original cut from 0.7%.

The cuts mean Labour’s broad progressive constituency may see itself as being asked to stomach the attempted bromance with a reviled foreign leader. Rearmament is a direct consequence of Donald Trump’s re-election, and the aid cuts a direct consequence of Starmer’s February 27 White House visit. For most party members, and more than a few voters, a Labour manifesto commitment has been abandoned for the least palatable of reasons.

That this is a policy that will be popular (or at least not unpopular) with the public is a given. Foreign aid attracts neither votes nor sympathy. Development’s tiny budget, the lowest of low-hanging political fruit, has been raided and arms spending promised (as it has been phrased) on the backs of the world’s poorest people. That 28% of the development budget was being spent on housing asylum seekers in the UK domestically only adds to the tension within Labour.

And yet, criticism of the government’s shortest of short termism has been muted. Political opponents on the right approve. Cutting aid spending is a Reform UK manifesto commitment.

Labour backbenchers have been pointed. One described it as “Trumpian bullshit”, adding: “I’ve given my entire adult life to the party, is this what it was all for? Is this Labour values?”

Anneliese Dodds, the foreign office minister responsible for aid – and most moderate of souls – resigned after being humiliated by a prime minister who gave her an hour’s notice of the halving of her budget. She delayed her announcement so as not to detract from the White House visit.

Anneliese Dodds has resigned in protest over the aid cuts.
Shutterstock

In and out of favour

The historical pattern had been clear: Labour governments elevate, and Conservative governments relegate, international development as a government priority.

In 1964 Wilson made development a separate department. His Tory Edward Heath then moved it into the Foreign Office when he was in power. Wilson took it out again, but then Margaret Thatcher moved it back.

Tony Blair gave it a new title and a new status, and then, providing the exception to the rule, David Cameron not only retained its independence, but ring-fenced its budget. The pandemic gave cause for Cameron’s successor-but-one, Johnson, to revert to type and merge the department into the Foreign Office, one feels now, for the last time.

With these latest cuts, UK aid spending will fall to the lowest level as a percentage of national income since before 1964.

Development was also – and perhaps for the wrong reasons – historically the only department with reliably female leadership: Barbara Castle, Judith Hart, Lynda Chalker, Clare Short, Valerie Amos, Justine Greening, Priti Patel, Penny Mordaunt, Anne-Marie Trevelyan, Vicky Ford, Dodds and, now, Baroness Chapman.

One consequence was the foregrounding of women’s and girls issues in policy. Hart in particular proselytised for UK development spending. Her 1973 book Aid and Liberation was a clarion for socialist – rather than what she saw as neo-imperialist – aid to what was then called the third world. It was, for her, a political as well as a moral cause.

There may come a time when Starmer’s choices here will be spoken of by Labour members and, then voters, as craven. Portentously, Wilson was accused of the same over Vietnam, and Blair over Iraq.

The last time a Labour government diverted welfare funds to rearmament they were out of office shortly after, and for over a decade. At least Clement Attlee and Ernest Bevin – the pair invoked by Starmer and his ministers as they announced the cuts – exchanged electoral advantage for historical greatness.

Trump’s second administration has created a crisis, both for the government and for Britain’s place in the world. It exacerbates another crisis, also known as the British economy, where pressure on public spending is about to create its own inflection point. Are Labour governments for cutting help for those in need at home as well as those overseas?

Leading where others follow, Trump has cut US foreign aid. By 83%. It is hard, in the new age of transactional, personalistic, international relations, to discern much a future for development spending. The end of the age of aid – one of the reasons for Labour governments – is upon us. Judith Hart would be broken. Läs mer…

There’s an illustration by Helen Oxenbury in the new exhibition of her work, Illustrating the Land of Childhood, at Burgh House, Hampstead, that I hadn’t seen before.

Titled The House, the pen and watercolour image, mostly in black-and-white, shows the exterior of a street. Two windows of a single house are lit up in colour. The upstairs window looks in on a bedroom where a child is sleeping, and the window below shows the child’s mother preparing breakfast in the kitchen downstairs.

Who would’ve known that these characters had recently planted a plum tree in the bedroom that had burst through the floors and ceilings, almost destroying the home? Such is the story of Meal One (1971), by Oxenbury and Ivor Cutler, from which The House is taken.

Land of Childhood is Oxenbury’s first solo exhibition, and The House encapsulates the essence of the show. The world depicted through Oxenbury’s illustrations is one of family gatherings, mealtimes and activities, but also of oceans, forests, night skies and caves. Together they illuminate the adventure and anxiety of childhood.

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The exhibition spans almost six decades of Oxenbury’s career as a children’s book illustrator. In doing so, it demonstrates the different media that Oxenbury has worked with – including pastels, pen, gouache, watercolour and clay – to tell these stories.

An illustration from So Much (1994).
Courtesy of Helen Oxenbury

The earliest illustrations on display are from the 1960s, so it is also possible to follow a kind of journey through the materials used for creating and producing children’s books from the second half of the 20th century onward.

Like Oxenbury’s illustrations, the exhibition gallery in Burgh House offers something new to find in each alcove, recess, display case and picture wall of the room, with the artwork spotlit in the otherwise shaded room.

The gallery itself is small, meaning that visitors are close to the pictures and models on display. This compels a proximity to the images that is less typical of gallery exhibitions, and more familiar to reading books.

The descriptions on the wall are concise, noting the stories that the illustrations were made for, but without reproducing sections of the narrative. There is something exciting about seeing the illustrations loosened slightly from the stories that usually contain them.

One of the clay models on display.
Courtesy of Helen Oxenbury

The character and animation of things runs through the images and models in the exhibition, as does the drama and detail of the smallest interactions or tasks illustrated. The movement and rush of childhood seems especially vivid in the illustrations from the 1980s onward, including those from We’re Going on a Bear Hunt (1989, Michael Rosen), So Much (1994, Trish Cooke) and Through the Looking-Glass (2008, Lewis Carroll).

Seeing Oxenbury’s artwork on display, I think part of the effectiveness of these illustrations lies in their apparent openness, and the suggestion of vast spaces that extend just beyond the frame, or the unfolding of a scene yet to be concluded. This perhaps also underpins Oxenbury’s approach to illustrating childhood itself, when so much of our everyday is surprising.

And this is echoed in the sense of things still in motion that I noticed throughout the exhibition. Oxenbury’s interpretations of scene, and intimations of movement, are rendered in the almost unreal, vibrant pastel colours of a world that is still forming, and where anything is possible.

Helen Oxenbury: Illustrating the Land of Childhood is on until December 14, in the Marie-Louise von Motesiczky Gallery at Burgh House in Hampstead, London. Läs mer…