Hope is the Thing’ was inspired by the American poet Emily Dickinson’s famous poem ‘Hope is the thing with feathers’. In the poem, hope is seen as a small bird that continues to sing even during the wildest of storms.
The book was created during a dark period in Australia, the Black Summer of 2019-2020, when savage bushfires ravaged vast areas of the country. It was a time that presented a horrific vision of the future impact of climate change. Taking inspiration from the poem, Bell and Wagner show the many simple ways hope is present in our world.
Expanding upon Dickinson’s metaphor of a small bird, we meet on a colourful wordless double page spread a young girl creating artwork about Australian birds. These are pages that invite a closer inspection to spot various things that relate to birds. The book’s lyrical rhyming text shows how the simple actions of our native birds, actions we often take for granted, are a positive constant in our lives. ‘Hope is a seagull eyeing off chips. Hope is the hollow in a eucalypt’.
The brilliantly colourful artwork, which includes 3D imagery, was created using mixed media collages created from numerous sources including fragments of maps and print books, old artwork, coloured paper and prints from leaves. The endpapers are reminiscent of folded origami cranes set against a sunrise at the front and sunset at the back. The book’s final illustration depicts our young girl as a bird soaring off with other birds into a bright sky, a fitting metaphor of hope for the future.
It is not always easy to have hope in the dark times of people’s lives. This book shows it is the small, beautiful things of nature, the small green shoot on a burnt tree, the cheeky antics of a cockatoo or the dawn laughter of a kookaburra—these are the things that that give us hope and give us life.
‘Wherever there are birds, there is hope.’ ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan
‘Hope is the Thing’ won the 2024 CBCA Award for New Illustrator, Erica Wagner.
Picture Books for Older Readers
