The World We Can Build
By Eliza Hull & Sally Rippin, & Daniel Gray-Barnett
Reviewed by Lara Cain Gray
The World We Can Build comes to us from the team behind award-winning title Come Over To My House (2022), and continues that book’s plea for a more inclusive world for people living with disabilities. Sally Rippin is a prolific author and illustrator of children’s books. She is using her platform as the current Australian Children’s Laureate to question ways in which we can change our systems – including within educational approaches and the built environment – to better serve a diverse community. Eliza Hull is a writer, musician and disability advocate who, like artist Daniel Gray-Barnett, brings lived experience of these concerns to the project.
The premise here is simple – young Sam has a new friend, Carla. Carla uses a wheelchair. They have a great day at school and Sam asks Carla if she’d like to come over to his house to play. His house has stairs, so she can’t. Perhaps they can meet at the playground? But there, too, the spaces are not conducive to the two children playing together. We see that the playground has some ‘disability friendly’ activities, but there are many places in our cities like this; they tick a legal box for accessibility but are far from genuinely inclusive. It only takes a pathway that doesn’t run all the way to the swings, or a sandpit with a timber edging to prevent inclusive play.
So Sam and Carla set about inventing a world that works for both of them. On a big sheet of paper, they sketch an environment with ramps and levers, lifts and quiet spaces. We can see how this differently considered environment would not only make life easier for Carla, but would increase quality of life and inclusion for a whole range of community members – the elderly, parents with prams, or people living with invisible disabilities like chronic pain or mental health concerns. “You see, it’s not that hard,” says Carla to Sam.
A foreword from the creators discusses the ‘social model of disability’, which focusses on the barriers the world creates, rather than on a person’s impairment. A wheelchair user is disabled by a building that only has stairs. A blind person is disabled by a lack of audio description on a TV show. The problem is with the environment, not with the person, so removing barriers becomes the aim, rather than ‘fixing’ or accommodating the person. This will be a really refreshing conversation to bring into homes or classrooms, told with colourful relatable illustrations and straightforward language. The endpapers show piles of simple, multicoloured building blocks, reminding us of the opportunity we all have to build, and rebuild, in imaginative ways. Children do it all the time! It’s not that hard.
Bright Light (Hardie Grant Children’s Publishing) 2025
Sally Rippin
Eliza Hull
Daniel Gray-Barnett
