"The Last Stand"

Portrait of Christine Milne OA 
Archibald Prize Entry 2026

2700 x 700 x 35mm

Pyrography and Acrylic
Camphor Laurel

In "The Last Stand", Christine stands at life scale, gazing directly at the viewer. Behind her, the ancient stringybark rises. Above her passes the shadow of a white goshawk - Accipiter novaehollandiae, a species whose habitat is old-growth wet forest, and whose survival depends on it. The white goshawk was Christine's omen through decades of campaigning. It became the symbol of The Independents in 1989, the forerunner to the Tasmanian Greens. It was adopted when Christine was first elected to the Tasmanian Parliament, and carried through to the Greens' formation in 1993. In the portrait it passes as a shadow: peripherally present and not guaranteed to remain.

The Last Stand portrait sitting took place with Christine and Emily on 3 March 2026 in Denison Valley, Huonville, Tasmania in front of an ancient stringybark eucalyptus estimated to be around 400 years old. The tree remains unprotected. Two years earlier, a comparable giant on the same site was felled for plantation forestry, its trunk left to rot. The native forest soil nearby incinerated to destroy all seeds, fungi, and endemic biodiversity before monocrop replanting. This is what state-sanctioned "sustainable" forestry means in practice.

The portrait is pyrography and acrylic on a trunk slab of camphor laurel, an introduced, invasive species dominating the cleared landscapes it has entered in the Northern Rivers region where Emily created the final work. Christine currently serves on the Invasive Species Council and has been active since her appointment with Australia's Greenhouse Gas Council in 1990 on the issue of climate emergency. The parallel is intentional.

At 2700 × 700 mm, Milne appears at life scale. The work does not miniaturise its subject. It places the viewer in direct relationship with her — face to face, eye to eye — and asks them to consider what she has spent her life confronting. 

The Last Stand asks viewers: how will we act with the time that remains?