‘We had to leave home for a better future’: Kate Beaton on the brutal, drug-filled reality of life in an oil camp

Before work like Hark! A Vagrant made her famous, the Canadian cartoonist spent two years in the Alberta wilderness, see-sawing between boredom and fear for her safety. Now she is finally ready to tell the story

In April 2008, an international media storm erupted over the death of 1,600 ducks in a toxic pond in Alberta, Western Canada. Kate Beaton remembers it well, because she was working there at the time. All of a sudden the whole world turned their heads and they're like: What's going on over there? Doesn't look good to me.' Because of the ducks. And I was like: It's terrible about the ducks, but I see people around me failing. I see a lot more than that going on, too, and no one seems to care. What about the workers? What about the cancer rates in the Indigenous communities?'"

A decade and a half later, Beaton has piled her memories of life in a camp in Alberta - built to exploit one of the world's largest single oil deposits - into a chunky, no-holds-barred graphic novel memoir titled Ducks: Two Years on the Oil Sands. She was 21 years old, and had just finished a degree in history and anthropology, when she left her home on an island off the easternmost tip of Canada for the job more than 2,000 miles away.