Articles

Les Less Miserable: The Poetic Journey of Les Murray

Posted on by Editor in Poetry, Conference
David Naseby, Les Murray, 1995. Oil on canvas, 179.5 x 184.5 cm. National Portrait Gallery, Canberra.

The recent death of David Malouf, aged 92, has left many readers grieving the loss of a writer whose prose was marked by unostentatious care, quiet precision, and a deep humaneness. Malouf had a rare gift for tracing the places where the material meets the immaterial, where the ordinary world thins and something luminous shows through. In an age when algorithms increasingly choose our words for us, his painstaking craftsmanship feels all the more precious.

That same attentiveness to mystery and meaning shaped the work of Les Murray, another of Australia’s most distinctive and resilient poetic voices. Murray never wrote a cliché. His poems –gossamer, surprising, and often startlingly tender – stood in contrast to his rough, laconic exterior. Behind that exterior was a man shaped by a lonely and traumatic childhood, one who spent his career descending into the darker places of human experience and returning with light.

Murray refused easy certitude. He resisted the tyranny of the mob. He wrote with a spiritual clarity that was never sentimental. In his poem on the death of his father, Cecil, he offers a line that still startles with its fierce love and defiance: “Fuck them. I wish you God.”

This is Murray at his most distilled – a poet of hope, not optimism. Hope, for him, was not a mood but a posture: a way of standing in the world that acknowledged suffering without surrendering to it.

If you’d like to experience something of that spirituality– its toughness, its radiance, its refusal to look away – you are warmly invited to Michael McGirr’s talk, ‘Les Less Miserable: The Poetic Journey of Les Murray’, next Wednesday, 13 May, at 6pm at St Peter’s Eastern Hill in Melbourne.

Michael will explore Murray’s life, his craft, and the strange, grace-filled places where his poetry continues to speak. It promises to be an evening of depth, humour, and insight, very much in the spirit of Murray himself.

And if Malouf’s passing has stirred something in you, you may also appreciate Michael’s recent tribute to David Malouf in Eureka Street, a beautiful reflection on a life spent enlarging the imaginative world of this country.

Studio

Posted on by Editor in Books, Literature, Poetry, Review

Studio is a book-length journal publishing poetry and short fiction of literary merit, offering a venue for established, new, and aspiring writers. Studio also publishes literary articles, essays, news, and reviews of writing, writers, and events of interest to members. Studio was first published in 1980, and is published three times each year.

Membership of Studio puts you in touch with:

  • quality writing from Australia and around the world
  • avenues for publishing and writing in Australia and internationally
  • news of conferences and festivals of interest to writers
  • details of competitions for prose and poetry
  • other arts organisations, significant books, and valuable publications
  • informed comment and responses to literary ideas
  • a wide variety of writers and artists in Australia and around the world

Inside Studio
A studio is a special place for the artist. It is a space where creative work is crafted, shared, and presented for others to enjoy. In the studio, we experiment and display our best work for others to appreciate. Studio is a non-profit book-length journal produced by an Australian editorial team, with consultant editors around Australia. Studio seeks to serve its members by publishing quality poetry, short fiction, essays, and reviews, sponsoring competitions, and announcing events of interest to members. Studio also publishes a range of special edition books and coffee-table publications. Back catalogue editions of Studio and special Studio books are available on request. Studio grows as members share their work and generously support a quality literary journal serving writers and readers of poetry, short fiction, and the literary arts from around Australia and across the world. 

For more information, email the editor, Paul Grover.

Three on the Road

Posted on by Editor in Poetry
Pro Hart, The Good Samaritan, c. 1980. Oil on board, 30 x 44 cm. Private collection.

I
I was escaping a traumatic day
on the road with my dearest friends
when he fell in step beside us on the way
and the world began to glow again

II
I was a bastard, a tool of the State
until face down in the dirt
I heard voices uttered promises and groans
was made and unmade among stones

III
Of course, I was tempted to walk on
the complications the expense
he was a naked, bleeding Other
ashamed to ignore him I made him my brother

℘℘℘℘

Chris Ringrose is a poet and fiction writer living in Melbourne, Australia. His latest poetry collection is Palmistry (ICoE Press, 2019). Creative Lives, a collection of interviews with South Asian Writers, was published by Columbia UP in 2021.

Leonard Brown: Painting the Celestial

Posted on by Editor in Exhibition, Iconography, Painting

The survey exhibition of the work of painter Leonard Brown is currently on exhibition at the Ipswich Art Gallery in Queensland until 14 June 2026. Curated by the distinguished art historian Sasha Grishin, this survey explores his distinctive abstract works that exemplify his interest in formal geometry and handmade mark-making. Alongside this body of work are his religious icons drawn from the Orthodox tradition. Together, they explore the work of an artist centrally concerned with Christian spirituality and transcendence.

The art of Leonard Brown is a unique phenomenon in Australian art. He is highly regarded as a painter of sublime, minimal abstract canvases, and his paintings are held in major public art collections throughout Australia, including the National Gallery of Australia, the Queensland Art Gallery, the National Gallery of Victoria, the Art Gallery of South Australia, and the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

At the same time, Leonard Brown is an accomplished icon painter following the ancient conventions and methods of Byzantine and Medieval Russian icon painting. Many of his icons are consecrated and in liturgical use in churches throughout the world, find homes in domestic environments, and are held in private and public art collections. He is also a figurative artist of repute, the winner of the Brisbane Portrait Prize (2019), and has been awarded numerous other art prizes, including The Blake Prize for Religious Art (2010).

Painting the Celestial is the first comprehensive retrospective exhibition of Leonard Brown’s work to be presented in Australia and traces the artist’s development over more than five decades. The Ipswich Art Gallery is being transformed for this exhibition to include a gold-radiating sanctuary where Leonard Brown’s icons can be sympathetically displayed. His abstract paintings are being shown in greater numbers and in more depth than ever before. To enter the world of Leonard Brown’s art is to embark on a transformative experience. Both his painted icons and abstract works can transport the viewer to a different, more spiritual plane of existence.

Leonard Brown, To annihilate all that’s made to a green thought in a green shade, 2015.

The Dust of Memory

Posted on by Editor in Poetry
Photo by P. M. Flynn.

Here I sit in nothingness, asleep
while I close my eyes to darkness
as it falls around me.

There is a line darkness does not cross.
And still there are shadows:

flesh doesn’t wander over spirit or death.
(The flesh is quickest to disagree with eternity;
the bones are slowest to turn over in graves
of dust and water.) Spirit can never die.

Spirit never dies while we are awake but
sleeps at night like a universe of endless stars
expanding into nothingness, to never reach
over the edge of an infinite void, a dark hole
of remembering everything and giving it more
weight, more gravity to nothing escaping,
as every thought is compressed into words

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P. M. Flynn holds a BS in English from East Carolina University. A devoted roaster of organic coffee and enthusiastic baker of cookies, he pairs his creative pursuits with a long record of publication in respected online and print magazines. His debut poetry collection, Shadows on Moss, was released by Resource Publications. For more than fifty years, he has explored the deep interplay between art and theology, a commitment that continues to shape his writing and imagination. 

Les Less Miserable: The Poetic Journey of Les Murray

Posted on by Editor in Education, Exhibition, Literature, Poetry

Tickets available here.

Through the Torn Place: A Threshold for Good Friday

Posted on by Jason Goroncy in Exhibition, Multimedia

Through Lent and Good Friday, the High Altar of St Paul’s in Auckland held something rare: an artwork that does not announce itself, but waits. Titled The Opening, conceived and created by Karen Sewell under the auspices of SPAM (St Paul’s Arts & Media), is a site-responsive installation that takes as its starting point one of the most arresting images in the Passion narrative: the tearing of the temple veil. At the moment of Christ’s death, a curtain that had divided the holy of holies from ordinary worshippers for centuries was torn … from above. The Opening holds that moment and asks what it might mean for us now. What might it mean, too, to imagine that “Christ did not point to the opening but rather is the opening?

Rather than illustrating the biblical event, Sewell works with material and sensory registers – painted linen, bark, hand-formed earth, scent, and poetry – to create what she calls a “quiet threshold.” Visitors are not directed toward a conclusion but invited to linger, to bring what they carry, and to rest.

Four elements, one threshold

The installation operates as an integrated whole, each element carrying its own weight while contributing to a cumulative atmosphere of contemplative attention. Together they form what Sewell describes as “a place to pause, pray, and listen.”

I. The Opening – The Veil. A large painted linen veil, the installation’s central image, holds memory, fragility, and light. It alludes to the temple curtain while remaining resolutely its own thing: worn, painted, suffused with the marks of making.

II. Bark Work – Shedding. Bark, shed naturally by trees as new growth arrives, covers the floor, speaking of shedding and release. The material is at once beautiful and in the process of becoming something else.

III. Scent – Presence. A bespoke ambient scent, Presence, moves through the space unseen. Intangible and enveloping, it evokes Spirit: present even when invisible, echoing God’s quiet abiding within the material world.

IV. Earth Spheres – The Light Within Matter. Hand-formed earth spheres made from soil, sand, and water carry traces of place, time, and touch. Sewell calls them “the light within matter,” forms of quiet transformation, the hidden work of God in ordinary life.

In addition to these “response invitations,” as she calls them, Sewell offers two poems, “What Opened” and “Through the Torn Place,” which give language to what cannot quite be shown. They function not as explanation but as another material layer of the work.

Space for what cannot be answered

What distinguishes The Opening from much church-commissioned art is its refusal to be didactic. The installation does not tell visitors what to think or feel about Good Friday. It makes space for encounter, which is both harder to achieve and, perhaps, more theologically honest.

Sewell’s background in contemplative practice informs every decision. The scent is there for those who notice it and not for those who don’t. The response stations, fabric to tear, paper to write on, a moment to pause over the earth spheres, are invitations rather than instructions. Participation is entirely at the visitor’s own pace and depth.

“Rather than offering answers, The Opening creates space for contemplative attention: a place to reflect on the love that heals separation and restores communion.”

The bark floor work is particularly striking in this regard. Bark shed by a living tree is neither dead nor alive in the ordinary sense. It is released material, the evidence of a living system continuing to grow. That it covers the floor beneath the veil and the earth spheres gives the work a groundedness that prevents it from becoming merely atmospheric. There is substance here, as well as suggestion.

The installation asks visitors to hold together things that resist resolution: rupture and reconciliation, absence and nearness, loss and hope. These are not contradictions to be dissolved but tensions to be inhabited.

The exhibition is open on Sundays (0900–1300) or by appointment.

The image of the invisible God

Posted on by Editor in Poetry
Photo by Savannah B. on Unsplash.

I thought I saw you at the market
after you died, and again rounding
a corner on Monte Sano, past Holy 
Trinity. Convinced, despite your ashes
in an alabaster urn, I follow my mother 
until she turns to look at me with the wrong
eyes, wrong smile, three inches too tall –
this body was not yours resurrected. Yet,
the absentache does not dissipate, 
but burrows deeper in the bone. Doctors
say it’s quite common after amputation
to feel pain where there is no longer a limb,
experience it as fully as when it was
part of your frame you could see
and touch – the missing part remains
present somehow despite its removal.

I wonder if Christ misses his body,
now ascended, misses the smell
of his own skin and sweat, timbre
of his own voice, touch of his mother’s hand
sweeping hair from his face, even well into manhood –
does he miss his father’s hand on his shoulder,
the grip of his fingers around a hammer,
unravelling a scroll? Does he reach to touch
his chest where the pain of humanity
still throbs, but there is no ribcage, no pumping 
heart? Or does he try to conjure the scent
of spices, taste of roasted lamb filling his stomach, 
the sensation of sleep? Does his side still
flinch with the memory pain of a blade
sunk deep, do his fingers long to trace
the borders of his wound?

℘℘℘℘

Nadine Ellsworth-Moran is a minister serving in Georgia, USA. She has a passion for writing and the arts. She is fascinated by the obscure and the way grace shows up unannounced. She has been published in over 60 journals and hopes to continue to find ways to put the indescribable into words. She lives with her husband and five unrepentant cats.

Call for Papers: Sacred Christian Art in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand

Posted on by Editor in Dance, Digital Art, Drawing, Film, Iconography, Jewellery, Multimedia, Music, News, Painting, Papercutting, Performance, Photography, Poetry, Pottery, Sculpture, Street art, Technology, Theatre

The editors of Sacrum et Decorum, a peer-reviewed international journal dedicated to the history and study of sacred art, invite submissions for a special focus on sacred Christian art in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. They welcome contributions that engage with the intersection of Christian (broadly interpreted) visual culture and the distinctive colonial, postcolonial, and multicultural contexts of the region.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • Church architecture and interior decoration
  • First Nations and Māori visual traditions’ encounters with European missionary art
  • The reception and adaptation of European sacred art traditions in Australia and New Zealand
  • Religious street art
  • Individual artists, craftspeople, and workshops engaged in sacred art production
  • Stained glass, iconography, sculpture, metalwork, and devotional objects
  • Contemporary sacred art and evolving liturgical aesthetics

Sacrum et Decorum is published in both Polish and English and is indexed in DOAJ, ERIH PLUS, EBSCO, and other major academic databases. It is an open-access publication, and authors retain full copyright under a Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 licence.

The journal welcomes original, previously unpublished scholarly articles making a substantive contribution to the field. In addition to full research articles, shorter contributions – including reviews, source materials, and artists’ reflections on their own practice – are also invited. Submissions in English are particularly encouraged.

Full author guidelines, technical requirements, and submission information are available at the journal’s website.

where we conclude we already do not want for anything

Posted on by Editor in Poetry
Photo by Charles Pickrell on Unsplash.

the Lord is my shepherd and I / do not want to / lie down in your pastures / of fake grass and chlorinated pools / where the sun beats down on / our languid bodies and we are told / this is good even / though the heat feels like noise and / our thoughts have slowed / like tar

and you have closed / the entrances to the valley of / the shadow of death and / you have told us the shadows / have been banished / nothing to see here but I / want to see what that looks like and / you say I’m dwelling on the wrong things / why not dwell here where / there is a banquet that we will take / pictures of and post them so / those who admire us and those / whose admiration feels like / spite and those whose spite makes us feel / admired or at least victorious / so that they can see and try / to forget about us or talk about us / and surely / goodness and mercy will follow us all / the days of our life just in case / we hold still / long enough to / feel how much / we miss it

℘℘℘℘

Martine van Bijlert is a poet, writer, and artist who grew up in Iran, now lives in the Netherlands, and in between worked as an aid worker, researcher, and diplomat, mostly in Afghanistan. She is the author of the poetry collection Peace, Peace They Say.  This was first published in Hot Pink Magazine.