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.
Studiois 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.
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.
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.
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
℘℘℘℘
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.
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.
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 sacredChristian 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.
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.
No painting can be adjudged, can reveal its true meanings, can expose the deeper insights and sensitivities of the artist, unless one physically confronts and breathes in the paint. The message is in the medium. All that I am able to do is run my eye attentively over computer images of the successive panels of Kyrie Eleison, draw attention to one or two more obvious themes, and supplement my a priori reading of the paintings by inferences drawn from my many years of friendship with Michael Galovic.
Inspired by the unforgettable photographic images of the Twin Towers, Michael was moved to give iconographic expression to his meditations around the catastrophic event in the form of a series of eight interconnected, moving, and challenging panels. Drawing on living water from the well of Eastern Orthodox iconography, each successive panel links images of the devastated World Trade Centre to the Gospel narrative of Christ’s passion and resurrection, episode by episode. Michael’s conviction clearly was that it is only through the salvific Paschal Mystery that spiritual meaning can be ascribed to the otherwise totally meaningless incident.
But, as with Holy Scripture, one needs to delve deeper into the narrative to expose the sensus plenior, the fuller sense, that lies beneath the surface of the imagery. Unless I am much mistaken, what lies beneath the surface is a vision of “things-to-come” that Michael shares with countless Christians around the globe. To reduce this vision to its barest bones, it is that of an impending (in fact, it has actually started) worldwide catastrophic collapse of cultures and institutions, ecclesiastical as well as secular, accompanied by massive extinction of biological species, and the ravaging, or even the extreme elimination, of entire human populations. But this widely shared vision is not one of despair but of hope; not hope in the “but there is still time” with which climate scientists seem to feel it their duty, even if contrary to their convictions, to conclude their dire warnings, but hope, of faith, that a new universal order will emerge amongst a remnant humanity.
Michael Galovic, Kyrie Eleison, 2025. 170 x 80 cm.
In its Christian form, it is the conviction that the New Jerusalem will be centred on the Cosmic Christ, through whom, in the power of the Divine Breath, the Holy Spirit has drawn people to himself from the beginning of the Homo sapiens story. The eternal Logos, the Word,and the Incarnate Christ, Jesus of Nazareth, are one and the same, but the Word has come to the hearts of countless millions of seekers before the Incarnation and amongst those who have heard nothing of the gospel, even today. The cosmic Christ is the universal Christ, the saviour for all. The age of the cosmic Christ, to those who share this vision, will not be long coming.
Galovic’s Kyrie Eleison series is defined by the first and last panels, from the fall of the towers to the icon of the cosmic Christ. Each of the intervening six panels is centred on a cluster of symbols that invite the viewer to meditate on Galovic’s apocalyptic vision, first from one angle, then from another. Obviously, the symbols were selected and grouped because, for Galovic, each symbol has a particular meaning. But symbols are polysemous, and indeed frequently carry opposite connotations. This means that each panel, in its unique way, can simultaneously convey or connect with the meanings of both horror and doom, and with the promise of a new order arising from a devastated world.
But why, one might ask, does Galovic ground the whole series in the destruction of the World Trade Centre on 9/11? Galovic’s Kyrie, though he constantly refers back to 9/11, is not about 9/11 per se. He simply uses 9/11 as a type (in the biblical sense) of catastrophic events with worldwide consequences in general. He could, to take a couple of examples, equally have chosen the nuclear holocaust of the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, or the ongoing genocide of the Palestinians of Gaza, to anchor the series. The obvious answer to the question is that it was the impact, and by no means does that exclude aesthetic impact, of those unforgettable photos of the destroyed Twin Towers that gripped his attention. It was indeed those naked, silvery pinnacles of steel rising from the sea of wreckage that were to haunt Galovic and led to a series of 9/11 paintings that predate Kyrie.
Even the view from in front of a computer screen is more than sufficient to tell one that Galovic’s Kyrie Eleison is a work with a desperately urgent message for our times. In my opinion, it is both a triumph for Galovic as an iconographer and for the flexibility of the Serbian iconographic tradition, which has been his mentor since childhood, that has enabled him to interpret the apocalyptic signs of our times in a brilliant sequence of iconographic images of the unfolding heart-rendering stages of the paschal mystery.
℘℘℘℘
Guy Freeland, a lecturer at St Andrew’s Greek Orthodox Theological College, Sydney, lives and works on the lands of the Dharug people.
Art/s and Theology Australia 