In 1962, a columnist with the Melbourne Herald noted that a 16th century sculpture of Madonna and Child would be on that year’s Christmas stamp. He went on to praise ‘Our Lady of the Aborigines’ as ’a real Australian Madonna and Child,’ before asking, ‘How about it for next year?’

The painting was by Karel Kupka, a Czech, who lived and worked with Aborigines in northern Australia on and off from the mid-1950s. Darwin’s Bishop O’Loughlin commissioned him ‘to bring religion to the people in terms of local understanding’ by creating for Star of the Sea cathedral something similar to Chinese and Japanese Madonnas.

The Virgin’s face is individual and the child a person, each expressive of ‘nobility and natural dignity,’ in the words of the Darwin missionary, Father Frank Flynn. Our eyes are drawn to the arrangement of the figures, like a Byzantine icon, and the flatness in indigenous imagery. The backdrop and the haloes are cross-hatched. Instead of being cradled, the Christ child is perched on his mother’s shoulder, in the manner of Tiwi Islanders.

Colour reproductions sold throughout the world.

When Pope Paul VI visited Australia in December 1970, the Vatican issued a pair of commemoratives. One is of St Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney. The other shows Kupka’s ‘Our Lady of the........

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