Description
Francis Brabazon (1907-1984) is one of Australia’s unacclaimed poets. His formative years were spent farming the land near Glenrowan, Victoria until drought, rabbits and the bank drove him into Melbourne at the height of the Great Depression. Here he became captivated by art and joined a select group of painters who were attempting to forge a new modernist style of Australian art. By the early forties he was exhibiting his paintings alongside works by Sidney Nolan, Albert Tucker and Arthur Boyd. Of this group of artists, Brabazon was the most driven by a spiritual quest to discover the source of beauty in art. Gradually he drifted away from the Melbourne art scene and turned from painting to writing poetry in which to express his spiritual findings. On a visit to America in 1952, he met a person whom he considered to be the living embodiment of beauty and the very personification of truth – living Art – namely Meher Baba. Eventually, he moved to India and lived with Meher Baba in a disciple-Master relationship during the decade of the sixties. His major work, the book-length poem, “Stay With God”, is a modern spiritual epic of great depth. His English ghazals, modeled upon the fourteenth century Persian Master poet Hafiz, reflect the consciousness of the late twentieth century, yet express something of the flavor of the love-cry and longing of their original Persian ancestor.
