27: St Mark

St Mark is the patron saint of many different topics, including lions, lawyers, notaries, opticians, pharmacists, painters, secretaries, interpreters, prisoners, and people dealing with insect bites.  The lion is at the feet of St Mark 

St Mark can also be seen in one of the lancet windows. There are 3 lions around the church, one at the foot of the statue, one on the side of the right front pew and one at the top of the St Mark window

The woodcarver who created the statue of St Mark

This brief biography is from the Museums Victoria website:

Eva Schubert, Migrant and Artist, 1955

Eva Schubert was born in the northern German part of the former Czechoslovakia in 1922. After World War II, Eva and her husband settled in Bavaria, where he practised his trade as a woodworker. Eva began to assist him with his work, which was principally carving for tourists. They found it quite difficult to earn a living as they had to compete with the local woodcarvers.

In 1955 they migrated to Australia, first living in a boarding house in Mont Albert before moving to their own house in Nunawading. Eva began carving animals for the Arts and Crafts Society and continued to assist her husband with larger pieces. When her husband passed away in the 1970s she took on the outstanding orders and began to think of herself as a professional woodcarver.

She has worked with a variety of different woods and her work follows the German tradition of using flora and fauna motifs. The gradual incorporation of Australian flora and fauna motifs into her work coincided with her feeling more at home here.

ReferencesDeborah Tout-Smith & Anna Malgorzewicz (1992). Contemporary Craft and Cultural Identity Project. MoV and Monash Uni History Dept

Eva described herself as a woodcarver. She told me that, amongst the outstanding orders she took on after her husband Alfred died, were a number of commissions for churches. An increasing number of (mainly) Anglican and Roman Catholic churches were seeking to enhance their worship environments with original works rather than the mass produced and frequently quite tawdry items that had become the staple of many suburban churches.

I first met Eva Schubert around 1985 when she was commissioned to carve a crucifix for the church of St John the Divine, Croydon as a memorial to a parishioner. The corpus is in Huon Pine and the contrasting cross in Blackwood. This commission was followed by a unique and striking set of Stations of the Cross (well worth a visit if you can find the church open), a spectacular Paschal candlestand in memory of the late Fr Colin Coish and two pairs of standard candlesticks (the latter as replacements for the first pair, stolen and later irreparably vandalized.)

I also commissioned a substantial crucifix (below) from Eva to hang in St Paul’s, Kyneton.

The statue of St Mark, the patron saint of this parish and a crucifix in my possession, are carved from a slightly exaggerated perspective which assumes that the viewer is gazing upwards at them from below. 

 In addition to her commissions, Eva continued to produce smaller items, religious as well as secular, for sale at her annual pre-Christmass sale at her home in Nunawading