Barbara Hanrahan is known for her celebration of the lives of working-class women and men in the first half of the twentieth century, her compulsive recording of her suburban Adelaide childhood in the 1940s and 1950s, and her exploration, in a series of Gothic or fantastic fictions, of the interplay between good and evil. Similar concerns are evinced in her prints and paintings.

Hanrahan's life and work were shaped by an intense, idiosyncratic spirituality, clearly evident in her diaries but also hinted at in interviews and articles. At the age of twenty she pondered whether God's creations were fulfilled through human creativity; this thought process firmed to a belief that her talents were God-given and that it would be sinful if she were to fail to complete the creative task she had been set. She dedicated her life to revealing, through her art and writing, the presence of...