Matthew Gray (archer)

Lore & Background

Matthew Gray was born in Yea, Victoria, and is from Port Stephens. His father bought him his first bow at a garage sale. He holds a nursing degree and was working shift work at John James Hospital in Canberra while training for the 2010 Commonwealth Games. He attributed becoming a police officer with making him more aggressive as a competitor. He was an Australian Institute of Sport archery scholarship holder.

Gray has won medals at multiple World Field Championships: a bronze in the junior men's recurve event in 1988 in Bolzano, Italy; a gold in the men's team event in 1992 in Margraten, Netherlands, alongside Clint Freeman and Tony Pitt Lancaster; and a bronze in the men's recurve event in 1994 in Vertus, France. He placed 4th in the teams event at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. He won a gold in the men's recurve event at the 1998 European Grand Prix in the Czech Republic. In 1999, he won a team gold medal at the world indoor championships. At the 2008 World Cup in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, he was part of the Australian silver medal winning recurve team.

Gray represented Australia at the 2010 Commonwealth Games, where he won a gold medal in the men's recurve team event with a team score of 219, defeating Malaysia (ranked third in the world) who scored 212. He also competed in the individual event, facing Chu Sian Cheng in the quarter finals. He was coached at the Games by Simon Fairweather and was Australia's oldest competitor at those Games. He trained for the Games in his garage.

Reader's Guide

Matthew Gray's career spans over three decades of competitive archery, marked by consistent international participation and notable team successes. His three Olympic appearances (2000, 2004, 2008) place him among Australia's most experienced archers, and his gold medal at the 2010 Commonwealth Games stands as a career highlight. The team victory over Malaysia, then ranked third in the world, demonstrated the strength of Australian archery on a global stage. Gray's ability to balance a demanding career as a water policeman and, earlier, nursing shift work while training for elite competition reflects a disciplined approach to the sport. His scholarship with the Australian Institute of Sport and coaching from Olympic gold medalist Simon Fairweather further underscore his place within Australia's archery infrastructure. Gray's longevity in the sport—competing from the 1988 World Field Championships through the 2012 Olympic qualification cycle—shows sustained performance at a high level. His ranking as the fourth best male Australian recurve archer in March 2003, ahead of Robert Turner, and his participation in World Cup events across Croatia, Turkey, and China in 2010, illustrate his ongoing relevance in international competition. Gray's career provides an example of an athlete who combined full-time professional work with elite sport, achieving medals at the highest levels of the Commonwealth Games and World Championships.

Did You Know?

• He was Australia's oldest competitor at the 2010 Commonwealth Games.
• Children in his wife's school class cheered for him during the 2008 Olympics and he kept in touch with them during the Games.

Origins and Design Philosophy

Schmalz, a Canadian sculptor and committed Catholic, first conceived the work after witnessing a person without shelter curled up on a public bench in Toronto during 2012. That single image became the seed for a piece he described as deliberately provocative, meant to challenge people rather than comfort them. The resulting bronze figure shows a man asleep on a park bench, his face and hands concealed beneath a blanket. Only the wounds on his feet — the marks of the Crucifixion — give away who he is. Schmalz has framed the sculpture as a visual rendering of the Gospel of Matthew passage in which Jesus identifies himself with the least of his brothers. The bench itself is sized at 91 by 61 by 213 centimetres, large enough for a real person to sit down beside the figure. The design strips away every traditional attribute of Christ, leaving only a sleeping, vulnerable human form that forces viewers to confront who they might be ignoring on their own street.

A Contested Path to a Home

The first cast did not find a home easily. Schmalz presented a miniature to Pope Francis in Vatican City in November 2013; the Pope walked over, touched the figure's knee, closed his eyes, and prayed silently. Yet when Schmalz offered the full-size bronze to St. Michael's Cathedral in Toronto and St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York, both institutions turned it down. St. Michael's cited that appreciation among its community was not unanimous and pointed to ongoing restoration work; St. Patrick's similarly cited renovations. The Archdiocese of Toronto then suggested St. Augustine's Seminary in Scarborough, but Schmalz refused, insisting the work needed a location with broader public visibility. Regis College, a Jesuit theological school federated with the University of Toronto, ultimately acquired the piece in 2013 through a donation by Peter Benninger and placed it outside its main entrance on the St. George campus. The journey from rejection to installation underscored Schmalz's conviction that the sculpture belonged in the open, where passersby could not avoid it.

Proliferation Across Continents

By 2017, more than fifty copies of the sculpture had been cast and installed around the world. Each bronze takes Schmalz roughly three months to form and cast, and prices between 2014 and 2018 ranged from twenty-two thousand to forty thousand US dollars. The first American installation went to St. Alban's Episcopal Church in Davidson, North Carolina, purchased for twenty-two thousand dollars as a memorial to parishioner Kate McIntyre, who had a love of public art. Rector David Buck described the piece as a Bible lesson for a congregation accustomed to seeing Christ enthroned in glory, arguing that Jesus was, in essence, a homeless person. In December 2017, a cast appeared in Nelson Mandela Place in Glasgow alongside a painting by Peter Howson. The Archdiocese of Baltimore commissioned a lightweight wood-and-fibreglass version in 2017 for display in local schools and parishes before returning it to Schmalz in 2018. A proposed installation at Methodist Central Hall in London was blocked by Westminster City Council in 2016 over conservation-area concerns.

Mistaken for the Living

The sculpture's most striking reception has been unintended: people repeatedly mistake it for a real person. In Davidson, a resident called the police the first time she saw it, convinced a homeless man was sleeping on the bench. After a cast went up in Hamilton, Ontario, emergency services received multiple calls on cold, snowy nights from passersby worried about a shivering figure. Similar incidents occurred in Minneapolis and Fargo, North Dakota. In October 2020, a Bay Village, Ohio resident called the police on a statue installed just twenty minutes earlier; the episode drew national attention and was widely read as exposing indifference toward actual homelessness. Public opinion elsewhere has been sharply divided. Some Davidson neighbours called the work insulting and said it demeaned the neighbourhood; another wrote that it crept him out. Yet rector Buck noted that residents frequently sit on the bench beside the figure, rest their hands on Jesus, and pray. Art critic Lennie Bennett called the piece technically accomplished but aesthetically unremarkable, while conceding its social intent.