As artist Khadim Ali poses with the two paintings he has entered for this year's Blake Prize, a suicide bomber is terrorising his home town, Quetta, in Pakistan, close to the border with Afghanistan.
This time, the radio newsreader says, the death toll is at least 26. Sadly, suicide bombings in Quetta aren't unusual.
Only last month, Ali's parents were lucky to survive when another Taliban ''martyr'' blew himself up.
''My entire house was demolished,'' says the painter who migrated to Australia two years ago. My mother was injured, my brother was injured …''
His Hazara people have been victims of religious violence for generations, Ali explains. His ancestors fled Afghanistan in the 1890s after the Pashtun ruler Amir Khan set his dogs of war loose against the minority Hazara. They settled in Quetta, then in pre-partition India, since 1947 in Pakistan.
''We Hazara have experienced genocide because we are Shia muslims, descendants of Genghis Khan,'' Ali says. ''Because we are not Pashtun, we've been massacred throughout our history.''
Sixty years ago, when the inaugural Blake Prize exhibition was held in the ballroom of the Mark Foys department store, neither Ali nor his paintings would have been eligible for the competition.
Then, says author Rosemary Crumlin, the Blake Prize for Religious Art (as it was originally known) was the preserve of a select kind of artist: white, male, Christian and preferably Catholic.
Crumlin, a Sister of Mercy nun, has been going to the Blake exhibition since 1952, the second year of the prize, ''when I was a very young novice''.
She's also the author of The Blake Book: Art, Religion and Spirituality in Australia, published this week by Macmillian Art to coincide with the 60th anniversary.
The idea for the Blake (named after William Blake, the 18th-century visionary, poet and painter) came from a Jesuit priest, Michael Scott.
''In 1951, he had recently returned from Europe where he had spent a lot of time walking around churches,'' Crumlin explains. ''When he got back he was appalled at the standard of art in churches here.''
Scott's motives were transparent and naive, Crumlin says. He believed a one-off exhibition of religious art would encourage painters to return to biblical subjects and churches to buy their works.
Yet for all its Christian bias, Crumlin points out, the Blake only got off the ground because of a Jew. Scott's friend and walking companion, art gallery dealer Richard Morley, grew so tired of hearing Scott complain he offered to put up 100 guineas as prizemoney provided his donation remained anonymous.
The success of the first exhibition was enough to make it an annual event.
''In the early years, until the 1970s, there is hardly an Australian artist of note who did not put in for the Blake,'' Crumlin says.
However, there was a growing divide between the organisers and the artists. Scott and his supporters were traditionalists.
They believed religious art had to be figurative, devotional, liturgical.
''But the artists didn't read the directions,'' Crumlin says. ''So the Blake became more and more abstract.''
This led to the largest crisis in the prize's history, ''far more controversial than anything that has happened since''.
It came to a head in 1961 when Scott ''went on the ABC and said that no abstract work would ever win the Blake'', Crumlin recalls.
''A week later, the prize was awarded to Stanislaus Rapotec for a huge abstraction. That almost bought the whole Blake exhibition undone.''
Some of the committee resigned. Mark Foys ended its sponsorship. Scott sought to recover ground the following year by declaring all entries needed to be figurative and have a religious theme.
In the end, wiser heads prevailed.
The committee decided it should be left to the artist to decide whether a work is religious.
The result, Crumlin says, is that many more women and artists from other religious backgrounds are now among each year's finalists, reflecting a 21st-century Australia that is both multicultural and multi-belief.
Subject matter, medium and painting style are now as broad as art itself with controversy never far away - as with Rodney Pople's highly commended entry last year savaging the Catholic church's sad record in dealing with paedophilia.
''Religious questions of birth and death, justice, suffering and love, are often tackled with gusto and passion by those who enter,'' Crumlin writes in the preface to her book.
''There is something essentially Australian in the vigour of the art over these years - a kind of directness and honesty, fearless even brash.''
This year's 72 finalists competing for the $20,000 main prize include Ronnie Tjampitjinpa, Colin Vickery, Martin Sharp, Jane Lander, Luke Roberts and Herald photographer Tamara Dean.
As for Khadim Ali's two paintings, they may be subtle but they are certainly unflinching.
One, Bamiyan Buddha, features a demon of intolerance triumphantly celebrating the ''death'' of one of the two monumental sixth-century, world heritage-listed statues destroyed by the Taliban in 2001.
The other, Force of Forgetting, depicts a wilting sunflower after the six-day slaughter of a reputed 9000 Hazara by the Taliban at Mazar-e-Sharif in 1998.
''I believe [that] everything grows in Afghanistan is fertilised by the blood and bones of the dead,'' Ali says. ''The whole land is haunted.''