But Schroedl doesn't think these scars matter because ''You don't expect a gargoyle to look immaculate,'' since after all they're pugnacious entities engaged in the rough and tumble of combating evil spirits. Gargoyles and grotesques (technically Lester isn't quite a gargoyle but is really a grotesque or a chimera) are common on the exteriors of old European churches built in superstitious times. There are even a few (another story for another day) on at least two of Canberra's older, luckier churches.

Every premises ought to have something unforgettable in its foyer to greet its visitors and the school of art and its gargoyle set an example to building managers everywhere. Perhaps if the nearby ANU School of Music (only 75 metres away as the gargoyle flies) had had a gargoyle at its entrance it might have repelled the evil that's befallen it.

Schroedl is a technical officer in the Ceramics Department at the School of Art, and he is an artist too.

One day in a yard at the Reid apartment he lives in he found someone had tossed out a ceramic cat. Whimsically he put the cat on the top of the yard's wall (''Because cats like to sit on tops of walls'') and thought that great as it looked, a gargoyle would look even better and might even, for his is not an especially salubrious neighbourhood, scare away some potential evil-doers.

So, already a sculptor of dragons, he went to work on a gargoyle to go up on the wall. He'd never made one before but as it happened had a model in his adorable but overweight Staffordshire bull terrier Daisy.

''And so Lester when you see him is the same size as my Staffy, but not as beautiful. But there is a resemblance [those readers who know and love Staffys will understand that, like gargoyles, they are somehow gorgeous and grotesque at the same time] and in fact when I finished him, Lester, I half expected Daisy to turn green too, like Lester. Like the Hulk.''

Initially the stocky Daisy was only meant to be the model for the gargoyle's body but when it came time to make the gargoyle's head Schroedl found that, too, looking very similar to Daisy's. Again, Staffys have distinctive heads that are somehow simultaneously monstrous and lovely.

When Lester was finished the original plan, the placing of the gargoyle up on the wall was abandoned. It was partly because it was so big and heavy (''I always make things far too big'') but it also would have been difficult to put in place. And so for quite a while, pending a decision about him, the monster sat on his creator's kitchen table in the spot most Canberrans seldom decorate with anything more monstrous than a vase of daffodils.

''But I wanted the whole world to see him!'' the artist reminisced yesterday and when the display space in the School's foyer became available, ''I thought, what a way to welcome the second semester students back. It'd be exciting for them to see Lester there on guard. He looks so beautiful.''

The school agreed and Lester has been standing guard there since July 21.

To phrase this as discreetly as possible, for this is a family column, there is one very conspicuous part of Lester that certainly isn't modelled on anything of dear Daisy's. Lester must be the most prominently, blush-makingly male statue in the ACT.

When this columnist wondered if a pair of budgie smugglers might be appropriate for Lester his creator said that, yes, ''If necessary I could easily knock him up a costume.''