July 5, 2013:  Had curators at the gallery made that walk in 2004, before they finalised the $300,000 acquisition of a magnificent 1000-year-old rock carving of Ardhanarishvara, an androgynous form of the Hindu god Shiva and his consort Parvati, with the bull Nandi, they might have become suspicious that the carving had been stolen.

In the library's reference section there's a copy of Douglas E. Barrett's 1974 book Early Cola Architecture and Sculpture, 866-1014AD. The library's copy is one of 21 copies of the revered archeologist's landmark publication that can be found in public institutions across the nation.

Among a limited number of pictures in the book of Chola-era carvings photographed at Indian temples is No 54, a stone Ardhanarishvara with Nandi in Vriddhachalam in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, which bears an uncanny resemblance to the AGNSW's Ardhanarishvara.

Based on this photograph, University of Sydney art theft scholar Damien Huffer says he's confident the statue in the Sydney gallery's collection was lifted off the wall of an Indian temple. Going by the publication date of Barrett's book, this is likely to have happened some time after 1973 or 1974 - which means it was, by definition, removed illegally from India.

In 1972, India signed up to UNESCO's 1970 treaty preventing the illicit import, export and transfer of ownership of cultural property. Under the terms of the treaty a 1000-year-old artwork of significance could not be removed from India after that date.

Huffer says the gallery's curators undertook insufficient due diligence before the purchase.

"For a museum or gallery to truly perform due diligence requires that they bring all of their often considerable resources to bear to assess all available published information, and not merely what the dealer suggests," he says.

It was Singapore-based antiquities expert Vijay Kumar who recognised the AGNSW Ardhanarishvara as the one in Barrett's book this week. In addition to the image in the book, the stone Ardhanarishvara also can be found in the catalogue website of the American Institute of Indian Studies at the University of Chicago. Kumar asked associates in India to visit the site and locate the nook the carving was removed from. Yesterday he emailed The Australian photographs matching the temple wall in Vriddhachalam where worshippers have installed a new statue in place of the old one.

A scarred, chiselled-out wall such as those left behind when sculptures have been stolen from Cambodia's Angkor Wat would have provided a powerful image of how looting can chip away at the history of developing nations.

However, the Vriddhachalam temple is an active place of worship in what Kumar describes as "a fairly decent-sized town", so a modern-looking sculpture was commissioned to replace the old one. "I know the current one ... is recent, the clue is in the lower right hand," he says.

He describes the sculptor as a novice who got the hand positioning wrong.

Kumar says there is a possibility the NSW Ardhanarishvara was removed by the temple's management because there is a ritual process whereby damaged icons can replaced by new, intact ones.

"Major overhauls of such shrines was not prevalent in the 1970's . . Impoverished Indians made up for their lack of cash with righteousness (and) spirituality. It's only in the last decade where we have seen wanton acts of renovation. I am pretty certain that this switch did not happen in 1970, but will continue to dig," he says.

So the investigation continues into whether temple managers chose to update their broken, 1000-year-old stone carving with a new intact statue, possibly even funding the new one with the sale of the old.

Irrespective of the outcome, removing the original object from India was illegal and, should India ask, the AGNSW will be obliged to surrender without compensation the $300,000 jewel of its upper Asian gallery.

In addition to the pictorial evidence, The Australian has spoken to a reporter at India's The Hindu newspaper who checked the veracity of a receipt supplied to the gallery as proof the statue was in private ownership before 1972.

That note on letterhead from the Uttam Singh and Sons Copper and Brass Palace in Delhi appears to be forged.

The business is legitimate but The Hindu spoke with its owner who said his now-deceased father, who used to run the company, didn't sell stone carvings and always signed his receipts in Urdu.

The gallery's receipt is typed in English, not signed at all and dated April 1970, four years before Barrett's book was published.

Worse still, the receipt was provided to the gallery by disgraced antiquities dealer Subhash Kapoor, who is being held in Chennai, southern India, while investigators build the case against what they say is his $100 million international smuggling and looting empire.

The AGNSW has another three potentially problematic artefacts from Kapoor, for which it doesn't have any papers.

Meanwhile, in Canberra, at the nation's peak art gallery, the institution that is expected to set the gold standard for collecting, there are 21 Kapoor items in a collection of Indian artefacts that has only 61 items altogether.

Sources in the US have supplied The Australian with copies of documents that establish at least five Kapoor items were furnished with counterfeit documents and fake collecting histories before they were bought by the National Gallery of Australia for $6.9m.

That total includes a sixth item for which The Australian hasn't sighted fake documents. The gallery is refusing to identify what its other 15 Kapoor items are and it has refused to reveal what research its curators undertook before acquiring them. The NGA's secretive behaviour is in stark contrast with the transparency of the AGNSW. How did we get here?

It has become evident in the year since The Australian first reported on this case that ownership history checking in Australia has not been sufficiently thorough.

We are a wealthy country, young in museum terms, and our awakening to the art of our near neighbours is relatively recent.

Without the UNESCO convention, our appetite for their treasures might have known no bounds.

Certainly NGA director Ron Radford's confident assertion in a Senate estimates hearing five weeks ago that none of the items he bought from Kapoor had been looted now appears incredibly shaky, if not downright fanciful.

Kapoor was arrested on an Interpol warrant in Germany in late 2011 and was extradited a year ago to India, where he is awaiting trial. The extent of his allegedly vast business is likely to be exposed during the court proceedings.

For the artefacts to be returned, India needs to make a request.

India's high commissioner in Canberra, Biren Nanda, is keeping abreast of the issue but late this week a spokesman for him said the high commission was powerless to move without a request from the authorities in Delhi.

That request is likely to come - although, in the case of the AGNSW, director Michael Brand could pre-empt it.

Brand has form. He has been the clean-up guy before. At Los Angeles's morally bankrupt Getty Museum, Brand oversaw the return of antiquities to Greece and Italy, the retention of others and special deals that would permit others to remain on loan.

The Getty is a very wealthy institution, young and ambitious.

Canberra's NGA is also young and underRadford's leadership for the past decade it has also had an ambitious Asian art collecting mandate, as stated in numerous annual reports.

The Australian has established that Radford met Kapoor on at least one occasion and that he personally oversaw the acquisition of the big, 900-year-old $5.1m bronze dancing Shiva that first brought the gallery to international attention a year ago.

At the Getty, an intricate web of kickbacks and the informed acquisition of looted items from Greece and Italy precipitated Brand's big purge.

The Australian is not implying similar dark arts have been practised at either the AGNSW or the NGA, but it remains unclear who is going to take responsibility for the fact both galleries are poised to relinquish more than $7m worth of items bought with taxpayer funds or donations for which the donors received a tax break.

The federal Arts Minister has oversight of the issue on account of its international nature and his department's National Cultural Heritage Committee is directly responsible, yet both Tony Burke and NCHC chairman Patrick Greene have refused many requests to comment.

The Asian art specialist and AGNSW director at the time of the purchases, Edmund Capon, says he was overseas and not across the detail of the items acquired by his gallery.

Radford has refused more than 15 requests for interviews from this reporter; lately his spokesman has claimed that a conversation in Australia could jeopardise Kapoor's trial in Chennai.

Former NGA chairman Rupert Myer and present chairman Allan Myers have not responded to calls from The Australian.

Similarly at the AGNSW, board of trustees president Steven Lowy has not returned calls and a spokeswoman for his predecessor at the time of the Kapoor purchases, David Gonski, says he is not across the detail.

Another former board of trustees president, Frank Lowy, could not be contacted.

Legal heritage expert Patrick O'Keefe says the time is ripe for a thorough investigation in Australia into whether gallery trustees should be held accountable in the same way other company directors are.

No collecting institution buys items of significance without their explicit approval.

Somebody's got to own decisions that are bringing international shame and financial loss to the collecting institutions the population holds dear.

Source: theaustralian.com, DT. July 5, 2013.