I've just done something dumb.
I've picked up the stone head of Lord Vishnu, the ultimate protector of the universe. It's heavy, my fingers are slipping, and I think I'm about to drop him.
It's a sculpture separated by time and space, carved by unknown hands an estimated 1,200 years ago.
Instead of being in its ancient jungle home, perhaps a temple, it's propping up firewood inside a dusty garage on the NSW mid-north coast.
Hundreds of works like this arrived in Australia in the 60s and 70s.
But the story of how they got here has never been told.
For four months, I've been investigating these works for Background Briefing and what I've found is alarming: a story of dodgy dealers, looted temples and some of the world's most exclusive collections.
When I finally heave Lord Vishnu onto the dining table, his unblinking eyes stare at me.
I ask the owner whether this and other artefacts were potentially stolen. He shrugs.
"Possibly. Definitely. Sure."
Bad karma
In the jungles of Cambodia, Sopheap Meas is lifting old curses.
She's an archeologist working for the Cambodian government and her job is to find ancient Khmer artefacts stolen from her country.
To many in Cambodia, the artworks are not just stone artefacts but "living" gods. To them, these sculptures weren't stolen, they were kidnapped.
"It's like they lost their ancestor, an ancestral spirit," she says.
"So when they see the temple, they say, ‘I don't want to go there because the God is not there, the God is living outside of the country.'"
Hundreds, if not thousands, of sculptures were smuggled out in the 60s and 70s, which were violent, desperate years for Cambodia.
Cambodia was a casualty of the Vietnam War, then the Khmer Rouge orchestrated a bloody revolution and herded the population into farming slave camps now known as "the Killing Fields".
An estimated 2 million people died.
While Cambodia was being pillaged, the trade in stolen antiquities was booming. It was a smuggler's paradise.
Refugees fleeing the country brought sculptures across the border to Thailand, where there were dealers ready to receive them.
But there was also organised theft of antiquities on a vast scale. In one case, soldiers closed off an entire temple complex, raided it during the night and carried off their spoils by helicopter.
Some looters have never forgotten their past misdeeds. Many feel they are cursed and this guilt has led them to Sopheap.
"Here, we really strongly believe in bad karma: people want to be born with God when they pass away," she says.
The looters are sharing with Sopheap the stories of their theft, including the disturbing details of sculptures being hacked up and sold off.
As she listens to these stories, Sopheap struggles to contain her sadness.
"I cry, my hands are just shaking a lot," she says.
"I almost fall down … it's so painful to hear what happened to those objects."
While she tracks down the statues in the field, another part of her team traces the journey of these works overseas.
"Australia is on our radar," says her colleague Bradley Gordon, a lawyer working with the Cambodian Ministry of Culture.
"We know that a number of statues ended up there."
And as my investigation has revealed, these artefacts have been hiding in plain view.
The five-headed snake
In July of 1974, the Australian Museum in Sydney hosted an exhibition of more than 100 Khmer and Thai artefacts from one of the most exclusive and extensive private collections of the day.
The then-Khmer Republic ambassador, Chhut Chhoeur, wrote the foreword to the exhibition.
"The collection not only presents some fine examples of Khmer art but also attempts to show the influence the Khmers had on their neighbours."
The dramatic centrepiece was a five-headed serpent rearing up on its tail, described as a "Naga ornament".
The heads are framed by a hood, embellished with flourishes and decoration. The sculptor even captured the individual scales of the undulating snakeskin.
But something about the description is problematic: "From Preah Vihear temple on the border of Cambodia and Thailand."
Preah Vihear is an ancient temple perched on a cliff that straddles the Thai-Cambodian border.
"In the art market generally, if you can identify the place where something came from, that's seen to enhance the marketability of the object," says Asian art expert Angela Chiu.
"This shows how the art market has turned this very disturbing provenance of the object into not something that should concern us about looting, but instead about marketability."
So who did all these works belong to?
The 'man from Hollywood'
Frozen in the camera flash for the Women's Weekly "People and Fashion" pages stands a grey-haired man with a pencil moustache, beside an auburn-haired woman in a fur coat.
The photo is captioned: "The consul-general of the Khmer Republic, Mr. Doug Snelling, and Mrs. Snelling, lent their valuable collection of Cambodian sculptures for the art exhibition currently on view at the Australian Museum".
Once I start digging into Douglas Snelling, I find he's a person who seems to defy definition.
He worked as a writer, a publicist, a radio personality, a munitions factory worker, a representative of a foreign government and a Hollywood sketch artist.
But it's perhaps his architecture and furniture design that he is best known for.
I track down a person who may just know more about Douglas Snelling than anyone else in the country — writer Davina Jackson, who wrote Snelling's biography.
"Snelling was very glamorous," she tells me.
"I come from a background at Vogue Living and then the design magazines, and we're always very, very interested in those particular magazines in glamour."
She says he began his career in the late 1930s in America, where he hung out with some of the biggest stars of the day.
"He had met Errol Flynn and David Niven and the young Shirley Temple and quite a lot of you know, emerging stars, Laurel and Hardy …"
His passion for Khmer art began when he visited Cambodia during his honeymoon with his second wife, Patricia.
"This was the moment when he became very excited about Khmer antiquities, and he became frankly one of the world's most significant and committed collectors of Khmer antiquities during the 1960s," says Dr Jackson.
The trip also brought him into contact with the Cambodian ruler, Prince Norodom Sihanouk.
After returning from the honeymoon he continued the relationship with Sihanouk and the Cambodian elite, culminating in his appointment as Honorary Consul in 1970.
As Snelling's star was rising, he became famous for his furniture design.
Buried in the ABC archives, I find an interview with Snelling from 1976 about his signature product — the "Snelling chair".
Loading...The Four Corners footage shows Snelling in his living room: an Aladdin's cave of Khmer and Thai artworks.
There are seated Buddhas, torsos on wooden plinths and a majestic Dvaravati with free-flowing robes and a hand held up in Katakahasta.
Dr Jackson has a hot tip on where it all came from. Her research notes are at the State Library of NSW, and among them are letters from Snelling which might reveal where he acquired the works.
'Stolen from Angkor'
At the State Library, Douglas Snelling's life and achievements have been condensed into 11 cardboard boxes.
And in those boxes, I discover an extraordinary letter from November 8, 1965, addressed to a close friend.
Loading...The letter reads:
"Three months ago I had to meet a client in Hong Kong ... so Patricia and I took the opportunity to spend a week in North Thailand … We had an absolutely wonderful time, and acquired many Cambodian antiquities in stone and bronze.
"Apart from some small bronzes given to us by the Royal Family in Cambodia, we acquired our other Angkor pieces outside the borders of Cambodia. Some of these we had to smuggle out of Thailand, even though they were originally stolen from Angkor.
"Our purchases were made for practically nothing with ignorant peasants, for we were far from civilisation for most of the journey. One of the bronzes we bought for something like $US20 has been valued by a New York art dealer in excess of $100,000.
"This sounds crazy I know, but similar extraordinary values apply to all the pieces we have, and we now have about 20.
"... One of the stone pieces, a seven-headed Naga with Buddha head, is carved out of basalt and weighs about 400lbs. The most valuable bronze piece, which I figured to be worth about $5,000, I never let out of my sight and carted it all the way through Asia back to Sydney."
I flick through my notes. The seven-headed naga was captured in the Four Corners footage of Snelling's living room.
Loading...In the following days, I find one person who remembers that house intimately.
I don't know it at the time, but speaking with him will break open this investigation and help me track some of the works to their final resting place.
Tracking Snelling's loot
Christopher Snelling grew up in the shadow of old gods.
He remembers, as a child, playing amongst the statues in his father Douglas's home in Bellevue Hill.
"People came to visit … and felt it was a bit scary to be surrounded by these things, but as a child, I didn't feel like that — it was just the environment I grew up in," he says.
Then one day, he returned home from school to find most of the works gone.
"I remember …being quite surprised … And I think it was my stepmother who said, ‘Oh, your father decided to sell quite a lot of them.'"
Tracking artwork around the world is a painstaking task. With Snelling's connections in London, America and Cambodia, his artworks, including those "stolen from Cambodia", could be anywhere.
But Christopher Snelling has a vague memory that the works were sold out of New York by a prominent auction house.
My colleague, ABC librarian Cathy Beale, begins trawling through the many auctions which took place in New York in the late 70s.
And finally, she finds it.
The catalogue is a major breakthrough — it's the first time we've seen the works up close, and there are some problematic pieces, including a fragment of a 10th-12th century Buddha attributed to "Angkor Wat".
Using the catalogue, I can compare the pieces with items in the world's most illustrious collections. And I find some.
The Art Institute of Chicago has a seated bronze Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara that seems to match the one in the Snelling catalogue.
A Dancing Celestial Female matches a work now seen at...
...the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
And then I find the five-headed snake, from the ancient temple, Preah Vihear.
It’s part of one of the largest Khmer Museums in the US — the Norton Simon Museum in California.
I wonder what the museums will do when I contact them. And I'm hopeful they will begin investigating.
So when I do receive a response, I'm a little disappointed. They seem … uninterested.
The Art Institute of Chicago museum tells me it continuously researches the provenance of its collection and that its records on Snelling's object did not indicate provenance issues.
In California, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art says it welcomes the new information and "actively researches claims" about its artworks. But that's it.
And the Norton Simon Museum — the one with the five-headed naga — declines to comment.
While Snelling was sourcing his artefacts directly from Thailand, many of Australia's elite were getting theirs closer to home.
An exclusive commercial gallery on Elizabeth Street in Sydney had an uncanny ability to source genuine items from Cambodia and Thailand.
The man with the unerring eye
Take a stroll through the South East Asian art collection of any public gallery in Australia, and chances are you will be walking amid the legacy of Robert Haines.
The David Jones commercial gallery which he headed up was an extension of the department store: a place to admire fine art, and if your pockets were deep enough, buy it.
Loading...Haines brought the artistic sensibilities of the European elite to downtown Sydney, exhibiting sculptures by the likes of Auguste Rodin and Emilio Greco.
A titan of the Australian art scene, he ran the gallery with a discerning eye and fastidious care.
Bruce Ramage lived in the same Harry Seidler building as Haines and remembers sharing meals with his friend and neighbour.
"You'd be eating your soup out of an 18th-century bowl and spoon. The glassware was French and 19th century," he says.
"You always felt very nervous if you put a glass down in the wrong place … it was a little bit like living at court."
In the 60s, Haines began displaying something many people had never seen before in a commercial gallery — ancient Thai and Khmer sculptures.
Few asked how the Buddha heads came to be detached from their bodies, or how the Vishnu sculptures had been snapped off at the ankles.
Customers were only interested in whether the artefacts were real.
Sales records show the gallery catered to a cross-section of prominent Australians and international figures. Among them are former World Bank president Sir James David Wolfensohn; Lady Schlink, also known as Dr Margaret Mulvey, the pioneering gynaecologist; Princess Diana's stepfather, Peter Kydd Shand; Sir Nicholas Sekers, a British-based industrialist, and newspaper owner James Fairfax.
At a time when fakes were rife, Haines seemed to get his hands on genuine and significant items.
Close friends tell me Haines would never knowingly accept stolen artworks or work with dealers who falsify provenance.
But he may not have known.
And this leads me to a question unanswered 60 years on — where on earth was he getting them from?
The dealer on Suriwongse Road
The David Jones Gallery closed in 1992 and Haines died in 2005, and I worry that he took the identity of his dealers to the grave.
So I reach out to Haines's long-term partner, Patrice Raboute, now living in France.
Raboute remembers Bangkok being dusty and humid when they visited in the early 70s. In the backstreets, supposed fine art dealers would offload fakes to unassuming tourists.
But Haines was too clever for that.
Among the wannabes were a small circle of antique dealers who, somehow, managed to get their hands on genuine artefacts.
And Haines was visiting one.
"I remember his shop. It wasn't open to the public; you had to ring a bell," Raboute said.
"There was perhaps just one piece in the window, it was for people who made an appointment who knew what they were looking at."
And he remembered the name of the dealer.
"Peng Seng sold [Haines] most of the pieces that came from his gallery."
The archives at the NSW Art Gallery Library back up this account, with page after page of correspondence with Peng Seng revealing he supplied around 100 items to the David Jones Gallery.
"Peng Seng … is probably the most reliable and certainly the most knowledgeable dealer in Thailand," Haines writes in one letter.
No licences appear in the thousands of pages of David Jones Gallery records, despite Thailand passing a law in 1961 banning exports without licences.
Some items sent to Australia were labelled on export documents as "handicraft".
Peng Seng also insisted on one occasion on being paid into different bank accounts.
And, it seems he wasn't just assisting in bringing Cambodian artefacts out of Asia — he was also feeding Australia's demand for some of the oldest pottery in the world.
Ban Chiang pottery was discovered in 1966, when the son of a US Ambassador to Thailand tripped on a tree root and noticed the rim of a clay pot buried in the ground.
That pot and those found around it are thought to be as much as 5000 years old. The site of their discovery was recognised by UNESCO in 1992 as "the most important prehistoric settlement so far discovered in South-East Asia".
As word of the pottery's discovery spread, the Thai prime minister issued a decree specifically forbidding illegal excavation and transport of Ban Chiang items.
This was bad news for people like Peng Seng and Robert Haines, who were feeding an insatiable appetite for the vessels.
In August 1972, Peng Seng wrote to Robert Haines with news of the new laws:
Robert Haines responded to Peng Seng, acknowledging the receipt of a shipment of pottery and asking for more.
Peng Seng responded with good news in January 1973: "I am sure I could get some more as things quiet a little bit". And over the course of 1973, the news just got better, with more and more pots put aside for Haines.
Loading...The records reveal that the David Jones Gallery sold 13 Ban Chiang pots to the National Gallery of Australia, and one to the Art Gallery of NSW.
But what isn't so clear is whether the pots were shipped before or after the export ban.
When I search the catalogues of the museums, Bingo — the pots are still there.
I contact both galleries and tell them what I've found; they say they are now investigating these items, but offer no further information.
But one thing is certain. Peng Seng seemed to be able to get his hands on significant items. And he also had established relationships with international dealers eager to sell the works around the world.
Janus
Every art smuggling ring has a "Janus".
That's the name academics use for the lynch-pin of a smuggling network, who like the Roman god, wears two faces. As one paper put it:
"He is Janus — one face looking into the illicit past of an artefact and one looking into its public future where that dark past is concealed — the point of transition, or gateway between local looting and the international art market."
In Thailand, many believe Janus was alleged art smuggler Douglas Latchford. And when I start to delve into Peng Seng, I find Latchford lurking behind him.
Latchford was known as a colourful British expat who lived mostly in Bangkok and had published a number of books on Khmer art.
Australian legend Geraldine Cox — known as "Big Mum" for her work with vulnerable Cambodian children — called Latchford her "best friend, constant dinner companion, weekend-away person".
She tells me of his generosity to her when she was "doing it tough financially" — "living Khmer style, no running water" — surprising her on her birthday with an elaborate meal.
It wasn't until 2012 that the world learned the dark side of Douglas Latchford.
In a bombshell civil case, US prosecutors accused Latchford of purchasing an ancient work knowing it had been looted during the Cambodian civil war.
They would later accuse him of receiving goods from organised looting gangs since at least the 70s.
Their evidence was damning: emails to dealers with photographs of sculptures covered in mud, which Latchford boasted had been "found" at the Angkor Wat and Angkor Borei temple complexes.
Cox remembers villagers turning up to Latchford's house with a statue wrapped in hessian bags.
"It still had mud and everything all over it, and the look on his face as he was unwrapping it was so reverent," she says.
Cox prefers to remember this reverence, though she doesn't dispute the allegations against him.
"Everybody's got a side that's a bit dark," she says.
One of the last times Cox saw Latchford was in 2018.
"He was still very mentally alert but his Parkinson's had taken a bit of a toll on his body and his physical mobility," she says.
While they were celebrating in Bangkok, US investigators were closing in.
Latchford would die before facing trial in 2020, but by then his reputation, like the statues he was flogging, was covered in mud.
And the evidence suggested he had an accomplice.
The 'Thai Dealer'
In their lengthy indictment, US prosecutors referred to this accomplice as "The Thai Dealer".
They submitted a 1974 letter from a London auction house, but the dealer's name was redacted.
But there was one person who might know his identity.
Bradley Gordon has exclusive access to Latchford's personal records and sure enough, he forwards me the letter in question.
Only this time, it's unredacted.
And it confirms "The Thai Dealer" is none other than David Jones Gallery supplier Peng Seng.
In the letter, a representative from London auction house Spinks and Sons describes how Latchford worked with Peng Seng.
Loading...The letter reads:
"I have explored extensively with Peng Seng and Latchford how to get 'legitimate' papers for the large Koh Ker [sculpture] and for all subsequent shipments. The following is the best procedure I can think of at this time.
"Peng Seng will send us a letter written and signed by somebody in Bangkok. He will say that he has seen the piece in Peng Seng's shop three years ago. Peng Seng would like us to give him the exact text that we want in this letter.
"On all future shipments of important pieces only, both Peng Seng and Latchford will ship the pieces the way they have always done, at more or less the same time will send a modern piece of about the same size and same subject described on the airway bill in such a way that nobody will know to which piece the airway bill applies."
The letter casts doubt on the hundreds of items sourced from Peng Seng in the 60s and 70s and sold on to galleries including the National Gallery of Victoria, the Art Gallery of South Australia, the National Gallery of Australia and the Art Gallery of NSW.
"[Peng Seng] has come up in a number of cases …" Gordon tells me.
"When we see his name now, we know that's a sign that we should look a lot more carefully at anything that went through his hands."
The galleries tell us they will consider the information but make no firm commitment to return objects.
It's not an uncommon response, according to Gordon.
"We have a small number [of galleries] who are being very cooperative and helpful in sharing with us the documents they have and we have others who are being very difficult and we have a large number who are just being silent at the moment."
Peng Seng is not the only Australian connection in the letter. There's another name mentioned regarding a 13th century stone sculpture called a Nandi.
"Latchford offered the Nandi directly to Biancardi in Paris by photograph."
Biancardi. That would be Alex Biancardi — a wealthy Australian businessman from the 70s, and one of the world's biggest collectors of Khmer art of his time.
Lord Vishnu in the garage
Many sons inherit their passions from their fathers, but this can't be said for Daniel Biancardi.
As the tennis coach freely admits, the passion for South East Asian art died with his father.
It's in his garage on the NSW mid-north coast, in an estate beside an enclave of nesting bats, that I discover Lord Vishnu propping up firewood. The head didn't sell at auction, and it's been gathering dust ever since.
The way Daniel tells it, his father led an extraordinary life.
"He met Aung San Suu Kyi on one of his visits to Myanmar, he also had a meeting with the Dalai Lama," he says.
During these voyages, his father amassed one of the world's foremost private collections of Khmer antiquities, and stored hundreds of pieces in an apartment in Sydney's Neutral Bay.
Daniel tells me those items were so valuable that insurance companies wouldn't cover them, leading his father to transform the apartment into "a vault".
"There was this big bar that was six inches wide and a metre and a half long," he says of the heavy steel door.
"To get in through the front door, you'd have had to dynamite it."
When his father died in 1998, he was left with a dilemma — what to do with all the artefacts.
Then the NSW Art Gallery came to his rescue.
"They said they will come and take it and store it at no cost," he says.
"They were appreciative of what my father had done for them in the past and they may also have thought, ‘Well, this is a good way of maybe getting a little bit more.'"
The Art Gallery of NSW ended up taking on around 80 pieces — most of which were textiles. Daniel says he was never asked where the pieces came from but didn't have any paperwork in any case.
The provenance of these pieces is now being examined by the gallery.
Daniel also began receiving calls from strangers all around the world who claimed to know his father.
"Guys I've never heard of, saying, 'I'm from the museum of this and that, and your father was always going to donate to us,'" he says.
"Those guys were just after whatever they could get and I'm pretty vulnerable at that stage and I'm not knowledgeable about the art."
Daniel tells me he has no paperwork from his father's purchases but remembers him dealing with Spink.
There's no evidence showing Biancardi knowingly purchased stolen items, but I ask Daniel whether he reckons some might have been.
"Possibly, definitely, sure," he says.
"He had too much good stuff and how do you get that much stuff? [My father] also didn't shy away from the fact that some of these things might have been a little bit shady."
As I'm browsing through Biancardi's collection, one piece catches my eye: a graceful four-armed deity just under 35cm high. Over the 1,300 years since its creation, the copper alloy has begun to oxidise, coating the artefact in an emerald green patina — a reminder of the jungle the statue once called home.
That statue is now on display at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art.
But I've seen it before. Because an older, black-and-white photo of the same work appeared on the computer of Douglas Latchford, in a folder labelled "Spinks".
The museum tells me they've long been reviewing objects connected with Latchford and his associates and that in 2013 the gallery returned two objects.
"As we continue our research, we will continue this approach, as is appropriate."
Making amends
On a winter's day in June, I get a call from Christopher Snelling. It's been weeks since we spoke and he's been doing some thinking.
"I guess I've been thinking about how the world has changed and while the collection probably had a very personal connection to my father, it doesn't really have the same connection to me personally," he says.
We start chatting about one piece specifically, the majestic Dvaravati, pictured in the 1976 Four Corners documentary.
Loading..."That work is in Hawaii, in my stepmother's house, and at some point she will make the decision to leave that house," he says.
"We have been respectful custodians of the object and I would like to see us respectfully find an opportunity, if possible, to return it."
It seems he's come to a simple but profound realisation.
"It doesn't belong to me."
This special investigation comes from ABC RN's Background Briefing program. Follow the podcast on the ABC listen app.
Credits:
- Reporter: Mario Christodoulou with additional research by Cathy Beale
- Digital editor: Annika Blau
- Designer and illustrator: Teresa Tan
- Executive producers: Tim Roxburgh and Fanou Filali
Images courtesy National Art Archive, Art Gallery of NSW; Snelling Estate, State Library of NSW; Australian Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, LACMA, Metropolitan Museum of Art and ABC Archives