AUSTRALIA/CAMBODIA

Stolen treasure traders

By Mario Christodoulou with researcher Cathy Beale and illustrations by Teresa Tan for ABC RN’s Background Briefing
Updated 16 Jul 2022, 

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”.

Listen to the podcast

In a two-part Background Briefing special investigation, Mario Christodoulou investigates the concerning origins of Australia's vast collection of Khmer and Thai antiquities.

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.

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Stolen treasure traders - ABC News