Former Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam was a long time supporter of the Reunification of the Parthenon Sculptures. I was fortunate enough to see him speak on the issue in 2001 at a conference organised by the Institute of Art and Law. I was later to discover that this was the last overseas trip he made.

He was 85 years old at the time, but if you met him, you would never have believed it. He talked eloquently at great length about the history of the sculptures & how they had come to be where they are today. The story was so convincingly told, that his conclusions that they must be returned were almost unnecessary – if you understood the story, you would have made up your own mind the same ways ass he did that there was only one rightful place that could be called the home of the Parthenon Sculptures.

Gough Whitlam died on 21st October, aged 98.

Former Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam

From:
The Australian

Gough Whitlam praised from both sides of politics
October 21, 2014 2:30PM

POLITICIANS from across the divide have heaped praise on Gough Whitlam, describing the former prime minister as a “visionary” leader who spurred both progressives and conservatives into public life.

Mr Whitlam, who died this morning aged 98, led Australia for three turbulent years from 1972, launching sweeping reforms of the nation’s economic and cultural affairs, until his dismissal by the governor-general John Kerr amid a constitutional crisis in 1975.
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Neil MacGregor talks about how the Parthenon Marbles can be part of a story in London & a different one in Athens. What he seems to completely miss is the fact that they were designed were part of one complete story, not the contrived justification of their expropriation that he thinks they now embody. Would anyone consider that splitting the pages of a book between two locations made more sense than having all the surviving pages in a single library?

The story of the marbles in the British Museum, is merely a small & inconvenient footnote at the end of a long life on the acropolis – claiming that it somehow now forms a new (equally important) story seems slightly ridiculous.

From:
The Australian

An object lesson in civilisations
March 29, 2011 12:00AM

NEIL MacGregor, director of the British Museum in London, had an unlikely popular success with his BBC Radio 4 series A History of the World in 100 Objects, followed by an engaging if sizeable tome of the same name. Bite-sized discussions about chiselled rocks, old coins and ancient scrolls, no matter how well researched, are not your usual hit-makers.

MacGregor tapped into a revival of interest in history, a thirst for cultural context at a time when we seem to value things being faster, smaller and disposable while, simultaneously, contemporary life is ever more frenetic and unexamined.
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A few days ago, various people in Australia were claiming that the Flinders Map was Australia’s equivalent of the Elgin Marbles. This was a fairly spurious comparison to make, as there is no real connection between the two cases, which involve entirely dissimilar circumstances. Unsurprisingly, Britain has taken the point of view that the map is legally owned by the British Hydrographic Office.

From:
The Australian

UK claims first map to identify ‘Australia’ made by Matthew Flinders is theirs
From: AAP
January 26, 2011 4:03AM

AUSTRALIANS may claim it to be the nation’s “birth certificate” but that does not mean English authorities are going to be handing it over easily.

A campaign has been launched to take ownership of the first map to use the name “Australia”, which is currently located in the archives of the United Kingdom Hydrographic Office (UKHO) in Taunton, Somerset.
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The Smithsonian Institute has returned the remains of nine Aborigines to Australia. This follows the numerous recent examples set by museums in the UK who have returned similar remains under the terms of the Human Tissue Act.

From:
The Australian

Ancestral remains returning from US
Lanai Vasek
The Australian
July 05, 2010 12:00AM

THE ancestral remains of nine indigenous Australians will finally return home today after 60 years in a museum in the US.

The remains — taken from their burial places during the 1948 American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land — were handed back to indigenous representatives at a traditional smoking ceremony in Washington DC over the weekend.
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Greece has built the New Acropolis Museum to re-house artefacts that there was no space for in the old museum on the Acropolis itself. It is no secret though that the key reason for the museum was to help secure the return of the Parthenon Marbles from the British Museum.

From:
The Australian

Athens builds a home for Parthenon’s marbles
Helen Vatsikopoulos | June 20, 2009

THE New Acropolis Museum in Athens will never become a landmark building. It will not be like Joern Utzon’s Sydney Opera House, its towering tiled sails reaching over the harbour, or Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, with colossal steel whorls dominating the landscape.

But the city of Athens already has such a building, Phidias’s Parthenon. He designed it in the mid-5th century BC, funded by a hefty stimulus package to rebuild the archaic temples destroyed by the Persians; it’s still standing. The temple atop the Acropolis hill overlooking central Athens survived virtually unscathed for almost 2000 years, only to suffer its worst damage in the past 400: Venetian cannon balls, Ottoman dynamite, a bad restoration and acid rain have all taken their toll, along with an act of vandalism perpetrated by one man, a British diplomat. More on Lord Elgin later.
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Another review of Sharon Waxman’s new book – this time in the Australian Press.

From:
The Australian

Pillagers called to account
Rosemary Sorensen
January 08, 2009

AFTER Michael Brand took on the directorship of the J. Paul Getty Museum in California and inherited the ugly mess of its acquisitions history, he suggested that being an Australian was an advantage.

“I went in (to negotiate with the Italian government the return of looted artworks the Getty owned) with no background in antiquities, no history at the Getty, a neutral person,” Brand told author and journalist Sharon Waxman last year. “It might even have helped that I was Australian — who knows?” Waxman, in her recently published book Loot, concurs, calling Brand a “blank slate”.
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Another review of James Cuno’s book on why museums should be holding onto cultural property of questionable provenance.

From:
The Australian

Back to the source
Ingrid D. Rowland | October 04, 2008

Who Owns Antiquity? Museums and the Battle Over Our Ancient Heritage
By James Cuno
Princeton University Press, 228pp, $US24.95
The encyclopedic museums’ argument against repatriation of classical artefacts is self-servingly flawed, writes Ingrid D. Rowland

EARLY this year, the state apartments of the Palazzo del Quirinale hosted a remarkable exhibition of ancient Greek, Roman and Etruscan artefacts, all found on Italian soil but held until recently in museums and private collections in the US, notably the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. The exhibition was a diplomatic coup for Francesco Rutelli, the former mayor of Rome, who until April was minister of culture for two years in the left-wing government of Romano Prodi.
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Washington’s Smithsonian Institution has become the first US institution to return human remains at the request of Australian aboriginal groups, following the lead set by various museums in the UK in recent years.

From:
The Australian

Bones return to Arnhem Land
Natasha Robinson | August 06, 2008

THE remains of 33 indigenous people taken by American researchers 60 years ago touched down in Australia yesterday to be repatriated to Arnhem Land.

A delegation of four traditional owners returned home after travelling to Washington DC to collect the remains from the Smithsonian Institute’s National Museum of Natural History.
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