Art Gallery of NSW checks its collection

"The Art Gallery of NSW will check the provenance of other items in its collection after revelations that a 1000-year-old statue in its collection was stolen from a temple in southern India".

Should it not have checked those origins bfore they accessed them into their collections? I hope the Australian public ask why they did not.  How many more Australian museums and galleries have added dodgy antiquities to their collections? Edmund Capon, [ director 1994 -2004]

conceded the gallery had been less diligent in the past when checking the provenance of ancient treasures. He said the process of ensuring antiquities had not been looted was much more developed and punctilious now than even a decade ago. "It is difficult. Again it's like so many things – you don't learn from your successes," he said. "You learn from mistakes and when things aren't going well. "We are much more conscious of it than we were 10 years ago."

That's ten years ago when everybody blithely thought they could get away with flaunting the international conventions and import of the antyiquities preservation laws of the source-countries? The only reason we are seeing this concern is public pressure on those that convinced (misled) themselves that they had a "mission" which placed them  above all and any laws and regulations.

Andrew Taylor, 'Stolen statue: Art Gallery of NSW checks its collection', Sydney Morning Herald ‎October 17, 2013