The institutions they represented may still be in the market but their perception and drive will be hard to replace.
After 20 years curating the USA Museum of the Australian National Maritime Museum, a Federal institution based in Sydney, Paul Hundley has become Associate Director for Curatorial Research at the new National Museum of Qatar in Doha, writes Terry Ingram.
This continues the tradition for Australians to acquire exotic curating jobs overseas. The museum is reputed to have acquired one of Cezanne's paintings of card players for around $US300 million.
Set up in 1988 with US5 million of funds from the US Government's as its gift for Australia's Biennale, the USA Museum where Hundley used to work was relatively richly endowed, given there are limited pieces of material culture which connect Australia with the US.
The most unusual and precious of the acquisitions made by Hundley during his tenure was a porcelain punch bowl with a view of early Sydney.
Hundley tenaciously followed through a tip off on the existence of this rare piece of Australiana in Newark, New Jersey, and the owner was persuaded to part with it for $500,000 in 2006.
Barely a painting of an American ship that came to Australia or had any other connection with it escaped Hundley's attention at auction here or overseas.
In Qatar Hundley will be supervising five curators and developing the research program for exhibitions at the new museum which is currently under construction and will open in 2015.
Unlike other arts professionals, especially the NSW State institutions which have been subject to severe cutbacks, Hundley will be replaced and his position has been advertised.
The other missing buyer, not always in the room itself of course, was Paul Brunton. To the vast surprise of his colleagues in the library world Brunton stepped down late last year from his position as senior curator, Mitchell Library, Sydney to which he was clearly much devoted joining 42 other members of staff leaving on that date as a result of a redundancy deal.
Brunton, who never had another employer was responsible for numerous acquisitions for the library both in the saleroom and privately.
These included rare journals, books, paper and documents such as the letters of first fleeter Newton Fowell, and diary pages of explorer George Bass.
He was the curator of Matthew Flinders: The Ultimate Voyage, exhibition presented at the State Library of NSW in 2002 and he was also a prolific researcher.
As an important Australiana tool the archives of Oz magazine, now lost to Australia, would have had more than a passing interest to Brunton but it was to the National Library in Canberra that it was offered on the magazine's 50th anniversary.
The help of Sydney rare book dealer Nicolas Pounder was enlisted in cataloguing the archive which belonged to Richard Neville, one of the key figures of the 1960s counter-culture movement.
Oz magazine was an underground satirical publication which was launched on April 1 1963 and was published in London and Sydney.
The archive was sold to Yale University after the National Library of Australia failed to make a competitive offer, Neville announced.
Neville is reported to have said that he would have preferred the collection - which covered his decade of co-editing OZ magazine in Sydney and London, as well as a period in New York in the early 1970s - to have remained in Australia, but the NLA's offer "was not enough to live on".
The National Gallery of Australia has sought to continue its enterprising purchases by agreeing to buy two iconic paintings by George Stubbs through Neville Keating Pictures for the Australian national art collection.
The pair A portrait of the Kongouro (Kangaroo) from New Holland and a companion painting, A portrait of a large Dog from New Holland (Dingo) were painted by Stubbs in 1772 in response to a commission by naturalist Sir Joseph Banks. The small works have remained in the possession of descendants of the Banks family since then.
Banks returned from Captain Cook's 1768-70 Endeavour trip, which mapped the East Coast of Australia with the skin of a large kangaroo, and presumably one of a dingo.
He commissioned the established animal artist George Stubbs, better known for his depictions of horses, to paint the 'portraits' of these Australian animals, which Stubbs did using the kangaroo skin and a number of skeletons, as well as rough sketches and verbal descriptions.
The paintings were first exhibited in the Royal Academy, London in 1773 and were published as engravings as a symbol of Australia in the account of Captain Cook's first voyage to the Pacific.
'The subjects of the two paintings are integral to Australian art and history' argues Radford.
'Stubbs’s image of the kangaroo, in particular, became the archetypical image of the kangaroo for well over half a century.'
‘These two paintings should be in Australia, in the national art collection which is the largest and most balanced collection of Australian art. They should belong to the people of Australia’, he said.
Both paintings are in the UK under a temporary export ban imposed by the British Government.
The Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art (RCEWA) believes these works should remain in the UK and has imposed the temporary export ban to allow time for a UK public institution to raise the estimated GBP £ 5.5 million needed to acquire them.
Radford said the National Gallery of Australia would “still persist in its efforts to acquire these paintings that are historically significant to Australia.”.
The paintings had been on loan to Parham House, Sussex, a Tudor gothic pile going back to 1577 but under present family since 1922, and where they have been replaced by copies by the artist Ying Yang.
Britain's export reviewing committee recommended deferral because the paintings were so closely connected with the country's national life “that their departure would be a misfortune; and that they were of outstanding significance for the study of eighteenth century exploration of Australia and the public dissemination of knowledge during the Enlightenment
Australia, of course, lost the celebrated Stubbs painting A Pair of Foxhounds to the Tate Gallery in London in the 1970s after it had appeared in a Sydney shop window for $5000.
The only known Stubbs to be in Australia, a portrait of a grey mare, is on loan to the Art Gallery of NSW with a view to a sale.
Like Alan Bond, the NGA could proceed to buy the Australiana portraits and keep them in the UK
Bond did this with a portrait of Banks by Sir Benjamin West ultimately secured by the Lincoln Museum in the UK.
