An 800-year-old wooden carving has been returned to one of Nepal's oldest temples, nearly 50 years after it was stolen.
The 1.3m strut was repatriated in a ceremony near Kathmandu on Tuesday, after being inherited by the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) in 2000.
A year later, the gallery was notified the artefact had likely been stolen from the Ratneshwar Temple in the historic city of Patan.
The work is believed to have been stolen in 1975, although some records suggest it may have been stolen in a wave of looting in the area in the 1980s.
How the carving ended up in a collection inherited by the Art Gallery of New South Wales remains a mystery.
A slow journey back to Kathmandu
AGNSW Director Michael Brand travelled to Nepal to attend the ceremony in the Kathmandu Valley.
"It's a very special day for our Nepali colleagues and friends because this strut now is back in Patan," Dr Brand said from Nepal.
The director has acknowledged the 20-year process to return the carving was "unusually long".
That, he said, was due to "events" in Nepal, including earthquakes and changes in government.
"It was really just finding the right time for it to go back and now is the right time," Dr Brand said.
"This one took a little longer than normal but also it was actually easier in the end because of the information we did have."
Professor Erin Thompson, expert in art crime from the City University of New York, has tracked the strut case and said timing was a common excuse used by museums and galleries.
"If you don't think conditions are right, why aren't you helping make them right, instead of holding on to something?" professor Thompson said.
"It's not ethically correct for a museum just to say "we're waiting for you to take the problem" without recognising that they are part of this global illicit market — they're part of the problem.
"You can't just take other people's objects, take other people's gods because you think they'll be better off."
She welcomed the repatriation but said AGNSW should apologise for the delay.
"Most often in recent years, activists have identified an artefact, shown a museum director pictures of it in situ before it was stolen, and then those objects come home fairly rapidly, within months sometimes weeks."
The return of the carving was bittersweet for the director, who acknowledged the object belonged back in Nepal.
"There is an element of sadness that this wonderful work of art will no longer be on view in Sydney, but all of us take great happiness and comfort that the work will be seen by so many people here in Nepal."
The Ratneshwar Temple is thought to be one of Nepal's oldest pagodas of its type, thought to have been constructed in around 1200 AD.
The carving, which depicts a yakshi or shalabhanjika deity symbolising love and fertility, was one of the temple's 16 ornate roof struts.
The next wave of repatriations
The Nepalese carving is not the only stolen work within the gallery's archives.
AGNSW has 40,000 items on display or in storage, and among them are three pieces procured from now-imprisoned art dealer Subhash Kapoor.
Kapoor was arrested and last year convicted of buying and dealing in stolen art by a Manhattan court, and was ordered to serve 10 years in jail by a Tamil Nadu court in southern India.
Indian-born Kapoor operated a New York commercial gallery specialising in Indian art, and sold or donated works to international museums, including the National Gallery of Australia.
The sculptures, rattle in the form of a lady playing the drum, a winged deity, Varaha rescuing the earth goddess Bhudevi, originate as far back as the 2nd century and are believed to have been stolen by Kapoor.
Dr Brand said the gallery was intending to return those works to India in the near future.
Professor Thompson said these moves are part of a wave of stolen works being returned from western collections.
She credited growing awareness surrounding collections of works of theft.
"Just like you ask, 'Are my bananas fair trade? Were my sneakers made by child labour?', we're starting to ask 'This beautiful thing I'm looking at that's giving me pleasure, whose pain might be behind that pleasure?'"
