Were tensions growing between Gant and Siddique? In court and in the dock they seemed on good terms, constantly exchanging notes and whispering to each other. But perhaps matters between them were not as smooth as they appeared. In her plea to the judge, Siddique’s wife also noted the unfair burden on her family’s finances: ‘I fear that only our properties have been seized (not Gants, Archers or anyone else who actually made money in the situation) will be sold to pay Pridham, we will be left with absolutely nothing and we will be deported back to England.’
In his psychiatric assessment, Dr Nicholas Owens stated that Siddique had ‘reported a complicated relationship with Peter Gant, which included past disputes over payments’.
From Owens’s report, and that of clinical and forensic psychologist Patrick Newton, I pieced together a little more about Siddique’s back story. According to Siddique, one of his lecturers at the Courtauld had told him that he would never find a job as an art conservator in the United Kingdom because of his ethnicity. ‘I was not black enough for Uganda, but not white enough for Britain. I didn’t belong anywhere,’ Siddique had told Newton.
And so in February 1983, after completing his studies, Siddique migrated to Australia with his wife and their first two children—a 6-month-old and a 2-year-old. He had been married since 1974 and his marriage was ‘the centre of his life’.
He told Owens that at his new job as painting conservator in Ballarat he quickly realised that a lack of government funding threatened the viability of his conservation work and so he established a new funding model, taking on work for private clients as well. He said that that model had since been copied and used by the University of Melbourne’s conservation centre. He also spoke of conflicts that arose between him and regional gallery directors in the late 1980s and that ‘rumours were spread around that he was not running the conservation centre properly’. As we know, he left the centre in 1989.
Newton found that ‘even allowing for some hyperbole in his self-reports’, Siddique was ‘clearly depressed’ and at ‘significant risk’ for deterioration following sentencing. His age, ‘naivety to the prison context’ and other medical problems would intensify his vulnerability. The psychologist predicted that Siddique was unlikely to experience ‘further involvement with the criminal justice system’, and that there was no indication of antisocial tendencies or behavioural pathology such as substance abuse or gambling. The risk of recidivism was ‘quite small’. He was introverted, reserved and risk averse.
Both Newton and Owens noted that Siddique was experiencing depression and anxiety in 2007. Owens wrote that at this time Siddique had suffered a 3-month episode of low mood, insomnia and negative thoughts including ‘guilty ruminations over decisions he had made in his life’—the depression had developed immediately after a month-long trip to Uganda. Newton commented that the depression would not have impaired Siddique’s ability to understand the wrongfulness of his conduct or its potential consequences: ‘His intent to commit the offence would not have been obscured.’
But why the depression in 2007? Financially he was doing well—by 2007 he had paid off the family home and his Easey Street property, and had bought three investment properties. He had told Owens that from 2002 until March 2014 he had operated the biggest art conservation facility in Australia and that his business was the main opposition to Robyn Sloggett. He maintained that he had always been friendly to her, but that ‘she has never taken to me’. He described himself as being the victim of other’s manipulation, including Guy Morel.
Owens wrote: ‘Essentially Mr Siddique claims that while he made copies of original Brett Whiteley paintings, this is not a criminal act; however, he denies selling them or benefitting financially from the copies in any way. He described a version of events in which his generous and somewhat naïve nature was taken advantage of by others.’
I could not understand why a man so desperate to avoid jail had not been able to present these copies to the court. Siddique had an explanation for this, too: he told Owens that ‘he was unable to draw on evidence to support his version of events because the relevant witnesses who could give such testimony no longer want to have anything to do with him’.
Owens concluded that Siddique was experiencing a ‘severe depressive episode’ and if imprisoned was ‘at risk of deliberate self-harm, including suicide’.
Siddique, the court was told, had no prior convictions. Gant had one, for car theft, in 1993.
Gant did not submit a psychiatric assessment. A pity. I was intrigued by his psychological make-up. He submitted nine character references. Artist Catherine Larkins described him as an ‘icon of the Melbourne arts industry’. Carlton gallery owner Bridget McDonnell spoke of the ‘joy’ of having him visit her gallery; he was ‘one of the few people who actually looks at all the pictures and is interested to know about the various artists and works’. Horse trainer and former police officer Macgregor Woodhouse described Gant as a ‘person of impeccable character and charitable nature’.
Gant’s daughter Chrissy had also written a letter. Her tone was less anguished than Siddique’s daughter, but her letter was touching in its understatement. Her parents had separated when she was ‘one and a half’. She grew up living with her mother, but her dad continued to play a ‘huge role’ in her life. When she was eleven years old, she and her mother moved to Gippsland, and her dad would make the 10-hour round trip from Geelong every second weekend. She had fond memories of growing up surrounded by art, and visiting artists in their homes and studios, ‘playing in the shed with my own little set of tools while dad framed pictures’. This upbringing, she wrote, nurtured her own love of art and eventual studies in fine art and photography. Her dad was a lover of animals—they jokingly called him ‘the dog whisperer’. He had helped her set up a lunch delivery business.
‘For the first two years I couldn’t afford to pay him but he stood by my side working countless hours, often till the early hours of the morning,’ Chrissy wrote.
At the end of 2013, he encouraged her to tender for the Royal Children’s Hospital Christmas lunch for 3600 people. ‘I thought this was a joke as there was no way we could possibly cater for that many people.’ She won the tender and had catered for the event for the past three years, ‘Dad’ by her side.
‘Despite the incidents of recent years Dad continues to have a deep love and passion for art; however, his career and reputation have been completely destroyed.’ The media, she wrote, ‘very rarely portray even a glimpse of his true character’. The court case had cost him dearly: the loss of the family home, the breakdown of his 29-year marriage, bankruptcy and an ‘extraordinary amount of legal fees’.
The unconditional love shown to Gant and Siddique by those closest to them was as moving as it was unsettling. These men were capable of benevolence. Their families could not believe that they were capable of anything else.
While awaiting sentencing, Peter Gant gave an interview to The Sydney Morning Herald’s Nick O’Malley. The story was published on 3 September 2016. Gant’s complaints were beginning to sound routine: people with money did not have the best taste, Australians didn’t appreciate the richness of their own artistic culture, the best artists were not celebrated enough. Although he now seemed to be cultivating a whole new area of grievances, grumbling about Australia becoming a ‘police state’, with ‘rules for everything’, such as ‘parking tickets’ and ‘bike helmets’. Parking tickets and bike helmets? ‘It’s wrong. It’s fucking wrong,’ he said, and as I read his words I could hear his idiosyncratic voice. But what was this thing he was saying about Siddique? O’Malley wrote: ‘Gant admits that he once had Siddique paint some pictures in the style of Whiteley—an exercise in curiosity—but says he never sold them as Whiteleys.’ Was Gant throwing his friend—who he had described as one of the best conservators in the world—to the dogs?
Elmyr de Hory had read the article in The Sydney Morning Herald that weekend. Relations between Gant and Siddique were not good, he tol
d me.
From: elmyr de hory 03/09/2016
To: Gabriella Coslovich
Apparently they loath each other and are not speaking.I did read the article and I’m not surprised at his attitude towards the art community.He takes pride in believing he’s an intellectual elitist.
I spoke to Gant briefly by phone on the evening of 5 September, a week before the sentencing, to ask about his interview in the paper that weekend. He was typically pleasant and told me he was ‘more than happy to talk’, but his lawyer had given him an earful about speaking to the media. He was under instruction to say no more until after an appeal. I asked him how he was feeling about the next steps—sentencing and an appeal.
‘I am confident about winning an appeal. If an appeal is based on the law, we should win easily,’ he said.
And the prospect of jail—did it scare him?
‘There’s not much point being scared,’ he said. ‘There is nothing we can do about that.’ He said that he ‘knew’ what the judge ‘would like to do, but he might not have any choice’. I understood what Gant meant. During the plea hearing Justice Croucher had signalled his reluctance to send the two accused to jail before an appeal. In a few days we would know the judge’s decision.
‘See you, sweet,’ Gant said as he signed off.
Whenever I bid him goodbye, whether in person or by phone, I was always left feeling strangely complicit. The exchange of information can sometimes be a morally blurred business.
It was the last thing I had expected to hear. Hadn’t Jeremy James stood in the witness box and sworn that he had photographed not just Orange Lavender Bay but also Big Blue Lavender Bay in Robert Le Tet’s boardroom in 1989? His testimony had played a central role in leading Justice Croucher to declare that a conviction would be ‘unsafe’. And now he was telling me that he thought Gant and Siddique guilty?
It was another bizarre twist in this most curious of tales. I had phoned him on the morning of 8 September 2016, at the New South Wales car dealership where he now worked. The receptionist put me through to his office and a friendly, cheery voice greeted me, almost as though he had been anticipating my call. He asked me to hold on while he closed the door, and then he spoke to me for forty minutes with a frankness I had not counted on. Was I being played? He told me that he had never expected his evidence would be so critical to the outcome of the trial.
‘It took me by surprise that so much was resting on my testimony,’ he said. ‘It now strikes me that they will try to use that testimony as a principal point for the appeal. I have no doubt in my mind that those guys are guilty.’
And yet, James stood by the story he had told the court: he had photographed the orange and the blue paintings in 1989. ‘I was so impressed with them, the orange in particular, that they have indelibly been etched in my mind,’ he said.
He had never seen the third painting—Lavender Bay through the Window.
‘I was only telling the truth as to what I knew,’ he told me. ‘Was I happy to be there? No, I was not.’ James’s holiday planned for April 2016—a trip to Disneyland with his grandchildren around the time of the trial—had been threatened by a subpoena.
‘I was not going to be stopped to be subpoenaed for Mr Gant’s defence. I was taking four little boys to Disneyland and I was not going to be stopped. It’s taken me sixty-five years to get to Disneyland and I finally got there,’ he said gleefully.
That explained the delays in the trial, and James’s late appearance, as the last witness. He claimed that as soon as he ‘hopped off the plane’ on his return to Sydney he was surrounded by police.
So how did he square seeing the orange and blue paintings in 1989 with his belief that Gant and Siddique were guilty? Simple. There was no logic to the defence’s story, he said. Why would Gant squirrel away two huge Whiteley paintings for twenty years and not even sell them when he was faced with bankruptcy? It didn’t make sense, he said, plus there were Morel’s photographs of Siddique creating the paintings in his storeroom.
‘So logically they can’t be real, they have to be fake,’ he said, with the same conviction that he had shown during his testimony in court. ‘I was asked to be a witness to something which actually transpired a long time ago—as to what has happened since and why it’s so complicated can only be answered by the people who perpetrated the crime.’
But there was no logic to his story either—the paintings had been ‘indelibly’ etched in his mind, and yet he believed them to be fake? What was this story he was telling me and why was he telling it?
What about the A Private Affair catalogue supposedly from 1989 depicting Orange Lavender Bay, I asked—a catalogue he claimed had been printed by his family’s firm? James himself had found the running proof that was tendered to the court.
‘That’s how I know it’s real,’ he told me. ‘We did a lot of catalogues for Peter Gant, as we did for Niagara Galleries.’ He claimed that Gant never paid for the print run of A Private Affair. But if it had only been a print run of twenty, as he had told the court, the sum couldn’t have been that much, I thought to myself.
‘Lack of cash flow has always been his enemy,’ James said. Gant lived ‘high, wide and handsome’. The words startled me. De Hory had used that exact phrase to describe Gant in one of his emails to me. Was I getting closer to my anonymous source? Without prompting, James confirmed what Elmyr de Hory had already told me—that he had once been a photographer for Christopher Skase. Once again, de Hory had been on the ball.
What about the artworks James had sold to Arthur Thompson? What happened there? James told me he had sold them ‘in good faith’ and had believed them to be authentic.
His friendship with Gant had waned, he told me. The two were no longer close. They had lost contact over the years, although James had coffee with him during Gant’s recent trip to Newcastle. Gant had phoned him and said he would be passing through Sydney on his way back to Melbourne and could they catch up. They did, at James’s workplace, where Gant’s dog, Chewy, persisted in barking at everyone. At a certain point Gant had to dash off for his interview with The Sydney Morning Herald.
‘It was a bullshit article,’ James said. ‘Gant’s a runaway train, nothing will stop him.’
From: elmyr de hory 01/09/2016
To: Gabriella Coslovich
Hi Gabriella,
I thought you would be interested to know that Playfoot is suing Siddique for Approx $1.1 million in relation to the Orange Lavender Bay.Siddique has responded by abusing Playfoot verbally, explaining that he never received any remuneration from the sale of the forgeries.
Cheers,
Elmyr.
Three days before the scheduled sentencing of 12 September 2016, Justice Croucher postponed for the second time. Instead a ‘mention’ would be held on that date. I was beginning to wonder whether the judge simply couldn’t bring himself to sentence these two men. Was he regretting not throwing the case out? How else to explain this latest delay? I phoned Susan Borg. She told me that the Crown had made compensation orders against the accused—$2.5 million in compensation to Andrew Pridham, and $990 000 to John Playfoot—and the judge needed to address these claims. Compensation to John Playfoot?
That afternoon I phoned Gant—he said he hadn’t heard the news.
‘I can’t believe this,’ he said, sounding exasperated. ‘I am so over this, it’s giving me the shits.’
I took the opportunity to ask him about the County Court case involving Dudley Cain and his Perceval painting. I had been avoiding raising the matter.
‘It’s on the public record,’ Gant said curtly. ‘I was acquitted and they lost. There is nothing else to say. The jury found me not guilty, very, very quickly.’
On Monday 12 September 2016, Justice Croucher walked into the wedding cake–like splendour of courtroom four, sat at the bench and launched into a sharp explanation. A compensation order had been made by the Crown at the ‘eleventh hour’ and he needed to deal with it before he could sentence the
accused. He seemed cross—his face red and forbidding. He was no longer wearing his horsehair wig—from 1 May judges had stopped wearing them in Victoria—and it was startling to see him without it. His remaining hair was silvery white and shorn back to a close crop.
‘I’m not prepared to sentence the accused until I have heard submissions on the questions raised,’ he said.
He pelted out no fewer than nine questions about the compensation order. Who should he make the orders out to when there was no evidence that Siddique had received any money from Pridham or Nasteski? To what extent should he be inquiring into the financial circumstances of the accused? And why hadn’t the compensation orders been raised at the plea hearing?
‘I’d heard nothing about this until the last minute last week,’ he said irately.
Yet again the Crown was in his bad books. In the middle of a murder trial, he had taken the morning to return to the tangle of this case and he was not in the position to hear full submissions now.
‘I’ve got other things to do, and other people to deal with, and I can’t just drop everything, and nor can everyone else just drop everything and sentence them, and there’s yet more uncertainty, more uncertainty for everyone and more delay, and it’s just not right. But there it is.’
But the men were declared guilty four months ago. And still no sentence? When even Gant’s defence barrister began to gently encourage the judge to sentence, it seemed something was amiss. His Honour dug in.
‘I’m not sentencing in this case until this is sorted out one way or the other … that’s the view I have taken. Or the other alternative, possibility, is I don’t sentence at all.’
Whiteley on Trial Page 33