A $200,000 painting went missing from Australia’s National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne… 12 years ago.

So, uhm… did they only just notice, or what?

Apparently, the gallery wanted to make perfectly sure that it didn’t falsely accuse a museum staff member of theft when they could have simply misplaced it. So it searched for Richard Parkes Bonington’s Low Tide at Boulogne for 12 years before finally reporting it stolen.

The 1824 piece most likely went missing during 1999 renovations, when the gallery’s 65,000 pieces were relocated. Last year, Dr. Gerard Vaughan, the gallery director informed the Victorian government that “a painting in the state collection, previously considered misplaced, is now suspected to have been stolen. [...] In all likelihood, this painting is no longer in our possession.”

Thanks to a freedom of information request, the gallery was finally able to report the painting stolen after some 8 years of searching for it. How big of a blow is this to the artistic community? An Australian art academic noted that the missing piece isn’t exactly iconic, and that it was an easy miss for gallery visitors.

“If you have an absolute passion for romantic French landscapes, you could be quite upset not to see this work,” said Sasha Grishin, a professor of art history at the Australian National University.

So, dear reader – do you have the missing piece?

Museum Reports Painting Stolen… After 12 Years is a post from: The Inquisitr

The spate of bizarre sesmic activity hasn’t left the Great Southern Land tonight with news that Melbourne has experienced yet another earthquake.

The latest quake struck at around 7:10pm local time (AEDT) and follows another small quake centered on Frankston (just outside Melbourne) in the last two weeks.

At the time of writing we don’t have a reading, however the broad range of Tweets about it would suggest it happened.

We’ll update this post with a reading when we have it.

At a guess we’d suggest that the epicenter was to the South East of Melbourne. More soon.

Update: unconfirmed report via Twitter puts the earthquake at a 3.0. More soon

Update 2: Geoscience Australia remains down. Sure sign of confirmation. The Rudd Government needs to give them more money

Update 3: we have a 95% confirmed report that the quake was a 2.3 with an epicenter near Pearcedale, map as follows:

Update 4: latest word is a 3.2 in Port Phillip Bay, as confirmed by Geoscience Australia. Big q is, how is it that our best scientists take over an hour to work out an earthquake.

Melbourne, Australia Experiences Another Earthquake is a post from: The Inquisitr

A second earthquake in around two weeks has rattled residents in one of the last places you’d expect to have an earthquake: Melbourne, Australia.

The quake struck at 4:30pm local time Wednesday (10:30pm US PDT) and lasted between 4-10 seconds. There is no confirmation of the scale of the quake, although Twitter users reported that it felt less severe that the last quake March 6 that recorded a 4.7 on the richter scale.

Having sat through it (oddly I didn’t feel the last one) the biggest part is the pure surprise. I’ve never felt an earthquake before, and our house in the Eastern Suburbs of Melbourne rattled for a good 4-5 seconds, sort of a mellow rattle. My first thought was that perhaps there had been an accident outside, but there wasn’t.

Update: quake was 4.6. Small on a global scale, but for locals, big enough to make the Melbourne Earthquake the Number One hash tag on Twitter.

Earthquake rattles Melbourne, Australia is a post from: The Inquisitr