Australia’s Byzantine trophy of war Part 1

The Anglo-American writer and avowed anti-theist Christopher Hitchens once lamented that there was no fraudulence one couldn’t get away with, provided one could get the word ‘Reverend’ put in front of their name. Hitchens was referring mainly to the unctuous and decidedly for-profit salesmen of the American evangelical churches, but the criticism probably has a certain universal currency.

Whether or not the Reverend William Maitland Woods – Senior Church of England Chaplain to the Australian Imperial Forces in Gallipoli, Sinai and Palestine throughout World War I – got away with fraud is debated to this day. He has been called a thief, a liar and the most brazen looter in Australian military history. What we can say with certainty is that at the end of his long tour of duty, Woods got away with a shipload of antiquities, and by his own admission, at times deployed ‘devious devices’ in the acquisition of