Douglas Snelling

He was born on 24 February 1916, the only child of a bootmaker, Albert Edward Snelling, and his wife Ethel May, née Burrage, in Gravesend, Kent, England.

His chairs featured parachute webbing and functional modernist designs, and according to the Powerhouse Museum, were "Australia's first popular, mass produced range of furniture sold widely through the major department stores from the late 1940s to the mid 1950s.

[2][10][11] Snelling also did work for a consumer electronics manufacturer, Kriesler, including on the design of the bakelite case of their iconic 'Sealed Midget' (Model 11-4) radio,[12][13] also known as the 'Beehive', made from 1946 to 1948.

Both the furniture range and radio were radical departures from staid and conventional pre-war designs; both sold in large numbers in Australia, during the consumption boom after the end of wartime austerity measures.

His earlier work in shop interior design won him a job with the practice of Beverly Hills architects Douglas Honnold and John Lautner.

[22] Snelling would also be influenced by other California-based American architects who were associated with Wright's design tradition, notably, Gordon Drake, Harwell Hamilton Harris, and Richard Neutra.

Among his final designs were waterfront property schemes for Fiji and Vanuatu, featuring modernist thatched hut-like buildings.

[44] Snelling continued to drink heavily, something that complicated his already cantankerous, querulous, and quarrelsome nature, and brought about violent and irrational mood swings.

There were unseemly public outbursts, such as his pompously toned letter of April 1974, critical of the awarding of a prize to Jørn Utzon, the original architect of the Sydney Opera House, for what Snelling derided as "his sculpture on Bennelong Point".

After Patricia's death in 1976, he moved with his teenage sons to Honolulu, where he married Swedish artist Marianne Sparre in the early 1980s.

In 1985, he was concerned enough about his failing health to suddenly book a flight back to Sydney, where he died several days later of a brain aneurism.

[1][45] In a June 2022 episode of the ABC Radio National current affairs series Background Briefing, it was reported that, during his time in Asia, Snelling had acquired many pieces of rare Khmer art for his private collection via the black market, knowing them to have been looted.

Apart from a few small pieces he said were given to him by members of the Cambodian Royal Family, he stated, in an excerpt from a personal letter he wrote during this time, that the rest were purchased "outside the borders of Cambodia",[40][47] presumably in Thailand.

The ABC report also cited evidence, discovered in a 1970s episode of the ABC-TV current affairs series Four Corners, when Snelling was interviewed about design at his Sydney home, in which many key Khmer items in his collection are clearly visible.

[40][47][48] Snelling acquired his collection during the days of the Kymer Republic;[40] its scale was a foretaste of the later, more-widespread looting of Cambodian antiquities, during the period of the Kymer Rouge government (1975–1979) and the subsequent two decades of their insurgency, when antiquities were smuggled out and fenced through Western art dealers, including Douglas Latchford.