The return of the Parthenon Marbles to Greece could be a ‘game changer’ for all of us

July 26, 2026 — 5:00am

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David Hill is the former managing director of the ABC, and a long-time advocate and activist for the Parthenon Marbles being returned to Greece from the British Museum.

Fitz: David, good to chat. I want to work our way towards the chances that the new British PM Andy Burnham will lead his government to returning the Parthenon Marbles to Greece from the British Museum, but let’s go first to your own involvement in the campaign.

DH: Sure. I have been heavily involved for three decades.

Fitz: Three decades! Hang on, I do hope you didn’t spend a single minute on it, while you were on the taxpayers’ dime, as managing director for the ABC, pushing your woke, lefty, Marxist, virtue-signalling progressive causes? I’ll have your guts for garters!

DH: [Laughing.] No! But there was a Greek-Australian bloke, Peter Cassimaty, who was a sound technician at the ABC, and after I left in 1995, he asked me to be on the committee of a group of Greek-Australians supporting Greece’s claim for the return of the Marbles, and so I got into it. I ended up living in London in the early 2000s as executive director of the British Committee for the Restitution of the Parthenon Marbles, which is around the time I first met Andy Burnham.

Fitz: How did the marbles get to Britain in the first place?

DH: Well, in the early 1800s, ancient Greece and ancient Rome were very romantic ideas, and the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire in Constantinople, Lord Elgin, was taken by the idea of stripping the Parthenon, which is on the Acropolis in Athens, of about 100 beautiful classical sculptures to adorn his estates in the village of Elgin, near Fife in Scotland. The Ottoman Empire at the time encompassed Greece. He paid a nominal fee, and over several years the job was done.

Fitz: Bloody hell. Talk about “Stuff the British Stole!”

DH: Taking the statues was controversial at the time. A lot of people were critical, including Lord Byron, who wrote damning poems about the stripping of these marble statues. The Parthenon – the crowning achievement of ancient Greek temple architecture – was built at the height of classical Greek civilisation in the 5th century BC, and there’s no argument these sculptures are recognised as the ancient world’s most valuable and........

© The Sydney Morning Herald