Framed is a labour of love. A story that has been bubbling away in my subconscious for decades.

It is the fictionalised 'true' story of how my brother was framed for the biggest art heist in Australian history.

Below is the dedication in the front of the book:



In the mid-1980s Peter Rosson (re-named Daniel Hardman for the purposes of this fictional account) was a wildly successful Melbourne artist, known for by-passing the nepotism of contemporary dealers and galleries, and selling paintings direct to the public.
In early1986 he had a sell-out exhibition in which over thirty of his extraordinary Ash Wednesday expressionist landscapes sold for a total equivalent to ninety thousand dollars in today’s money.
In August 1986, he and his partner, Margaret Casey, were framed for the theft of Picasso’s Weeping Woman from the National Gallery of Victoria, which had occurred some three weeks earlier.
The so-called evidence touted by the investigating police at the time, was a hand-drawn artist’s sketch, of dubious providence, depicting a woman with an uncanny likeness to Peter’s partner Margaret, holding a wrapped package identical to the one widely viewed on television several days earlier, when police had finally recovered the Picasso from a railway station locker.
It was a little too pat. It was a set-up. And within forty-eight hours, when fingerprints and typewriter faces didn’t match up, the police knew they’d been had….
But who had produced this convenient piece of ‘evidence’… This artist’s sketch?
No one seemed to know, and the police certainly weren’t saying.


But what is known, is that within weeks, the investigation into Australia’s biggest ever art heist – a crime which attracted massive media and public interest here and world-wide, and during which a group calling themselves ‘The Australian Cultural Terrorists’, repeatedly threatened and ridiculed the police and the state government – was dropped.
The crime remains unsolved to this day.
Thirty-five years later, when a documentary team gained access to the police archive containing Rosson and Casey’s police file, the file box – once the dust was blown off and it was opened – was found to be empty.
Rosson’s career as an artist never recovered from the taint of being implicated in the Picasso theft, and sixteen years later, in 2002, he took his own life.

Rewind to September 1989:
Frustrated after two years of trying to identify the informer who had attempted to frame him, and facing the increasingly harsh reality that his career was tanking and he was apparently ‘black-listed’ by the mainstream art establishment, Peter and his new wife, retreated to the coast to re-group.
There we shared a duplex rental – a kind of family compound.
We went surfing a lot, and Pete talked about the Picasso affair… A lot.
It had been a deeply traumatic experience, especially in light of the damage done to his career. But Pete had learned much in his attempts to get to the bottom of what had happened. And he had plenty of theories too, which I heard repeatedly as we traversed the coast, looking for waves.
Many of Pete’s theories seemed a little outlandish at the time, but with the passage of time, some have begun to seem quite plausible…
Framed is my brother’s story; based in part on the known facts of the Weeping Woman fiasco, and drawing on some of his colourful theories about what had transpired. But mostly it is fiction. My characters Daniel and Audrey are perhaps all too easily identifiable as my brother and his partner, Margaret. But the other characters are imaginary – perhaps coloured somewhat by the stories my brother told me – but nonetheless invented to fit a fictional plot, and not intended to resemble any real person in any way.

Note: The quotes in italics in each of the chapter headings are taken from Angry Buddha – a hitherto unpublished book written by my brother.