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Solo. Efforts to trace and recover rare Javanese relics missing from Solo’s Radya Pustaka Museum have unexpectedly discovered that about 3,000 ancient manuscripts were taken to Australia almost 30 years ago.

While no one seems to know whether any of the manuscripts came from the museum itself, John Paterson, an Australian researcher of Javanese culture who has been holding onto them since 1980, has told the Solo Legislative Council that he would like to hand them over to the museum to be better taken care of.

The Radya Pustaka Museum, which is the oldest museum in Indonesia but has been plagued by the disappearance of many items in its collection, has been at the center of recent attention over concerns about its financial position and the competence of past administrators.

Paterson received the manuscripts from Suranto Atmosaputro, the former head of the Javanese literature department at Sebelas Maret University in Solo, although he did not know whether Atmosaputro, who has since passed away, obtained them from the museum.

Paterson said Atmosaputro was worried he could not look after the historical manuscripts so he asked him for help.

“As I live in Australia, I had to take them home with me,” Paterson said. “But now I want to return them to Indonesia.”

Paterson said he established the Literary Foundation in Solo in 2007 with a view to eventually returning the manuscripts.

According to the head of the foundation, Supardjo, there were three places considered worthy of receiving the priceless manuscripts: the Radya Pustaka, Jakarta’s National Archives Museum or the National Library.

However, he said that the Solo museum did not want to receive the manuscripts until it had upgraded its facilities.

The chairman of the museum committee, Winarsa Kalingga, said the museum was in no position at present to give the manuscripts their required level of care. The museum recently discovered some items long thought missing from its collection right on its very own premises.

“We found six ancient maps piled up like garbage in the warehouse,” Kalingga said.

One was inscribed with Dutch and another was marked with Javanese names. All of the maps were in poor condition.

Kalingga said this inventory debacle, and the improper storage of priceless artifacts, proved the indifference of the museum’s previous caretakers.

Further examples of past neglect included misplaced keys to locked storage facilities.

“In the warehouse, there are two buckets filled with keys,” Kalingga said, adding that they could not work out what all the keys were for.

“It’s better off that we report them as missing keys, ask for permission to break the locks and then make a new set,” he said.

Meanwhile, leads for other missing items pointed to the University of Indonesia’s Depok campus in West Java, which is believed to be holding at least 29 ancient manuscripts suspected of having been sold illegally.

In addition, some 20 other manuscripts were found to have been borrowed by Solo’s Indonesian Arts Institute (ISI) in 1991, but never returned.