She sat for more than three decades in a field in Daingean, Co Offaly. Four tonnes of bronze, covered in a grimy coat of green and black. Discoloured yet undamaged, she became a favourite perch for birds. She could still be there now, but on the other side of the world somebody was desperately seeking Victoria.
Mr Neil Glasser, then director of promotions for the Queen Victoria Building (QVB), a shopping mall and architectural focal point in Sydney, was getting more than desperate. His search for a statue of the monarch to place in the busy plaza outside the QVB was proving frustratingly unsuccessful.
It wasn't for want of trying. For more than three years he had investigated the sculptural leftovers of 23 countries around the world. Occasionally he would stumble across a neglected, abused Victoria that nobody wanted, but getting permission to claim it for Australia would inevitably prove more difficult.
At his lowest ebb, in 1986, he received confirmation that a statue of the Empress of India existed in Daingean. Five days later he stood in her field. "I looked upon the most magnificent, majestic, imposing and regal statue of Queen Victoria I had ever seen," he said.
When Ms Ann Canavan, an Irish tour guide working at the QVB, explains to visitors the origins of the statue she doesn't tell the whole truth about how it ended up in the southern hemisphere.
"I tell them that it was a gift from the people of Ireland to the people of Australia. What I don't tell them is that she lay in bushes and brambles in a field for 40 years before we found her," she said.
In fact the imposing statue by John Hughes, which formerly graced the forecourt of Leinster House, is on extended loan. In the 1940s it was something of an embarrassment to the state and the subject of regular letters to the Government from republicans angrily demanding its removal.
The reorganisation of the Dail grounds to make way for a car-park was the excuse needed by the Government of the day. In 1948, Queen Victoria was banished to the Royal Hospital Kilmainham, before making her way to Daingean and eventually Australia.
Former Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald was involved in the transaction. "It was a particularly ugly statue," he remembers. "I'm sure there was some political reason for its removal, but you certainly couldn't make the argument for its return on aesthetic grounds."
Technically Ireland could still ask for it back, but even in the current climate that seems an unlikely prospect. Ms Canavan understands the motivation of hiding such relics away, but thinks it was a shame.
"Australia may become a republic and I would hope people would take some time before pulling everything down. There is absolutely no point in removing these things from our history," she said.
Dr Paula Murphy, a UCD art historian currently working on a study of 19th century sculpture, agrees. This week she presented a paper to a conference on public monuments and sculpture in London and outlined how statues and monuments from the pre-independence period had been "either removed, dismantled or bombed from their rightful place in our cultural heritage".
King William III sat astride his horse in the city centre for 200 years. Defaced sporadically, he was eventually blown up on Armistice Day 1928.
King George II once soared above the trees of St Stephen's Green but was blown up by republicans in 1937.
Nelson's Pillar, then Dublin's best known landmark and focal point at the centre of O'Connell Street was brought crashing down by a republican group in 1966, the 50th anniversary of the 1916 rising.
"We can't obliterate our history by destroying monuments," says Dr Murphy. "I have a great sense of loss about it and in a way we have written ourselves out of our own history."
Her list goes on. The Earl of Carlisle, once located in the Phoenix Park but blown up in 1958; Viscount Gough - "a stunning equestrian statue", according to Dr Murphy - also blown up in the 1950s. "The capital no longer has any equestrian statues and few great monuments," she noted.
It is not just in the case of Queen Victoria that Ireland's artistic loss has been another country's cultural gain. King George I, an equestrian bronze, began life on Essex (now Grattan) Bridge. In Dublin Portrait Statues, the late Fred (F.E.) Dixon recounted how its erection in 1722 was celebrated with "two hogsheads of wine for the people".
The statue was later moved to the garden of the Mansion House. In the 1920s it was taken down and later sold to the Barber Institute of Fine Art in Birmingham.
"We do have a legacy of your imperial past," said the director of the institute, Mr Richard Verdi, when asked about the statue this week. "Thomas Bodkin, an Irishman, was the first director of the institute. He saved it and brought it over. We are rather proud of it; it's the oldest public sculpture in Birmingham."
The institute recently spent £25,000 refurbishing the statue. "We gave it a major facelift and it looks wonderful," said Mr Verdi. "You can't deny your own history by simply removing its relics. George I is much loved. You are not having him back."
Would we want him? Perhaps not, but even as our public monuments and statues were being lost, senior politicians were warning against their removal. State papers examined by Dr Murphy show that in the 1950s, John A. Costello believed the public should be made aware of the intrinsic artistic value of such structures. Nelson in particular, he said, "served as a permanent reminder of freedom achieved".
As early as 1938 Eamon de Valera expressed concern about the fate of these relics of imperialism. It was not Government policy, he said, to remove sculpture solely because it was associated with the former British regime.
"There may in some cases be reasons of historical or artistic interest which would make it undesirable to take such action."
This week his granddaughter, the Minister for Arts, Heritage, Gaeltacht and the Islands, Ms de Valera, responded to the question of how important these works were in terms of Irish heritage.
"These sculptures have a story to tell. They were part of our history. They took on an Irish dimension and were landmarks in our capital city," she said.
Apart from the Wellington Monument in the Phoenix Park, there is only one other major monumental remnant of our pre-independence past left in Dublin. New art projects have sprung up around the city, most with a distinctly Irish flavour, few built to last as long as those that went before.
But Queen Victoria's consort, Prince Albert, once in a prominent position in the centre of the lawn behind Leinster House, still stands in the middle of some bushes beside the wall of the Natural History Museum. "Most people I have spoken to don't even know he is there," said Dr Murphy.
History has shown that a country's public monuments are often the first casualties of revolution. After the collapse of the Soviet Union statues, mostly of Stalin, were systematically removed from their pedestals. At the time part of a poem by Shelley was regularly quoted. It seems appropriate here:
My name is Ozymandias, king of kings. Look on my works, ye mighty and despair! Nothing beside remains.