After a rewarding career as an antiques dealer, Joan Bowers has decided to sell her private collection of Indian artefacts, no doubt one of the best in Australia. The auction will take place on Sunday at Bonhams & Goodman's Bay East rooms at Waterloo.

Knowing when to sell is as important as knowing when to buy and in Bowers' case this decision was largely made for her.

She decided to simplify her life after a successful battle with cancer and the celebration of her 60th birthday .

The decision wasn't exactly easy because she has shared most of her life with these wonderful objects. Her children have grown up with them. But after some trepidation she now feels a sense of relief that the decision has been made and she can pass them on to other collectors. She hopes the new owners gain as much pleasure from them as she has. Her collection was sourced almost entirely from India, predominantly from the Rajasthan region. How she found the pieces is a saga in itself.

She first visited the sub-continent in 1981 as a delegate to a conference. She took a train to Jaipur and was astonished to see valuable antiquities lying in the rubble as historic buildings were being pulled down.

After some inquiries she found that it was possible to buy rubble by the truckload.

"So I started to buy demolition sites," she says. "You'd pay the labourers a bit extra to pull things down sensitively, then take what was valuable and sell back the rest."

The items of value would then be shipped back to Australia, a process that was an adventure in itself.

Among the treasures she retrieved in this period are some of the rare items for sale on Sunday. There's a door from the Gajner Summer Palace in Bikaner, a pair of octagonal sandstone stools used for mounting elephants, ornamental room dividers and elaborate hand-carved columns, all from the 19th century, if not earlier.

A very significant piece is a plaque that marked the site of a royal sati - the traditional Hindu custom in which a widow was burnt to ashes on her dead husband's pyre. Bowers was surprised to find this among a group of stones she bought. The plaque has been a feature of her Sydney home for nearly three decades.

Another of her favourite pieces is a dowry box featuring an erotic painting on one side. The naked couple was modestly covered by a blanket painted on during the Victorian era. Also included are five, four-poster Calcutta beds from the mid 19th century, plus an 18th century glass mosaic wedding enclosure. Joan's daughter used this last item in her own bedroom.

Once she had discovered this source of antiquities she started Joan Bowers Curiosities and Antiques, at first in Paddington and then in Little Bourke Street, Woolloomooloo. This shop was run in partnership with Lord Alistair McAlpine, the treasurer of the British Conservative Party during the Maggie Thatcher era, who walked in one day and made her an offer.

Regarded as one of the most prolific collectors in the world, McAlpine was fascinated by Indian antiquities and when he began to invest in property in Broome, he asked Bowers to decorate his Cable Beach Club. She was also asked to source antiques for several of Christopher Skase's properties in the 1980s.

This started the fad for incorporating Asian antiques in Australian homes and Bowers says she sold thousands of her recycled items during the next few decades. As well as the Indian pieces the collection includes a selection of Aboriginal and Papua New Guinean artefacts she collected in the '70s along with some Chinese furniture and contemporary Australian paintings.

Among the monumental stone sculptures and temple doors are some curiosities that say a lot about a period of Indian culture that seems likely to be forgotten.

Lot 2267 is a series of framed sketches Bowers calls "visions of hell".

One shows a man having his brains picked out by crows. She has been told that these were shown to children to warn them what would happen if they were naughty.

Another reminder of the past is a medical doll from a time when all doctors in India were men. Male doctors were not allowed to touch women patients, so they had to indicate their symptoms by referring to these wooden models.

The collection can be viewed at Bonhams & Goodman's Bay East rooms, 224 Young Street, Waterloo. See bonhamsandgoodman.com.au.

My collection

Joan Bowers is well-known for the series of antique shops she ran in the eastern suburbs of Sydney until 1998. Starting in Paddington, she then moved to her most famous shop in Little Bourke Street.

The store became a meeting point for the rich and famous, where the likes of John Laws and Lady Mary Fairfax might rub shoulders in front of a temple door featuring carvings of Krishna.

"I first went there (the sub-continent) as a delegate to a conference in Bangladesh trying to set up an orphanage," she says. "And I felt utterly comfortable there."

She felt especially at home in Jaipur, the capital of Rajasthan, where she began to recover antiquities from demolition sites. About 30 years later she celebrated her 60th birthday there, flying friends over for a week of celebrations.

Bowers was one of the first Australian dealers to discover what treasures were to be found in India, most of them being destroyed in the country's period of rapid modernisation. She now feels it's time to pass these on to a new generation of collectors.

$250

In 19th century India, these wooden medical dolls were used by female patients to point out the area of concern to male doctors.

$3000

This elephant, one of a matching pair, once graced the base of a swing used to celebrate the god Krishna.

$12,000

This painting, worthy of a national collection, according to Joan Bowers, dates from the 18th century. Protecting it are two temple donor figures, also part of the Bowers collection.