The butterfly was dead when the old man found it, lying in the snow 1,600 metres above sea level. It didn’t have a name then, as he bent down and scooped its body up from the ice – a tiny John Doe, light as a feather, barely visible to an untrained eye. But this encounter in the spring of 1922 wasn’t his first brush with the short life cycle of an insect. It wasn’t his first time on Barrington Tops either, a volcanic plateau perched high in the Great Dividing Range of New South Wales. The man’s name was Johnny Hopson but to many he was known as the “Father of the Tops”.
It was no secret that the plateau was good butterfly country; if you picked your moment right, the mountain air would be thick with them, gathering at dusk in cloud-like clusters ripe for someone like Hopson to catch hundreds at a time with a sweep of a net. Or, as in this case, a cold snap or unexpected snowfall might leave the ground littered with delicate corpses, waiting in plain sight for a keen-eyed collector. The butterflies were just the start of its riches and, once word began to spread of this “nature’s wonderland”, collectors swarmed like moths to a flame.
Hopson was there to guide the first scientific expedition in 1915 and successive waves of genteel academics, wet-eared university students and avid amateurs who trudged up the misty slopes with their nets and killing jars.
Then, in June 1928, Johnny Hopson keeled over dead at the age of 60. The story of his butterfly didn’t end there. Most of the 3,000-odd insects he’d collected were bequeathed to the Australian Museum in Sydney but that little fellow from the snowfield had passed into the hands and collection of Hopson’s friend and Australia’s foremost butterfly collector, Dr Gustavus Athol Waterhouse.
Finishing the work of other collectors, whether they were living or dead, friend or stranger, was nothing new for Waterhouse and he set about identifying the body. As he looked closer at its wings he saw bright-red markings on the silky white underside, telling him this was something new.
Waterhouse dubbed it Pseudalmenus chlorinda barringtonensis. Later generations of entomologists would give it a much cooler nickname – the flame hairstreak.
Nearly 90 years later, in 2016, an email pinged into the inbox of an Australian National University scientist, Dr Michael Braby, with an unusual attachment. It was a photograph of a flame hairstreak, supposedly the one Hopson found dead in the snow. Thanks to Waterhouse, that specimen had become a “holotype” – the first of its kind to be collected and named, and held by the Australian Museum since the 1930s.
Like Waterhouse, researchers such as Braby often pick up the trail of generations of long-dead collectors whose life’s works now sit in museum drawers.
In some cases, Braby has used specimens from the 19th century to study species that now face an uncertain future. “They really underpin our knowledge of biodiversity – they are the foundations, the pillars, if you like,” Braby told me. “So once you start compromising that … yeah, it’s not good.”
For Braby, P barringtonensis and its related subspecies were of “high conservation interest” as they are particularly vulnerable to rapid environmental upheaval.
But, as he looked closer, Braby realised that the signature red markings of this “flame hairstreak” had been set out not by millions of years of evolution but a very thin paintbrush.
“It’d been touched up,” he said. The butterfly was a fake, a closely related species painted to look like its rarer cousin. “I’d never come across that before.”
I had been working at the South Australian Museum for less than a week when a colleague told me about Braby’s discovery and how it connected to a bizarre string of thefts that had rocked the museum world more than 70 years earlier.
The investigation began in January 1947 in the basement of the National Museum of Victoria in Melbourne, when an entomologist named Alec Burns made a “fluke” discovery.
Burns had spotted three empty spaces in a drawer of green-and-gold birdwing butterflies. That handful of gaps soon grew to more than 800 missing specimens and, within a fortnight, more than 3,000 rare and precious specimens had been reported missing from Australia’s most prestigious state museums in Sydney and Adelaide.
Staff knew almost immediately that this was no accident. It was a methodical serial heist, and a transgressive act against the very idea of a museum itself – by someone who knew their way around one.
On the day I heard about the missing butterflies, I bought a copy of a 1955 memoir by a British artist, writer and athlete named Colin Wyatt.
On paper Wyatt was the archetypal gentleman adventurer and naturalist – a dashing, enigmatic, self-consciously literary character who seemed to have walked out of a Graham Greene novel, invoking Vladimir Nabokov, Lord Byron and Arthur Conan Doyle every few pages.
Born into an old dynasty whose fortunes were said to have echoed the rise and decline of the British empire, Wyatt’s father had trained him since boyhood to become an expert butterfly collector, mountaineer and champion skier. By his 20s his exploits in the ballrooms, art galleries and ski fields of Europe lit up the pages of society rags including the Tatler.
As 1930s Europe edged towards war, Wyatt headed to Australia, where he conquered mountains, exhibited surrealist paintings alongside Sidney Nolan, William Dobell and Dorrit Black, and served in the same wartime camouflage department as Dobell and the photographer Max Dupain.
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With his minor celebrity and talent for storytelling Wyatt charmed Australia’s entomological community, introducing himself to staff at the Australian Museum in Sydney and National Museum of Victoria. He befriended Waterhouse, then in his 60s.
In 1941, years after he donated Hopson’s flame hairstreak holotype to the Australian Museum, Waterhouse wrote a glowing account of his collecting trips around Sydney with “my friend Mr C.W. Wyatt” – including one experiment in which Wyatt cut fake butterflies out of coloured foil to lure rare specimens into his net.
Even Burns, the entomologist who noticed the missing specimens in January 1947, had set out on a collecting trip with Wyatt just a few weeks before his discovery. While Burns had returned to Melbourne, another member of their party crashed overnight at Wyatt’s Woollahra flat, where the recently divorced Englishman seemed to have packed up his life in Australia – including several caseloads of butterfly specimens.
Weeks after Burns noticed the missing butterflies, a New Scotland Yard detective and the head entomologist from the Natural History Museum in London knocked on the door of Wyatt’s mother’s house in Surrey. Among the trove of 40,000 butterflies he had collected since boyhood were boxes of rare Australian specimens he had shipped over to England shortly before leaving Australia.
Eventually Wyatt confessed, blaming the year-long spree on the breakdown of his marriage which had “driven him to distraction”.
The case made headlines around the world. In Australia Wyatt had name-dropped his friend Waterhouse to gain access to many of the collections he stole from – including Waterhouse’s life’s work.
The case posed an existential crisis for Australia’s museums. Could they really claim to be safe havens for scientific and cultural knowledge if their collections could so easily walk out the door?
Then there were the collectors: for generations these museums had relied on a community of enthusiastic amateurs who were given extraordinary access in the hope they would eventually donate their collections to science and posterity. If they couldn’t be trusted, the whole system risked breakdown.
Worse still, it emerged that British museum authorities had suspected Wyatt of lifting specimens from London’s Natural History Museum more than a decade earlier – and had tried to warn Waterhouse five years before the Melbourne discovery.
“This man has collector’s mania and is not to be trusted with specimens,” the warning said. It was never acted upon.
Nearly 80 years later, scientists like Braby are still unravelling the impact of Wyatt’s thefts. While most of the stolen specimens were recovered and returned to Australia in 1947, this painted decoy of the flame hairstreak holotype had sat unnoticed for more than 70 years, since Wyatt slipped out the original and took it halfway around the world.
Such entomological repatriations mirror a bigger reckoning now facing museums around the world.
Those venerated collections that present-day researchers like Braby rely on were often built by gentleman naturalists with sticky fingers – along with soldiers, missionaries, convicts, enslaved workers and colonised peoples. These collectors lived through an age of exploration and imperial expansion, when the seemingly respectable study of natural history and human culture was both alibi and accessory to the dirty, extractive work of empire-building.
This was a history that could not be neatly consigned to a few bad actors or a rogue museum a century ago. When I visited the Melbourne Museum archives to research the Wyatt case, I found something else filed between frustrated memos about stolen butterflies: grateful acceptance letters that confirm that the same museum staff so outraged by Wyatt’s thefts were themselves engaging in the same kinds of macabre “collecting” that present-day museum staff and First Nations communities now grapple with. The museums, it seemed, were a kind of crime scene long before the butterflies went missing.
As for the butterflies, the case hasn’t closed yet. Braby did eventually track down Hopson’s original P barringtonensis, misplaced for decades among the thousands of other stolen specimens brought back from England, each bearing a little yellow label warning future scientists of their connection to the case.
A few years after Braby’s discovery, another entomologist named John Tennant was studying a different holotype at the Melbourne Museum – a peacock jewel that was also recovered from Wyatt’s mother’s house in 1947. Up close, Tennant realised that this was a decoy too – the original was later identified at the Bavarian state collection of zoology in Munich, where it had sat among a series of specimens Wyatt had given it before his death in 1975.
That butterfly is still to complete its final journey from Germany to the UK to Australia, making it almost as well travelled as that charming Englishman whose name is now immortalised across the drawers of museums he stole from, pinned for posterity on to thousands of specimens:
Passed through C.W. Wyatt Theft Coll., 1946-47.
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This is an edited excerpt from The Butterfly Thief by Walter Marsh, out now through Scribe Publications