Behind ‘The Butterfly Thief’

One morning in January 1947, an entomologist from the National Museum of Victoria (now the site of State Library Victoria) discovered a number of butterfly specimens had vanished from the Museum’s Lyell Collection. 

The chance discovery in the depths of the museum, beneath the Zoological Hall (which is now the Library’s Redmond Barry Reading Room), was the first hint at what would become the most audacious serial heist in the history of Australia’s museums. 

Before long, museums in Sydney and Adelaide realised they had also been hit in a raid that claimed more than 3000 rare and precious butterfly specimens, including many priceless holotypes.  

The culprit? Colin Wyatt, a British adventurer, ski champion, mountaineer, artist and amateur naturalist, and the subject of a new book by journalist Walter Marsh called The Butterfly Thief: Adventure, empire and Australia’s greatest museum heist.

‘Wyatt is such a fascinating and enigmatic literary subject,’ says Marsh. ‘The bedrock source for understanding his life story comes from his own memoirs published in the 1950s, in which he seems to actively be trying to write himself into a canon of adventure literature. 

‘These writings entirely omit this infamous, widely reported case of stolen butterflies, which recasts his stories as, at best incomplete, at worst, the testimony of a wildly unreliable narrator. It made for a slippery but irresistible central figure that also speaks to the broader themes of who writes history and what gets left out.’ 

Marsh uses this true crime caper as a touchpoint to a larger narrative of how history is gathered, shaped and told. 

‘For me, the fact that Wyatt seems to embody this archetype of the gentleman naturalist, collector and adventurer, and managed to infiltrate many of these museum spaces and communities and escape back to England before anyone noticed they were missing, speaks to the values these institutions were built on – of race, gender and privilege in an age of empire.  

‘He looked and sounded like he belonged there, and was even interrupted by the Museum’s Treasurer apparently mid-theft, only to be left alone because he spoke with a “cultured accent”! 

‘This makes Wyatt, and the whole story, a compelling lens to reflect upon that broader lineage of generations of collectors and scientists whose exploits have left us an extraordinary legacy in the form of invaluable collections, but are also entangled with darker realities of empire and dispossession that institutions and communities grapple with today.’ 

The Butterfly Thief draws on State Library Victoria’s extensive collection of newspapers, as well as unpublished case files, dossiers and private archives from across Australia and England, to piece together Wyatt’s story and decades-long impact on the world of natural history. 

‘I wrote some of the early scenes while sitting in the same reading room that was once the Zoological Hall, which helped bring to life the archival accounts I had found across museum collections around the country,’ says Marsh.  

‘I later drew from the Library’s newspaper and books collection to obtain digital versions of contemporary reportage of the thefts, but also Wyatt’s earlier life, that now appear in the book. In many instances, the State Library was the only collecting institution in the world that still held the original newspaper pages that could be re-scanned to use these out-of-copyright photographs to tell Wyatt’s story in a modern context.’ 

About Walter Marsh

Walter Marsh is a journalist based in Tarntanya/Adelaide, and the author of Young Rupert: The making of the Murdoch empire (Scribe 2023).

Buy the book

The Library’s Cultural, Student and Family Members receive 10% off all books at Readings State Library when they present their digital membership card at purchase. Get The Butterfly Thief: Adventure, empire and Australia’s greatest museum heist now to learn more about the enigmatic Colin Wyatt.