The Butterfly Thief: Adventure, Fraud, Scotland Yard, and Australia’s Greatest Museum Heist

The story of the most audacious serial heist in the history of Australia’s museums — and the British gentleman adventurer who pulled it off and got away with it — in a scientific true-crime caper stretching around the globe. In January 1947, a chance discovery rocked the world of natural science: over 3,000 rare and precious specimens of butterflies had vanished from Australia’s most prestigious museums in Sydney, Melbourne, and Adelaide. Alarmingly, the missing insects included many priceless ‘holotypes’ — the first specimen of a given species to be identified, against which all others are compared. On the other side of the world, New Scotland Yard descended on a country house in Surrey, where they found a trove of over 40,000 butterfly specimens. The culprit was Colin Wyatt, a Cambridge-educated ski champion, mountaineer, wartime camouflager, artist, and amateur naturalist whose high-flying exploits cut a path from the Alps of Europe to a London court room to a final expedition to the jungles of Guatemala. Drawing on unpublished case files, dossiers, and private archives, The Butterfly Thief pieces together Wyatt’s enigmatic life story and his decades-long impact on the world of natural history. Along the way, award-winning journalist Walter Marsh reveals a deeper history of gentleman explorers, scoundrels, and grave-robbers that begs an uncomfortable but vital question: What if Western museums were crime scenes all along?

About the Author :
Walter Marsh is a journalist and editor based in Tarntanya/Adelaide, and the author of Young Rupert: the making of the Murdoch empire (Scribe 2023). A former staff writer and editor at The Adelaide Review and Rip It Up, his writing has also appeared in The Guardian, The Monthly, The Saturday Paper, Crikey, The Age, and InDaily.

Review :
‘The Butterfly Thief is the most delicate of books that, like its insect namesake, unfurls its brilliance slowly and then all at once. Walter Marsh has given us his “lepidopteran Sherlock Holmes” book in all its delightful eccentricity. This is a work filled with artefacts, curios, and the ephemera of human striving, teased out with the sharp eye of a writer, if not a collector. Marsh has a wry attention to detail that thrills, and deploys it to wonderful effect here.’ ‘In The Butterfly Thief, Walter Marsh follows the trail of Colin Wyatt, a mysterious 20th-century collector who becomes a lightning rod for the tangled legacies of empire, science, and obsession. With wit and wonder, Marsh turns one man’s improbable life story into a fascinating reflection on how history is gathered, shaped, and stolen.’ ‘This fascinating tale of conquest, colonialism, and collecting kept me riveted from the first page to the last. Walter Marsh is a compelling and gifted storyteller, but it is his ability to reveal the intricate connections between a singularly weird and wonderful butterfly heist and the wider crimes of the West that makes The Butterfly Thief truly extraordinary.’ ‘The Butterfly Thief tells a story stranger than fiction … As Marsh describes in this fascinating, impressively researched and at times dismaying book … all the trouble caused by Colin Wyatt’s meddling with Australian butterflies.’ ‘Walter Marsh’s true crime caper The Butterfly Thief pieces together several mid-century museum thefts that shook Australia’s leading natural history institutions … The book’s scope is broad … [with] vivid details … Compelling.’